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I mentioned this earlier, but I was charmed at how Maguire managed to synthesize the book and movie versions, even down to reconciling the silver/ruby slippers.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a politcal allegory and it seems appropriate that the sequel carried on in that tradition. That said, I thought Oz/Animal as metaphor for Nazi Germany/Jew was a little tired. What I thought worked better was the analogy between the Tiktoks and what can be seen as an increasingly mechanized/depersonalized laboring class today. I'd have liked to have seen a little less of the first and more of the second. I also thought the disquisition on the nature of evil was too explicit. Much of that exposition would have been better left implied.
Carping done, Wicked was fantastic in the way that it showed that POV is everything. In a tour de force, Maguire managed to make Elphaba's actions, if not entirely benign, understandable and well-intentioned. On the flip side, in both the movie and the film, the wizard gets to claim that while he's a bad wizard, he's a good man if a humbug, and that goes unchallenged. Yet we see, to borrow from Hannah Arendt, how evil can be banal.
I loved how Maguire fleshed out the characters and provided backstories, even down to Dorothy's arrival in Oz not being entirely happenstance. Chance was a factor in everything that happened, but destiny also was in play. Also notable was how he transformed the two-dimensional characters of children's fantasy into economic, sexual beings.
This was a terrific read. Entertaining, thought-provoking and shows that there can be plenty of life in a well-worn myth, in the right hands. Highly recommended.
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