It was a joy to come in to work today to find that my aggressive tidying of last week sent the message to the cleaning crew that they could go ahead and scrub all the surfaces down. It’s all much calmer in here.
Over the weekend I read through “Visitors From Oz”, a book I learned about from reading Martin Gardner’s obituary. It’s one of the oddest things I’ve ever read, a kind of advanced fanfic that jumbles together a bunch of Garnder’s interests and contains bizarre scenes like the one where Dorothy, back in the US after nearly one hundred years of living in Oz, single-handedly subdues a hijacker on an airplane who has been screaming about his love of Saddam Hussein. Given that it was written in 1998 this is not quite as dark as it might seem, but still. Much of the writing verges on a parody of Baum’s style, especially that of the latter Oz books, where characters tend to helpfully remind each other of their backstories, as a way of getting the readers up to speed. But Gardener has them do this almost every chapter, which keeps the characters from being very distinct from each other, and also tends to impede the forward momentum of the narrative.
the book also contains a major crossover section, where we find out that the Lands described in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are actually contained within Oz. But just when you think you’re going to get a face-off between Baum’s common sense whimsy and Carroll’s verbal absurdity, all of the fun is drained out of the whole conceit by having the Carroll characters assert over and over again how he wrote about them inaccurately and how they are actually very sensible and even tempered. You have to ask yourself what exactly was the purpose of that, coming form the man who wrote “The Annotated Alice”.
Gardner was a great lover of Oz, and helped to establish its earliest fan organization, so his decisions here seem all the odder. The book was written when he was in his eighties, and it seems to be partially an attempt to summon up all the things he enjoys in Baum’s books and partially a grab bag of his other interests. I don’t at all regret reading it, but I am still deeply puzzled by it.
Tags: books, Martin Gardner, Oz