A Not so Professional Review of Wicked
OK, so I read Wicked and it seemed to me that the idea was a really, really good one. As for the execution, not really so good. At least, Gregory McGuire isn't an idiot like Dan Brown. He has more talent, but since this is a non-professional review and not a comparison of idiots vs. non-idiots, I'll just stick to Wicked.
The story starts off really well, especially for those of us who grew up with Oz, Dorothy, and that annoying little mutt, Toto. The image of the four on the yellow brick road and the witch hovering over them on her broom, brought back memories. But, that was the high point. The story slowly slid downhilll, or I should say, puttered about until it started going downhill after the events at Shiz.
At Shiz, it seems, all character development was stunted: maybe University life does that to people, but I wouldn't know. Frizz and Melana were good characters, and well developed, as well as Nanny and Turtle. But, all the young ones at Shiz seem to be two dimensional, and sometimes just not individuals, and at other times they seem not to be the same person from scene to scene. I thought we would see some development in Elphaba, but her character just didn't seem to be consistent throughout the novel. Furthermore, what I found confusing was Fiyero's interest in her, and why he would have had an affair with Elphaba. That didn't seem to mesh with his personality at all, especially being an Arjaki, and thus would not have really taken interest in someone as seclusive and undefined as Elphaba. You may say that some people are attracted by the mysterious, but frankly Fiyero didn't seem to be a character that was attracted by that. At the university he seem more direct, frank, and said what was in his mind. Anything that was not clear, occluded or ambiguous didn't seem to hold his interest. But, all of a sudden at the Emerald City, he just became the opposite of all that.
Beside character development, the one stuttering fault of this otherwise great idea was McGuire's unwieldy prose. It was ackward, prosaic, and a bit loose on synctatical unity. I felt that sometimes I was reading many different books at once, as the prose style wasn't uniform, and ackward enough to drive me nuts sometimes. Some of his alliterations were so ungraceful that I had to read it two or three times in order to get the feel of the sentence. At other times, I felt like Sylvester the Cat muttering the offending literary verbiage playing itself out in my mind. And especially awful was the ending: It seemed to me as he was finishing up the novel, he really had to go to the bathroom and just started writing as fast as he could, disregarding written decorum and style. The ending was a completely different work in my mind. Though, I must say how the Wicked Witch of the West died was pretty comical and I did enjoy a good chuckle there. But, as I said, this was a really, really good idea.
OK, the good parts? This was 100 times better than The Da Vinci Code. At least most of it didn't seem contrived like that awful, plagiaristic, non-informed narrative about a myth that no one really thinks it's true, but some idiots out there think that it is.
Overall, though, there were a lot of portions of the novel where the description of the landscape, or even of people, were done in a very colorful and vivid manner. Albeit the same sometimes descended into the darkness of Sylvester the Cat's sputtering speach pattern--in my mind, of course.
The one thing that I couldn't understand, though, were the reviewers who stated how this is a remarkable approach to the theological debate centering upon the Nature of Good and Evil. I think the reviewers were either high, got paid lots of money, or have never ever read anything on theology or philosophy in their lives. Or don't understand what a Bildungsroman is. I think that was what put me off the most, the reviews and the reviewers, who I believe are also idiots like Dan Brown, but maybe not quite so much. Theological debate? The Nature of Good and Evil? I'm sorry to say, but a Bildungsroman is a Bildungsroman, and Wicked had no ounce of any philosophical debate, except to point out that maybe excessive religiosity can be oppressive to most people. Duh!
OK, anyway, if I wanted theological theories on the Nature of Good and Evil, I would sooner read Augustine's The Confessions than read Wicked.
And that, for now, is my opinion, no matter how wrong it may be. I'd recommend this book for a light reading if you happen to be running out of books, and the only ones left are a bunch written by some Dan Brown. Who is an idiot, but I have no proof of that. Thank you and good luck.
