On My Shelves: The Emerald City of Oz

 

The sixth book in the series is a pivotal story in more than one way. In The Emerald City of Oz, Dorothy learns that rebuilding the house in Kansas following the twister, and then taking the rest-cure trip to Australia, put Uncle Henry in considerable debt. He had hoped to be able to pay that debt off, but crops have not been good and his health has not fully recovered.

While Henry doesn't worry much for himself, he does about Em and of course both of them are very worried for the often inexplicably cheerful Dorothy. They want her to be cared for, but have no resources to do it, and any other relatives are distant both in relation and in physical distance.

Dorothy, however, isn't worried. While Aunt Em and Uncle Henry aren't sure how much to believe of her stories of Oz, Dorothy knows that every day, Ozma checks her Magic Picture to see what Dorothy is doing – and watches for a particular signal. She tells her Aunt and Uncle that she will go to Oz and be safe there; they see her go upstairs, and then when they check a short time later, are astounded to see she's gone.

Our heroine has no intention of abandoning the people who raised her, however, and immediately asks Ozma if she could bring Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to join her. Ozma smiles and says that she had already intended to do so.

Meanwhile, Roquat (later Ruggedo), the Nome King, has been brooding over his complete and utter humiliation at the hands of the Oz people, and the mortal girl Dorothy Gale. Finally, after disposing of his more cowardly generals, he finds General Guph, a clever and devious campaigner willing to work with him on a plan to conquer and enslave all the people of Oz.

Guph points out that while they have many, many Nome warriors, they have a weakness known to the Ozites – eggs – and since the last battle numerous hens have come to inhabit Oz. Moreover, it is unsure what amount of magic Glinda and the Wizard of Oz may have at their disposal. Thus, Guph proposes that they try to enlist the help of other dark fairy races to perform their conquest of Oz. Roquat sees the logic of this, and gives Guph the order to proceed.

The Emerald City of Oz thus proceeds on two parallel plot tracks. The first is the establishment of Dorothy and her aunt and uncle as permanent residents of Oz, which after the initial introduction of the startled couple to Oz and the Emerald City, becomes a travelogue/tour of previously unfamiliar areas and peoples of Oz, including Utensia (land of living tableware), Bunnybury (naturally filled with intelligent civilized rabbits), living jigsaw puzzle-people called Fuddles, and many others.

The second is the steady and increasingly deadly preparations of the Nome King and his allies the Whimsies, Growleywogs, and Phanfasms – each more powerful than the last. All four groups actually plan to betray the others in order to seize Oz for themselves, but are all resolved to at least complete the initial invasion as planned to ensure there will be no effective resistance; in this all four are honestly united and thus present a terrible and apparently irresistible threat to the land of Oz.

The Nomes provide the method of invasion, of course: they will tunnel beneath the Deadly Desert and all the way to the Emerald City, thus bringing the invasion force up squarely in the midst of their enemies' most important and otherwise almost impossible to reach stronghold, a stronghold which also holds most of their powerful adversaries; if they can take the Emerald City and destroy those within, their victory is nigh-certain.

Roquat's plan very nearly succeeds; in fact, the only thing that saves Oz is that Ozma idly wonders what the Nome King is up to and asks her Magic Picture to show him to her, something that she apparently hadn't done, or at least had not done often, since her return to Oz. Had she had that thought a mere few days later, Oz might have fallen.

The defeat of the invading force is complicated by the fact that Ozma refuses to fight the invaders in any conventional way. Not only does she believe the invading force is far stronger than her defenders, she also is philosophically opposed to combat herself.

However, the Wizard and Glinda, with the help of Dorothy, devise a plan which succeeds: they cause the tunnel to fill with irritating, parching dust that will cause an unbearable thirst in the advancing enemy. The tunnel will break through right in front of the "Fountain of Oblivion", a fountain whose magical waters cause complete and total amnesia in any who drink it. Thus, when the invaders emerge, they are irresistibly drawn to the fountain and drink – forgetting not only why they are there, but even who they are. (the Fountain does, however, leave them the ability to speak, walk, and so on).

Following this near-disaster, Ozma asks Glinda to seal Oz away from the entire outside world magically, so that it is not generally possible to reach it even through the rather extreme means seen previously.

The Emerald City of Oz is a far stronger book than its predecessor, although its interspersing of travelogue with tense and often frightening invasion plans can be a bit jarring. It is not in my opinion one of the best of the Oz novels, mainly due to this somewhat clumsy contrast; however, it is one of the most important in several ways:

 

1. Dorothy becomes a permanent resident of Oz. Until now, she has been constantly bouncing back and forth, and it always appeared that Oz was just a temporary stop, a sort of vacation. Now she – and her guardians – are permanent residents.
2. This book makes explicit and detailed the idea expressed in passing in The Road to Oz: specifically that no one in Oz ages or dies, though it is possible to completely destroy someone with great effort.
3. Similarly, this book establishes that Oz – at least the part of it acknowledging the rule of Ozma – is a nigh-utopia, with minimal work required and almost endless resources from Ozma to support her people.
4. This is the first book in which a villain/opposing force returns, and establishes Roquat the Red as a terrible and vengeful adversary.
5. This is the first book in which Glinda's Great Book of Records makes a clear appearance. The Book of Records is a tremendously powerful magical artifact which records the doings of every person in the world, in detail, every day throughout the day. It later is made clear that this applies only to people (human or faerie humanoids) and not to animals. This is a tremendous resource for Glinda and Oz in general, although the description of its use demonstrates that Baum really didn't grasp the SCALE of his invention. Assuming for the sake of argument that the total number of Faerie residents is very small compared to the general world population – say, a million or so – then the book's expansion would be governed by the general rise in human population. Today, assuming that each person's doings in a given day average two sentences, fourteen billion new lines would be added to the Book of Records every day; with an average sentence length of 15 words, that's four hundred twenty billion new words a day, or the equivalent of something like four to five million novels' worth of text per day. Yes, it magically stays the same size, but in no way is Glinda reading all, or even a significant fraction, of this in a day. One must assume there's a way to prioritize and search.
6. Finally, this book establishes the mystical barrier around Oz, which eliminates any travel to Oz using mundane methods at all. Even if you GET to Fairyland in general, getting to Oz itself will not be easy.

 

Point #2 is, perhaps, the most problematic. It contradicts prior books in the series, which have explicitly referred multiple times to things and people dying. In addition, there is a lot of "Fridge Horror" embodied in this concept, some of which Baum will explore in later books (such as The Scarecrow of Oz), but other parts of which he ignores (such as the problem of the eternal month-old infant and the parents doomed to care for him or her for eternity, or the old, infirm man doomed to live forever at the edge of death, never crossing over).

For my own purposes in Polychrome, I decided to stick with the original version of Oz in this aspect; while people are exceedingly long-lived in Faerie, babies grow up reasonably quickly and, more importantly, death is still a real presence; those attacked by weapon or monster can die, and will. It is, however, clear that death has been vastly reduced in Oz, as have many forms of danger.

(I have seen some fan-theories that run along the lines that when Ozma – the rightful heir – was returned to the throne, the deathlessness which was supposed to be part of Oz returned with her; it was the Wizard's usurpation and overthrow of Pastoria that had allowed death to return. This explanation doesn't really work for me.)

#3 is fairly obviously drawn from Baum's own changing political alignment, something which had already started to appear in The Road to Oz, in which suddenly there is no money in Oz – when in the prior three books money had been mentioned fairly frequently. These aspects I downplay heavily, aside from Ozma's attempt to care for all her people and drive away death and injury.

Numbers 4 and 5 are very important factors both for the later books, and for my own Polychrome, as Roquat (renamed Ruggedo) and Guph both play a part in Polychrome, as does the barrier around Oz.

This is another of the recommended novels of the series; while somewhat jarringly divergent in its flavor/tone, it has one of the stronger stories of Oz and fairyland within it, and is certainly one of the most important of all the novels!