If you'll recall from last month, book six in the 'Oz' series, 'The Emerald City of Oz', was also the last. Ozma has cut Oz off "forever from all the rest of the world" and that's perfectly OK. Baum points out that "we have had enough of the history of the Land of Oz to fill six story books." We don't need any more. Don't even ask him. It's just not possible.

But I'm here right now to talk about book seven in the 'Oz' series, 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz', so something has clearly changed. Realistically, it was 1913 and there hadn't been a new 'Oz' book in three years and kids kept writing to the author saying, "Why? Why? Why?" and so he caved in to overwhelming public demand and wrote another one, knocking out one more each year until 1920's 'Glinda of Oz', at which point he was the late L. Frank Baum but published that anyway. In his prologue, however, he states that one such kid suggested that he use a wireless telegraph to reach Oz, so he put one up in his back garden, learned how to use it and this is the result.

The other thing I must point out before I start is that, while I hadn't read the 'Oz' books before starting this runthrough, I did know a good deal about the story of this seventh because I saw it in a film. Once Baum returned to 'Oz' business, you see, he really returned to 'Oz' business. He personally formed a production company called Oz Film Manufacturing Company, which made four features with the same core crew, including him as writer. The schedule was ambitious as all four films were released within the last four months of 1914. 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz' was the first of them and I reviewed it at Apocalypse Later. Now I know how much of it was sourced from the book and how much added for the screen. It's largely faithful.

One difference is that the lead character, a Munchkin called Ojo, changes gender. He's a boy in the book, one who's ironically rather dismissive of girls, including Princess Ozma. In the film, he becomes a she and doesn't have that problem. He's a poor Munchkin, for some reason, because there aren't supposed to be any poor Munchkins, and he lives with his Unc Nunkie who speaks in one word sentences. They decide to go where the money is, metaphorically speaking at least, given that there is no money in Oz, and apparently that means their neighbour's house on the mountain.

I remember how this scene unfolds from the movie. It's Dr. Pipt's house and he's known as the Crooked Magician, not because he's a fraud but because his limbs are contorted, probably from having to stir four cauldrons for six years solid. It's Dr. Pipt who made the powder of life that we saw Mombi use to create Jack Pumpkinhead and Tip to create the Saw Horse and the Gump. It's also Dr. Pipt who made the solution that turns things into marble, as Mombi planned to do with Tip before he escaped. Here, we learn that it's called the liquid of petrifaction.

Ironically, the reason Dr. Pipt is dedicating six entire years of his life to making more powder of life is that his wife wants a servant—read "slave"—and he can create one for her out of a bunch of scrap cloths she's assembled into a vaguely human shape. Why she would need a slave when he already is one is open for discussion, but that's where we are. And it works, because Scraps is created in front of Ojo the Unlucky and Unc Nunkie the Silent One, even though Ojo snuck a lot of things into her head because he felt sorry for what she was about to become. Unfortunately, an accident prompts the liquid of petrifaction to be poured all over Unc Nunkie and, ironically, Dr. Pipt's wife, Dame Margolotte, so now they're marble.

The rest of the book is theoretically a quest in which Ojo attempts to acquire the ingredients a Crooked Magician needs to make a counteragent that will reanimate them. And it kind of is. He sets off, with Scraps in tow, along with a glass cat called Bungle, to locate a six-leafed clover, the wing of a yellow butterfly, a gill of water from a dark well, three hairs from the tip of a Woozy's tail and a drop of oil from a live man's body. If that's suitably cryptic for us, it's just as cryptic to Ojo and Scraps, who have never heard of a creature called a Woozy and have no idea how a live man could secrete a drop of oil. But, needs must, as they say, and off they go.

This is a great setup for Baum, who likes his stories to be episodic. The problem here is that he seems to have forgotten that five ingredients ought to mean five episodes and maybe he ought to dedicate about a fifth of the book to each of them. Instead he sets up a bunch more episodes that have nothing to do with the quest but are, at least, agreeably whimsical. There's a creepy one that sees them stay a night in a house with a disembodied voice. There's a telling one when Dr. Pipt's phonograph, which accidentally received a sprinkling of the powder of life, shows up and is summarily dismissed for being annoying, just like the Musicker in 'The Road to Oz'. Was Baum tone deaf or just hate music?

We already know he was wildly inconsistent, as is underlined by another one when we meet the public advisers, Miss Foolish Owl and Mr. Wise Donkey. If you'll recall, Oz didn't have a word for "horse" because they've never seen one, but they do have zebras and donkeys, which is why Tip called the Saw Horse rather than the Saw Zebra or the Saw Donkey. These little things bug me.

Anyway, eventually, ninety pages into the Del Rey paperback reprint, they stumble on a Woozy. After all, when Baum isn't being inconsistent, he's being convenient. A long set of adventures further down the road, Ojo picks a six-leafed clover without permission, which prompts him to be arrested at the gate to the Emerald City and tried. By the time that's resolved and they get back on the road, they're two ingredients down out of five and we're running out of pages. By the time, they locate a dark well, even Baum realises that he'd better wrap things up quickly so hurls out the other two like his life depended on it and scrawled 'The End' on the final page and that's that. See, it's all there, right?

To be fair, while it's all about the quest, it's not really all about the quest at all. In fact, because Baum could, he ends up dismissing the quest and solving the problem at hand anyway. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, unless of course it's made out of glass like Bungle. What really matters is the journey taken in order to fulfil the quest and that's fine. While Ojo is initially and depressingly reminiscent of Button Bright from 'The Road to Oz', he isn't stupid at all. He just doesn't know anything because he's never been anywhere or done anything. This is his opportunity to go everywhere and do everything and he learns all the way. I liked him a lot.

I liked Scraps too, even though the personality she describes as "Original" would really be very annoying indeed to anyone who had to hang out with her for more than about five minutes. It's not her fault, of course. It's Dr. Pipt's fault for bringing her to life in the first place and Ojo's for filling her head with a heck of a lot more than literally what the doctor ordered. I'll tell you who else likes Scraps and that's the Scarecrow, because the two of them click like a house on fire, an expression I now realise should absolutely never be used in conjunction with two characters who are entirely made of highly combustible material. She's an acrobat, a poet and a particularly memorable character, even by the high standards of this series on that front.

I was happy to see Baum handle his reunion fetish in a controlled manner, dishing out regulars here and there but never too many at once. Dorothy makes an appearance a couple of hundred pages in to point out that she knows everyone in Oz, except, of course, any of the characters we haven't met yet. Ozma is here, of course, as are the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Shaggy Man and others. Of course, even while bringing back regulars, Baum introduces inconsistency, this time explaining that Toto can't talk because he's not a fairy dog. To which I say: Billina isn't a fairy chicken, Jim isn't a fairy horse and the Pink Kitten isn't a fairy kitten, even though it was pink. They all talked the moment they got to fairyland. Let's just be honest. Toto either doesn't want to talk or he's too frickin' stupid to figure it out.

There are a bunch of new characters too, of course, because, for all his faults, Baum is never a skinflint when it comes to that. Beyond Ojo and Scraps and everyone in the early chapters, the Woozy is the first memorable addition, even though he's shaped rather like the dog from the 'Money for Nothing' music video. In the movie, he looks like a cardboard AT-AT. There's a Yoop, who's twenty-one feet tall. There are Tottenhots—not Hottentots—who absolutely show up in the movie in blackface, even when they're played by Harold Lloyd. Fun fact: it was on this film that he met Hal Roach, the producer who made him famous, because Roach was the Cowardly Lion.

And there are the Hoppers and the Horners and I bet you couldn't guess in a million years how we can distinguish them. Let me put you out of your misery! The Hoppers hop and the Horners have horns. Gotcha! For all Baum's rampant imagination, sometimes he was ridiculously literal. At least the Horners love wordplay, which was a lot of fun for me, but it also started a war with the Hoppers, so it's maybe nothing to write home about. It takes our heroes to defuse it.

For all my flippancy, much of which is absolutely warranted, 'The Patchwork Girl of Oz' is a heck of a lot of fun. It shows that Baum still had it after three years away from the series and it also suggests that he'd learned his lessons after the debacle of 'The Road to Oz'. After that book, I wondered if he'd run out of imagination and the series should die a natural death. In a way, he tried to do that a book later, but that was a step back into form in every way so we didn't need an execution after all. This backs that up with the feeling that, far from being out of ideas, he could conjure up more of them on the fly and just keep issuing them in an endless stream.

So, let's see how he does next time out in 'Tik-Tok of Oz', which appears to emphasise how Ozma clearly didn't do a very good job of cutting Oz off "forever from all the rest of the world". ~~ Hal C F Astell

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