You have read this one before. It was over a decade ago, before the musical hit Broadway, and you've wanted to reread it ever since. You borrowed the book the first time you read it though, so you've been searching for a inexpensive copy for years now. A few weeks ago, you found a pristine paperback edition for $1.50 and you were like, "I'll get you, my pretty!"
You're a nerd. You know that right?
Gregory Maguire specializes in novels that re-imagine familiar stories with new and interesting twists. He has taken on such classics as "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "A Christmas Carol". In "Wicked," he tackles the story of the Wizard of Oz (obviously) and it is the best work of his career. It is never clear whether Maguire draws more from L. Frank Baum's book or from the 1939 movie, but what is clear is that this is more than a story about a familiar character. "Wicked" is an examination of the nature of evil itself. It is an attempt to see a familiar character, one who is automatically thought of as evil (Wicked is right there in her name), from a different point of view.
One of the great sages of your life, Obi Wan Kenobi, is quoted as telling Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi that "you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." As you have gotten older, and tried to see things from different perspectives, this quote keeps becoming more and more true. Heroes and villains are often easily interchangeable depending on the point of view. Nelson Mandela is now seen as a hero and the father of modern South Africa, but he was seen as a terrorist for decades before. Martin Luther King Jr. is such a hero to you that you have raised your boys with his speeches ringing in their ears, and his words guiding their beliefs, but from a different point of view, Doctor King was a dangerous revolutionary who was bent on the destruction of an entire society's way of life. The same can be said of Vaclav Havel, Caesar Chavez, Ho Chi Minh, or even Jesus of Nazareth.
So it is with Elphaba. Maguire created her name as an homage to the author of Oz's initials, L. F. B... "El-Pha-Bah." Elphie to her friends. Fabala to her devout father. The Wicked Witch of the West to generations of American children who grew up not caring if she had a back story, only fearing her for her skin color and her hatred of a girl named Dorothy and her little dog too. But Maguire fleshes out the witch's personality in ways that lend her a familiarity beyond your childhood fear. In fact, you quickly came to love Elphaba.
One of the most interesting things about the book is how Maguire tells most of it, not from the witch's perspective, but mostly from the perspective of her friends and loved ones. First, through the eyes of her lonely and promiscuous mother, her long suffering Nanny, and her religiously zealous father. Then from the perspective of her college roommate Glinda, who is revealed to be more of a self serving, servile, class conscious bitch than any kind of good witch. Next you see Elphaba from the perspective of another classmate, the stalwart and clear headed Munchkin boy, Boq. But it is when Fiyero, a dark hued pagan prince from the West, and Elphaba begin their love affair a few years after college that we see Elphaba as a lithe, sexual, passionate person.
She is bold, curious, skeptical, and iconoclastic. She has a depth of compassion for those of the social classes most often pushed aside. She is politically passionate, dropping out of school to become a revolutionary. She is misunderstood and she is prejudged. Elphaba's only desire after the heartbreak of her life is to go forth and do no harm in the world. The Wicked Witch. Do no harm. But you wouldn't know it from the way others think of her.
Indeed, it is a full 200 pages before the voice of the novel comes from Elphaba herself, until Maguire allows us to hear her thoughts in her own head, not spoken out loud to another character. She is almost always presented from other people's perspectives.
And that is what the book is about. What we call evil is only that from a certain perspective. Good witches and bad witches. Good Guys versus Bad Guys. Us versus Them.
But the truth is that there never really is a Them. There is only Us.
True evil, not the stuff of children's stories, but true evil begins when one of us allows ourselves to begin thinking of some of the rest of us as enemies. Maybe evil is not just the violence and suffering we inflict on one another. Maybe the greatest evil of all is when we choose to stop caring for others, even if those others are a Them. Only then are we able to allow ourselves to excuse all kinds of savagery being inflicted on others. Only once we think of them as just that. Others. Them.
"Wicked" uses one of the most iconic cultural images of evil and shows that it may not be that at all. Elphaba isn't one of Them. She is Us. And if the Wicked Witch of the West can be shown to be one of Us, who else could be too? Who else do you consider evil only because you have been told to? How many other times do you assume someone just IS the way they are without considering their history, without putting their lives in perspective?
For years now this book has helped you try to be aware of not making that mistake. It has helped you to consider things from the perspective of the Other. That's pretty powerful. Maybe that's why you've been looking to get your hands on another copy for over a decade now.
Maybe that's why you are always looking for new great books too. Because they can affect you so powerfully.
On to the next book!
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