“One of the things that I wanted to do when I started writing Wicked–and that I liked to do when I came back to this terrain ten years later–is to try to write about a fantastic situation that includes material that most fantasies–swords and sorcery type fantasies–leave out. For instance, critics of Tolkien are always saying, “Hey, what about the other half of the species? What about the female gender? What about romance, lust, passion, and betrayel? It’s only male bonding in Tolkien, pretty much.” So I wanted to put in sex, romance, philosophy, politics, violence, human bodily functions in order to make it seem as if these people who were contorting through a dangerous time in a dangerous, magical land were still people and are recognizably dense and complicated in the same way that a character out of, say, Dostoevsky might be dense and complicated.” — Gregory Maguire
Well put, I say. That’s exactly the attitude with which I try to approach my own writing. The full interview, available via podcast, is great, as is Maguire’s new novel, Son of a Witch, which picks up where Wicked left off ten years ago after the death of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Hmm. I’m not sure about a sequel to Wicked. I loved the book so very much, but I’m also a fan of all of the Oz books, which cover the time afterwards pretty well. Do we know how Maguire’s book ties in with those?
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never read all of the Oz books. I can say, however, that Maguire doesn’t restrict himself to Baum’s Oz. As he says in the podcast interview, he views his Oz as an alternative reality, much the way the show The West Wing presents an alternative reality to our own. The world and situations can be and are similar, but do not–and are not meant to–coincide fully. So, in that respect, no, Son of a Witch doesn’t really tie in with those books, I think.
I actually avoided using the term “sequel” for Son of a Witch because Maguire–and I rather agree with him here–doesn’t consider it a sequel. It’s more of a companion novel to the first. Elphaba is dead; a sequel implies a book about her, and that’s not possible. But it is interesting to see where Maguire envisions life in Oz going after her untimely demise. You may not like it as much as the original, but it’s definitely worth reading.