The Wonder City of Oz by John R. Neill
After Ruth Plumly Thompson made her (sort of) last contribution to the Oz series with Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, publisher Reilly & Lee invited longtime illustrator John R. Neill to write the Oz book for 1940 himself. At that point, he had been illustrating Oz for thirty-six years—surely there was no one else more qualified?
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| Originally published: 1940 Acquired: ~1996? Read aloud: October–November 2023 |
Well, the resulting book has a pretty terrible reputation. Everyone out there seems to dislike it; when I recently found the list of Oz books I had read as of 1997, I learned I had rated it the lowest of the Famous Forty. Even Reilly & Lee infamously disliked it, as upon receiving the manuscript, they tasked an editor to basically rewrite the whole thing. Eric Shanower informs us, "You have to read to at least chapter six of the published book before you reach a sentence that JRN actually wrote." As he admits, "Not that JRN’s original manuscript is any great shakes. It displays all the reason[s] that the editors at Reilly & Lee thought it needed an overhaul. However, I’m not sure it needed THIS overhaul."
But, perhaps this book more than any other shows the benefit of reading the Oz books aloud a chapter or two at a time to a five-year-old. Because when you do this, The Wonder City of Oz is hugely enjoyable!
The protagonist of Wonder City is Jenny Jump, a sixteen-year-old (I think) girl who lives by herself in New Jersey. She catches a leprechaun stealing her pepper cheese and transfixes him with her glare, which means he has to grant her a wish. She wishes to be turned into a fairy, but halfway through the process she blinks, meaning she's only half fairy (one fairy foot, one fairy eye, eight fairy fingers, and so on). When she stamps her fairy foot, she's propelled through the air to Oz, crashing down in the middle of Ozma's birthday parade. Soon, she's running a style shop and running in an "ozlection" to replace Ozma as ruler of Oz and helping fend off an invasion of shoe-eating sinister sponges from the Deadly Desert and going on an expedition to a chocolate star in an ozoplane with Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps and much more.
Neill's Oz (or maybe his editor's Oz, but let's just say Neill's) is a weird, madcap place. If you're not careful, you can sew your mouth shut with magic thread; when you cry, your tears are candy; if you throw your cap into the air but forget to let go, you'll go up into the air with it; you might meet a voice that has lost his man; houses are alive enough to pick residents and battle each other and defend themselves from attack; you can train shoes to perform music; it's a legitimate worry that if someone wins an election in a landslide, the landslide could be strong enough to destroy a city. Though substantially more madcap, it does remind me a bit of the way things were back in the first book, before Baum had codified the rules of Oz so much and a Scarecrow could just come to life with no explanation. It's all the kind of thing that might annoy an older reader, but made my five-year-old cackle in delight.
The book technically has an overaching plot in the ozlection, but it's not really the point. It also has one in terms of Jenny's temper coming under control, though that one reads pretty badly to modern readers—first, the Wizard and the leprechaun conspire to de-age Jenny so that she's nicer (and regresses to before she obtained her fairy gifts), and then at the end, the Wizard removes a lot of Jenny's personality traits to make her nicer! The first intervention genuinely upset my son, and the second I edited out. He was also really upset when Jenny lost the ozlection (he really wanted her to beat Ozma!) but that nicely paralleled Jenny's own anger; she goes on a rampage and ends up releasing a bunch of ferocious plant-animals (e.g., tiger-lilies, foxgloves) on the city. I changed it so that seeing the results of her rampage caused Jenny to realize she had to manage her anger more productively—a lesson our five-year-old needs to learn, at least. (Though when I asked him, "do you ever get really angry when things don't go your way?" he claimed not!)
One of the weird things is that the Wizard suddenly has a penchant for disguises in this book; the commenters at the "Book of Common Focus" on Pumperdink point out that this is probably Neill being inspired by the MGM film of the previous year, where Frank Morgan plays several Emerald City characters, all of whom might be the Wizard in disguise. And it does kind of fit with things the Wizard does in Wonderful Wizard, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Little Wizard Stories. Here, he disguises himself as a customer at Jenny's style shop, as a broom man in Ozma's palace, and a doctor; seemingly, this is all to check out Number Nine, Jenny's Munchkin assistant who, by the time of the next book, is the Wizard's own assistant. That said, it comes across as a weird obsession; at one point he apologizes for not having enough time to put on a disguise, and when General Jinjur recognizes him, he teleports her back to her farm so she can't give him away.
Speaking of Jinjur, one of the delights of the book is that Neill (or his editor) seems to have remembered a lot of characters that Thompson either forgot about or abandoned. Jinjur has only a brief appearance but it's her first one since Tin Woodman, I think. We get dialogue for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for the first time since Baum died. The Guardian of the Gates and the Wogglebug get a few meaningful scenes. We even get a pair of excellent scenes for Sir Hokus, Neill totally ignoring (wisely in my opinion) the really boring fate to which Thompson sentenced him in Yellow Knight. Here, he is just having fun chasing a two-headed dragon around the Emerald City, but he and the dragon pause their game to help Number Nine rid Jenny's style shop of an infestation of Nomes.
Of course, Neill always draws great pictures, but these are his best since the color plates were dropped, in my opinion. Clearly he starts from the pictures and then works out story events to justify them—and what better way could there be for him to work? How else would we ever get a two-page spread of Jack Pumpkinhead as conductor to a choir of shoes? I don't care how flimsy the justification is if I get to see pictures like this.
It's a wacky book, but probably the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz. Jenny travels to Oz, but beyond that, she doesn't do the usual Oz thing of questing somewhere. The whole book is set in or near the Emerald City, and just highlights the crazy, bizarre things that seemingly happen there on a daily basis. Life in Oz is a constant parade of delightful strangeness.
Next up in sequence: The Scalawagons of Oz
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