lightreads

The sequel to Wicked. Elphaba is dead, but the boy Liir remains. This is his story, as he makes his way in Oz and grows up with only the brief, burning influence of Elphaba for a guide. Back in the Emerald City, another tyrant has arisen to take the place of the Wizard, and he says he has come in the name of God. To the west, where Elphaba used to reign, the native tribes are warring, a monastery hangs on by its fingertips, and the corpses of travelers keep cropping up with their faces scraped off. Liir rattles from city to monastery to military service, searching for the girl who might be his half sister and finding that Elphaba reaches everywhere, even from the grave.

Maguire shows his strengths here: the worldbuilding is superb, further delving into the talking Animal political oppression spreading throughout Oz, and the characters are intense and real. Liir is not always likeable, but he is wonderful all the same. Elphaba was a shooting star all her life, flinging herself against the world and its injustices until it broke her. She believed that “it doesn’t matter whether you do good or ill, but just that you do at all.” Liir spends most of this book disclaiming any of her power, her ambition, her brilliance, and he’s mostly right – his gifts lie elsewhere. But he has them, and he learns to use them, after a fashion. We also return to the religious themes Maguire favors, with alternately thoughtful and disturbing results, and for once he is unsubtle as he takes a few swings at conventions of organized religion through Oz’s institutions.

But the real pleasure of a Maguire book is not the worldbuilding, not the characters, definitely not the plot (played out a bit too much with its head in the clouds and not quite enough with its feet on the ground for my taste, though I do have to say that after I slept on it, this ending was fabulously, subtly creepy). But the only reason you ever need to read a Maguire book is that the man writes like a poet fallen to prose. Listen:

A NOTION OF CHARACTER, not so much discredited as simply forgotten, once held that people only came into themselves partway through their lives. They woke up, were they lucky enough to have consciousness, in the act of doing something they already knew how to do: feeding themselves with currants. Walking the dog. Knotting up a broken bootlace. Singing antiphonally in the choir. Suddenly: This is I, I am the girl singing this alto line off-key, I am the boy loping after the dog, and I can see myself doing it as, presumably, the dog cannot see itself. How peculiar! I lift on my toes at the end of the dock, to dive into the lake because I am hot, and while isolated like a specimen in the glassy slide of summer, the notions of hot and lake and I converge into a consciousness of consciousness-in an instant, in between launch and landing, even before I cannonball into the lake, shattering both my reflection and my old notion of myself.

That was what was once believed. Now, it seems hardly to matter when and how we become ourselves-or even what we become. Theory chases theory about how we are composed. The only constant: the abjuration of personal responsibility.

We are the next thing the Time Dragon is dreaming, and nothing to be done about it.

We are the fanciful sketch of wry Lurline, we are droll and ornamental, and no more culpable than a sprig of lavender or a sprig of lightning, and nothing to be done about it.

We are an experiment in situation ethics set by the Unnamed God, which in keeping its identity secret also cloaks the scope of the experiment and our chances of success or failure at it--and nothing to be done about it.

We are loping sequences of chemical conversions, acting ourselves converted. We are twists of genes acting ourselves twisted; we are wicks of burning neuroses acting ourselves wicked. And nothing to be done about it. And nothing to be done about it.
[pp 127-128]

And so I have issues with the style and substance of the book, but I’m not going to talk about them because they’re mostly down to taste and, frankly, I mostly don’t care. Just listen to that.

Fiction. A Cinderella retelling in the perspective of an ugly stepsister, from the author of Wicked. Hmm. Okay, this book is just "not quite." Which I need to put in the proper scale -- the set-up is brilliant, as Maguire's generally are, and the follow-through is good, and the denouement is fine. But I didn't want fine. I wanted this book to walk up to me and knock me on my ass with a right hook to the gut. Instead it came up, dazzled me with some fancy footwork, and then asked me for a sedate waltz. Parts of this book are sheer genius -- the cleverness of the title which you don't realize until the very last page, the autistic ugly stepsister, the treatment of beauty in art and in life, Clara/Cinderella as a voluntary shut-in, the setting in sixteenth-century Holland, the reality of a prince searching for a wife. And the writing itself is outstanding, the sentence-by-sentence pace intricate and beautiful. But this book, which was excellent by the standards of fiction everywhere, fell just that tragic bit short of the extraordinary thing that it could have been, that feeling
when you read a book and it's as if the whole thing rings like a bell, the note perfect and clear and dazzling. And this sounded as if the author left his finger on the bell when he struck it, to over-extend the metaphor. I'm glad I read it, but I’m beginning to suspect this is Maguire's shortfall, and it makes me sad to see this beautifully conceived idea land in the realms of good and not blow-your-mind.