Out Of Oz by Gregory Maguire

Out Of Oz

by

Gregory Maguire

The final volume of Gregory Maguire's Wicked series is entitled Out Of Oz and I finished reading it on my kindle last night.  It is the longest of the four novels and spends most of the book following the grand daughter of who is popularly known to people as the wicked witch of the west.  In the Wicked books she is called Elphaba and in Out Of Oz her grand daughter's name  is  Rain.  In this fourth and final book,  Dorothy makes a re-appearance and the subject of home is re-addressed.  As we all remember in the original Wizard Of Oz that we all watched on television as children the story ends with Dorothy clicking her heels together in her red slippers and saying "there is no place like home".   In contrast to the simple moral of that childhood tale,  Gregory Maguire has taken these four books and addressed many of life's great questions.  He deals with good and evil,  race,  animal cruelty, war and peace, and many other issues that I am sure went over my head.  One really needs to take a college course for each of the four novels to completely get all there is to get out of them.  Never the less,  one of the topics he tackles is the popular literary theme of home.   On page 502 Dorothy says:

"Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go out far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realize that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. . . We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises,  that treasure-house of first experiences.  What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation.  Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times.  Sooner or later, there

no place remotely like home."

So Maguire takes Dorothy's historical "there's no place like home" which meant she need not leave  home to find what she needs and transforms it to "there is no place remotely like home" which means we reach a point where we can't return to what no longer exists for us.   Certainly,  is a hard thing to accept when we crest the horizon where  homesickness can not be resolved and it is clearly a step in maturing to wrestle with this concept.   More over it is always a little sad when it is once again pointed out to us in a novel.  

The series Wicked has many levels of meaning and is a very deep work.  It is not an easy read.  Gregory Maguire uses a large and varied vocabulary and I would not have been able to get through it if I didn't read it on my kindle.  Many times I touched the word so the dictionary meaning would pop up.  This series is adult in many ways.  It is a fantasy book and I am not a big science fiction and fantasy genre fan.   Never the less,  I got a lot out of the experience of reading this series and seeing the live production of the musical.  In my opinion,  those that have not read the series are missing out on a meaningful experience.   To review my posts on the other novels in this series click on the following links:   Wicked,  the play,  Son Of A Witch,   and A Lion Among Men. 

Please click on the author's name and book title at the beginning of this post to follow the links to more information.  And enjoy the video that follows.  It was made in 2011 shortly after the release of this final volume in the series.