It has taken me some time to get around to reading this book – close to 40 years, if I remember that far back clearly (which mostly I do). I remember seeing the great film classic version when I was young, many times; to be honest, it didn’t really grip me, although the switch into Technicolor was just as much of a wow for me as it must have been to those early audiences, and “Over the Rainbow” was also a key moment. But the Munchkins, flying monkeys, wicked witches didn’t insert themselves into my dreams as much as they did to most Americans. I tried to read it a few years later, when at boarding school – one of the benefits of an old library – but I found the turn of century American voice of the author much harder to deal with than the equivalent Victorians who I had come to enjoy.<\/p>\n
What moved me to restart reading after so long was a growing appreciation that it really was a classic; and Baum wrote so many sequels, there must have been something to it; and watching a wicked witch\/flying monkeys gag on Two and a Half Men, which was my trigger.<\/p>\n
The plot is remarkably close to that of the film; common now in an era of slavish adaptations, where the most successful movie adaptations are those closest to the book, but exceedingly rare before Lord of the Rings\/Harry Potter. There was the slight conceit of having the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow played by Dorothy’s friends from Kansas, which wasn’t taken from the book. Then a lot of repeated, very similar events where each of the companions does basically the same thing in different parts of Oz.<\/p>\n
My overall take on the book is very good; it’s a fun children’s story written some time ago, with some very vivid characters. But every moment I expect some sort of missionary to leap out from behind a rock; that comes partly from the chapbook moralising on loan from Pilgrim’s Progress, but I also catch a whiff of the Kellogg about Baum. That’s not a problem to enjoying the story, just something that I can appreciate now that I know a little more about the background of that era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It has taken me some time to get around to reading this book – close to 40 years, if I remember that far back clearly (which mostly I do). I remember seeing the great film classic version when I was young, many times; to be honest, it didn’t really grip me, although the switch into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-in-general","tag-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paullynch.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}