Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing)

“…every chapter contained either badly written guff or morally questionable material…”

Recently, I’ve been reviewing Christmas shows at various theatres. At Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, The Wizard of Oz was their seasonal production last Christmas. It was a very interesting attempt to reinvent the story and make a new kind of musical out of it. I don’t think it always worked but it did have me making comparisons with the classic 1939 movie.

As we were leaving the theatre, I saw they were selling copies of the book, one of which was very nicely covered and I bought a copy. I realised that, despite having watched the movie countless number of times as a child and as a parent of young children, I had never actually read the thing. It was time to change that!

In this introduction to the book, L. Frank Baum states that there is no need to include morals in the modern children’s story because morals are taught at school. His intention then was to write a children’s story for pure joy with no ‘heartaches and nightmares’. This is pure entertainment, as far as the author is concerned.

Oh dear.

As far as I’m concerned, this is a book full of nightmares, not for gruesome descriptions but because of the horrific morals it does teach, albeit passively. Some of these are clearly there in the movie too and it is quite remarkable that we all accept the terrible things we teach our children to accept when we let them see it. The book though is even worse.

With that in mind, my admiration for the musical Wicked has grown immensely. I loved it when I first took my kids to see it in London back in 2008. I’ve loved even more the two movies that recently came out. Here they put some of the nightmares back in and certainly the heartaches, but more importantly they put the morals back into the story. They should never have been left out.

So what exactly is wrong with Baum’s Wizard of Oz?

Firstly, it is exceptionally badly written. The characters have sense of development or believability, seemingly just told what to do, no matter how hard and going “Okay then!” and doing it. The plot rattles through a breakneck speed giving a feeling of reading the book on double or triple speed. There’s no sense of climax or inner logic to any of the chapters. It’s like someone wanted to do Alice in Wonderland again but really, really badly. If a client sent me this to edit I’d tell them it was a good first draft but could they flesh out the characters and give more room for plot development? There’s no substance here at all.

Secondly, the events of the story are just horrifying. I won’t bore you with all the points but the emotionless and amoral thinking behind the story just chills me.

We start with Dorothy killing a person who she is told “is wicked”. There’s no sense of remorse – Dorothy just calmly wears the dead woman’s shoes. The Witch of the North tells her she has to see the Wizard, setting her off on her dangerous journey, when in actual fact the witch must have known those very same shoes could have taken Dorothy home right then and there (a revelation Glinda the Good only tells her right at the end, seemingly perfectly okay with Dorothy, no matter the trauma of what she’s been through).

We’re meant to think that the Wizard is generally a good man even though he’s been exposed as a fraud only after forcing Dorothy – a child – to murder someone who he assures her is ‘wicked’ and therefore ‘deserves it’. Just let that sink in. Really sink in. A grown man of supposed great power, forces a little girl to attempt a heinous moral crime against a supposedly evil person who the Wizard himself can’t defeat. Does that not just strike you as the most repugnant thing ever?

And what do we learn about friendship in this book? When Dorothy discovers her stolen shoes could have taken her home at any point, her friends are not sad for her to find out all this pain and danger could have been avoided. No. What about me? they ask. “I wouldn’t have got my brain/courage/heart,” they say in response to the idea she could have gone home right at the beginning. So our children learn here that friendship is all about what you can get out of the other person, rather than enjoying someone for who they are and being the best for them that you can as a friend.

And the friends themselves, after their humble beginnings as Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion, all become rulers of different kingdoms, as if that is the appropriate conclusion for a character. Having fought evil rulers and brought down fake ones, the answer to being happy in life is to become a ruler yourself. Of course it is. Silly me for thinking anything else.

I could go on. Almost every page and certainly every chapter contained either badly written guff or morally questionable material. You could argue that children’s books are meant to be simple and not delve into the deeper meanings of life and morality but that simply isn’t true. Lewis Carroll, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis can easily be seen as contemporaries with Baum’s book, published in 1900, lying neatly between Alice (1865) and The Hobbit (1937). All of these authors manage children’s books that are brilliantly written, entertaining for children and teach, almost passively, the meanings of life and moral code. Baum’s is a travesty by comparison.

Even looking at modern children’s stories, often meant to be little more than entertainment, they do better than Baum. Look at Julia Donaldson’s wonderful books for very young children. Ten times better than Baum’s. On the shelf in my study where I’m writing this now is a super book called Two Frogs by Chris Wormell. Despite being little known, it is one of the funniest and also wonderfully meaningful books I’ve ever read (it all comes together at the end and especially the last page). It takes minutes to read – unlike Wizard of Oz – and has way more value.

Indeed, in my view, I think The Wonderful Wizard of Oz should be confined to the dustbin of history as a book and even the film should only be retained as an introduction to watching the two Wicked movies when children are old enough. Taken as a triptych together, the movies then would teach the very meaningful lesson that not everything is as it first appears and that bad people can often be found disguised as good while those who seem bad can often turn out to be very different from how others have presented them. That seems to me to be a message well worth teaching our children.

Besides which, the songs in Wicked are so much better and the whole plotline so much better thought out than its inspiration. You can’t go wrong really.

My Verdict:

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

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