Well, shiver my liver! Ruth Plumly Thompson's back in a mood to bring back earlier characters and she's adding pirates to the mix. She even addresses the concern I raised at the end of my review of last month's book, 'The Yellow Knight of Oz', because these pirates aren't in Oz until the very end of the book. They're from the Nonestic Ocean off the coast of Ev and thus any logic we might find or want to keep consistent within Oz simply doesn't apply.

There are two threads, each featuring a returning character. The first, for yet another adventure, is Ruggedo (formerly Roquat the Red), the former Gnome King (and former Nome King) (for those of us who prefer consistency), who's now a little grey pedlar wandering the countryside, trading a stash of dark glasses for food, clothing and shelter. He still can't speak, because he's only five into the seven years of silence he received after being hit by a Silence Stone at the end of 'The Gnome King of Oz'.

He's back over the Deadly Desert, having bribed his way over by eagle, for anyone who's counting the ways in which this uncrossable desert has been crossed. He was thrown out of his former lands yet again and he's now on his way through the land of Ev to the land of Rinkitink, which we visited so long ago within the series that 'Rinkitink in Oz' was written by L. Frank Baum rather than Ruth Plumly Thompson. However, he stumbles onto a palace with a sign that seems to fit him to a tee: "Wanted: A Dumb King".

It's called Menankypoo—and why not, I say—and it's right on the coast where the lands of Ev and Rinkitink meet. The Menankypoos don't speak either, but have large foreheads that serve as the 1931 equivalent of TV screens with closed captioning. That's pretty neat! I can think of a number of people I'd like to shift to that method of communication. They test him, of course, in joyous style, and confirming that he can't speak, act or think, proclaim him the new king of Menankypoo. That wasn't so hard, huh? And so Ruggedo has a kingdom again.

However, having been hired as king because he can't speak, he promptly gets his voice back. That happens in the nearby cave of Kadj the Conjurer, where he finds that he can't open anything, but for a single door hidden under a tapestry and marked "Sure Cure for Everything". When he opens that, a blunt axe promptly cracks him on the head, but it's no prank; it does what it says and cures everything, starting by restoring his voice. If he could only get out of the cave, he'd be in trouble with his new people, who don't want him to talk.

Fortunately, there's another character already in the cave, who goes by Clocker, the Wise Man of Menankypoo. They kicked him out for giving the former king bright ideas and he certainly seems to be the sort of intelligent character we rarely meet in this series. However, he communicates in an even weirder way than his fellow countrymen. He would look like the others, except for a head made of wood and a face made of clock. He can only speak once every fifteen minutes and then in note form, delivered by a cuckoo that leaps out to mark the time.

It's enough to get them out, because he knows all about the fire escape and, if you've paid even a tiny amount of attention to Ruth Plumly Thompson's penchant for wordplay, and most especially her literalisms, then you'll already know that it's an escape through the fire in the fireplace. The cave features other such gadgets as the Hardy-hood and the Standing-stick. Anyone wearing the former can't be hurt, while the latter makes other people stand still. As they leave the cave, they discover that the kingdom has fallen to pirates, led by Peggo the Red and Binx the Bad.

And that's an introduction to the first strand of plot, which continues uninterrupted for almost a quarter of the book, which is an unfathomable distance for this series. Fortunately, Thompson is happy to restrict her strands to two this time and they connect almost as soon as the second one comes into play, initially with King Ato the Eighth, then Samuel Salt and, not too much later, the other returning character, Peter Brown from Philadelphia, last seen in 'Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz' only two books earlier. His first, of course, was 'The Gnome King of Oz', two before that, where he was the one who threw the Silence Stone at Ruggedo.

But I should introduce you to the new characters. King Ato the Eighth rules Octagon Island off the coast of Ev, but he soon finds that he's the only person left on it, because his people are bored and sail off to seek excitement. Samuel Salt is a lonely ruler too, as the captain of the 'Crescent Moon' because he wasn't rough enough on his crew and they mutinied. It seems pretty natural for them to meet and join forces. Peter you know, but he was on a yacht in a storm off Cape Hatteras, only to be washed overboard and show back up in the Nonestic Ocean to join Captain Salt and King Ato on the 'Crescent Moon'.

I'm sure you've already worked out that the pirates who took Menankypoo used to be Salt's crew and the people of Octagon Island joined forces with them. It doesn't take much to extrapolate an inevitable extra step, namely that, with capable assistance from Clocker, who wants the kingdom for himself, King Ruggedo takes command of this army, or perhaps navy, and puts them to use as an invasion force, because what else would he want but to make yet another attempt to conquer Oz and make it his own. He's still going on about the magic belt that Ozma took from him in 'Ozma of Oz', a whopping twenty-two books earlier.

This invasion actually goes better than you might expect, though it doesn't last for long, because story happens and you know you're not going to see an unhappy ending in an 'Oz' book. To be fair, that makes the finalé the least worthy moment in the book. I enjoyed the initial shenanigans with Ruggedon and Clocker in the Cave of Kadj the Conjurer much more and the adventures of Captain Salt's 'Crescent Moon' as they sail the Nonestic Ocean seeking the traditional episodic nature of this series. They find it too, in Shell City (whose occupants are turtles), Nowhere (and a cottage in the middle of Nowhere, where they acquire Breakfast), Gordorkas (the floating boat of the Duke of Dork) and Snow Island.

I should add that Breakfast has a capital B because she's not a thing but an animal. She's a goat, a bananny goat, which means that her horns grow into bananas, drop off and then regrow. That's a wonderful thing but also a horrible thing, if you only have so much space. Yes, the 'Crescent Moon' is soon the location for a scenario reminiscent of 'The Trouble with Tribbles', which was thirty-six years into the future at this point even in our timeline. I'll leave it to you to work out how many in 'Star Trek' internal chronology.

I liked Breakfast but I think I liked Pigasus more. That's the most obvious wordplay in the book but it's still strong wordplay. Yes, Pigasus is a pig who flies, but when you're on his back, you become a poet. There are lots of silly rhymes here, even without Scraps showing up for long. She is here for a moment, but she's turned into "a faded old rag bag", just as the Scarecrow is turned into a bale of hay and the Cowardly Lion into an iron dog. Ruggedo gets his magic belt back and that means a lot of power in the wrong hands. Oh, and King Ato has a Read Bird, which is exactly what you think it might be, as the Royal Reader on Octagon Island.

I liked this one, as much as Ruggedo and Peter are both getting a little old at this point. It moves along consistently, which seems to be happening more and more often during Thompson's tenure as Royal Historian of Oz. Her wordplay isn't frequent enough to be called a highlight this time but it's there nonetheless and it's always welcome. She panders to episodic tradition with that island-hopping in the Nonestic Ocean but she doesn't rely on it for the whole of her story. Samuel Salt is the nicest pirate ever and King Ato turns out to be an excellent cook. Clocker is highly memorable too.

The catch has to be that the ending, when it finally arrives, is over and done with in a breath. It's as if Thompson was having so much fun setting up her story that she forgot she had to end it. The solution is obvious: just ditch one of the stops the 'Crescent Moon' makes on its sojourn round the Nonestic Ocean and use the available space to bulk the ending up into a chapter. But hey, it's not that big a problem to solve. After all, if you give an 'Oz' author free time in Ozma's palace, they'll just leap into another interminable reunion scene. Maybe that's why Thompson wrote this in the way she did, because she's been seriously cutting back on those reunions.

So, my fears were not met and I enjoyed this twenty-fifth book. Next up, 'The Purple Prince of Oz', which gave Thompson the opportunity to bring back a bunch of other characters for a return visit, not least Kabumbo, the Elegant Elephant. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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