As if to prove his point in his author’s introduction, the first few chapters of Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire include: slut shaming; puppet porn; mob violence and a pretty detailed childbirth. This book is very much not for children. It is so much better, darker and more politically complex than I had expected from having seen the musical years ago on the West End.

This is not a sweet and light tale of female friendship regretfully torn apart by loving the same man. It’s a politically complex novel about the spread of right-wing ideology and one woman who finds that not playing along with the majority opinion comes at a high cost. Put another way, it’s Elphaba’s story, from birth to death.

Oz is a land slowly falling to a dictator – the Wizard – who is sowing hate and discord to divide and conquer the four previously autonomous regions around Emerald City. Elphaba is the daughter of a preacher and a woman who is already unhappy before her first child is born with green skin. Everyone fears her, child and adult.

Elphaba’s lonely childhood is followed by a few happy years at university. She makes friends, including Galinda, but their physical and financial disparities contribute to them never truly seeing eye to eye. It seems that Elphaba’s only real friend is Boq, but even he isn’t as fully committed as she is to campaigning for the rights of sentient Animals.

“Things are not always as they seem. And it has been clear for some time that the Wizard’s bag of tricks would not do forever. There are bound to be popular uprisings – the stupid, senseless kind, in which strong dumb people enjoy getting killed for the sake of political changes that’ll be rolled back within the decade. Adds such meaning to meaningless lives, don’t you think?”

Capital-A Animals are slowly being stripped of their rights. It’s a pretty clear metaphor for how historical (and current-day) fascism always starts with a hate campaign against a group already vulnerable to distrust and dislike. Misinformation is spread about them. Most Ozlanders are indifferent, just looking the other way as Animals are harassed, mocked, lose their jobs, lose their citizenship.

Halfway through her time at university, Galinda changes her name to Glinda, Elphaba is joined by her younger sister Nessarose and new kid Fiyero comes along. He’s attractive but he’s also engaged to a girl back home, so romance isn’t an option. The main thrust of the novel here is the sisters’ fractious relationship getting in the way of what was just starting to be true friendship between Elphaba and Glinda. Nessarose believes everything her father ever said and is a follower of rules. She is also severely physically disabled. Both of which somewhat curtail Elphaba’s extracurricular exploits.

“Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren’t you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us…It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

After university Elphaba and Glinda part ways and that’s the end of their friendship. But it’s not the end of either of their stories. Elphaba goes to Emerald City to work for an underground resistance cell. She bumps into Fiyero and they become close. This is the most hopeful part of the novel, though the threat of something terrible always looms over Elphie.

And then the worst happens and Elphaba spends the rest of her life filled with doubt and guilt, gradually embracing the role of “wicked witch”. Though whether she ever actually does anything deliberately wicked is left open to interpretation. And she has a dog she loves, so she can’t be truly evil, right?

“The cook had a dog named Killyjoy who seemed to Elphie to be a Makejoy instead, a panting, sniffy thing. Some people thought for a time he might actually be a Dog, in hiding, but they gave up that idea. ‘Hah,’ Elphie said to the others, ‘have you spoken to Animals so seldom that you can’t remember the difference anymore?’ No, he was just a dog, but a most glorious doggy dog, full of rages and exaggerated devotions.”

This book contains humour and great characters, but it is also sad and dark, sometimes oppressively so. It’s a grimly fascinating, scarily relatable story about the rise of fascism and the demonisation of those who try to stand up to corruption.

In a couple of places the narrative skips several years, which is disconcerting and does require a certain amount of piecing together what you’ve missed. Which is partly deliberate, to hold back information from the reader. But this is already a long book so maybe Maguire made some judicious edits. This is the first of several books he has published about the world of Oz, riffing from Frank L Baum’s original series of Oz books but taking what was a very child-oriented, politics-free universe in a rather different direction. Just this month he’s publishing Elphie: a Wicked Childhood, which presumably plugs the giant gap that Wicked skips in her younger years. I’m definitely curious.

First published 1995 by Regan Books.

Source: Amazon