Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 5

The End of the Story But Not the Book

After getting away from the Gargoyles, our heroes have a curiously un-exciting encounter with a room full of dragons. You'd think that a cave containing an unspecified number of dragons -- even baby ones -- would be a tough level for the player-characters to get through. But after some polite conversation with the dragons, whose mother has tied their tails to immobilize them while she is off hunting, the adventurers depart.

Oh, and on their way out they pass through a kind of stone revolving door, which catches the wheel of the buggy and jams shut behind them. This turns out to be a problem, as the passage they've chosen leads into a small cave with no exit. There is a crack letting in some sunlight, but no way for Our Heroes to get out onto the surface. And by a curious oversight the Wizard doesn't have any nitroglycerine in his satchel.

Faced with a slow death by starvation, Jim the cab-horse descends into postmodernism. "I was sure it would come to this, in the end," remarked the old cab-horse. "Folks don't fall into the middle of the earth and then get back again to tell of their adventures -- not in real life. And the whole thing has been unnatural because that cat and I are both able to talk your language, and to understand the words you say."

Dorothy refuses to abandon hope. She remembers that Ozma is constantly monitoring her activities by means of the Magic Picture, and Ozma possesses the Nome King's Magic Belt, which gives her effective omnipotence. In other words, Dorothy is chums with God. Of course, this does raise the rather puzzling question of why Dorothy didn't signal to Ozma that she needed her help way back in Chapter Four, or why the sweet Girl Ruler of Oz was apparently content to let her best friend remain trapped underground, beset by hostile vegetables, wooden Gargoyles, and invisible bears.

The short answer, I'm afraid, is that Mr. Baum has run out of ideas for underground adventures and is about to begin some truly merciless padding. Dorothy makes her special sign, Ozma wishes her to the Emerald City, and a moment later Dorothy's companions follow via a second wish. (Apparently Ozma would otherwise be perfectly willing to let the Wizard and Zeb starve in a cave.) The plot is over at this point, but we still have six chapters to get through.

They get to the Emerald City. Lots of introductions. The Wizard gets rehabilitated and his past crimes are declared to be the fault of Old Mombi and other enemies of the Party. We also learn his real name: "Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs." Because of the unfortunate acronym (O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.) he prefers to use just his first two initials, and the fact that his monogram is the same as the name of the land he arrived in by accident is pure coincidence.

Sure it is, Agent Diggs. The Roosevelt Administration now has a full-time representative at the court of Oz, "advising" the lovely Girl Ruler. The Wizard quickly comes to terms with the other major power center in Ozma's court, Glinda the Sorceress. She even agrees to begin tutoring him in magic. Evidently both Glinda and President Roosevelt are concerned about the Nome menace, not to mention the need to make sure Kaiser Wilhelm doesn't gain any influence in the continent of Nonestica.

This brings up the question of exactly where the heck Oz is located. When it was just a Pennsylvania-sized country, it might be tucked into some convenient corner of the American desert. But once you start piling on neighboring countries like Ev, Ix, Mo, Hiland, Loland, the Forest of Burzee, the lands of the Whimsies, Growleywogs and Phanphasms (and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting), you're talking about a pretty substantial landmass. The fact that Dorothy gets washed up in Ev on the way to Australia suggests that it might be in the southern Pacific (near Bensalem, no doubt) -- except that there's no sign of any Alaska-sized island there. Even if you allow for the fact that Glinda later puts a spell on Oz to hide it from airplanes (and presumably orbital reconnaissance) that doesn't explain why the other countries of "Nonestica" aren't visible.

So I stick to my theory: Oz and environs are not on Earth. They exist in some parallel world. People from our world can get there, either by means of natural gateways or some innate ability. It's not unreasonable for Theodore Roosevelt to be curious about this mysterious place. And if Dorothy and the Wizard can get there, it's quite reasonable to worry about agents of hostile powers doing the same. Linguistic evidence strongly supports this: the tribes of Oz are Winkies, Quadlings, Gillikins, and Munchkins -- all very suggestive of a Germanic origin.

I expect there's a rattling-good unpublished Oz saga concerning the Wizard's slow chess-game battle against the Kaiser's agents in Oz during the years leading up to World War I.

The rest of the book is taken up with a very pointless non-crisis about Eureka the kitten being accused of devouring one of the Nine Tiny Piglets. She's put on trial for murder, with the Tin Woodman as her defense attorney and the Woggle-Bug as prosecutor. The Wizard attempts to subvert justice to save Eureka, but in the end the kitten is innocent and can prove it -- but let the affair go to trial because otherwise Mr. Baum would have had to come up with something else to fill out the book.

Jim, Eureka, and the Wizard remain in Oz. Ozma uses the good old Magic Belt to send Zeb back to California and Dorothy to Kansas. Uncle Henry's getting pretty jaded about Dorothy's constant disappearances. He doesn't even wait around in California to see if she'll turn up after the earthquake.

Dorothy Gale will return in The Road to Oz.