Welcome to the final installment of the
Wicked readalong, and thanks for your patience while I took a brief hiatus in order to attend to RealLife(tm).
The final part of Wicked is subtitled "The Murder and Its Afterlife", but in my humble opinion a better subtitle would have been "In Which Elphaba Completely Loses Her Marbles For No Good Reason".
Follow me below the fold and I'll tell you why I think that.
I actually read this last part of the book while I was out of town the week before last, so I'm having to go back and skim through it as I write this.
I hate to say this, because I sound like a broken record by now. But I was ultimately disappointed, by Part 5 and by the book as a whole. I have nothing but respect for Gregory Maguire's effort, and I'll be the first to admit that there's no way in heck I could have done as well as he did in pulling it off, but the issues I've had with the book all along never did get resolved. I never did understand Elphaba except in a limited and relatively superficial way, but what I did feel I'd come to understand about her was inconsistent with her behavior after the tornado brought Dorothy to Oz. It wasn't what I'd come to expect from her after following her story for the first four parts of the book. She totally, completely lost her marbles, and saying "Well, she lost her sister and her father and she had issues with feeling unloved by her father and all of that was tied up in those slippers" just feels, well, inadequate.
I'm still asking the same questions. Who was Elphaba? How and why did she come to be who and what and where she came to be? Who the heck was this Mother Mackle? A shadowy character who almost never makes an appearance in the book, and it turns out that she's somehow (apparently) been pulling the strings all along? And we never get to find out why? Damn, that's annoying. What's the point of us finding out that Elphaba's real father is the Wizard? Finding that out didn't add anything to my understanding of either the plot or the characters. Gah.
Sometimes, when one finishes a book and being left with a sense of mystery, of unanswered questions, of there being something more, something still unwritten, adds to the depth of the experience of reading that book. (The example that comes immediately to my mind is "Villette", Charlotte Bronte's last, darkest and most complex and nakedly autobiographical novel.) And sometimes it detracts. In Wicked, I felt it was the latter.
The final comment I have about Part 5 is that it's the part of the book that overlaps with "The Wizard of Oz" as we know the Frank Baum story. Maguire is faced with the challenge of interweaving the two plots in a believable and compelling way, and I'll grant that this is no small task. His task was to pull together not only the various narrative threads of his own book, but of someone else's. Sadly, I don't think he got the job done -- not fully, and not gracefully. The kidnapping of Dorothy with the dogs and the flying monkeys, the business of Elphaba deciding out of the blue that Fiyero was alive after all, and coming back to her disguised as the Scarecrow, just doesn't ring true. There's something not quite right when I say, out loud, "Oh, come on!" as I'm reading. And that's what I did during that passage. It's what I did when I read the last page of the book, too.
So. Didn't hate it. Don't regret reading it. But yeah, I'm disappointed. It didn't live up to the hype.
What do you think? If you think I'm wrong, tell me so, and tell me why. I'd like to be persuaded.
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Our next Read-Along selection is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I'm going to try approaching this one a bit differently than I did Wicked, in that I'm going to have us read the whole book and then discuss it. My edition has about 350 pages, so I'm thinking I'll give it three weeks and post a discussion diary the last weekend in June. If you haven't already grabbed a copy, get out there and get one and get to readin'. Hey, this one'll be fun!