The Road to Oz by: L. Frank Baum

 

L. Frank Baum is clearly bored with the Land of Oz in The Road to Oz. Children once again demanded more Oz stories and he wrote this one within a year of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.  It follows the same formula: Dorothy finds herself on the way to Oz with a young male companion, an older mentor figure, and a wildcard character through magical circumstances.  After several misadventures with several different people, Ozma eventually gets involved to get our characters to the Emerald City before the mentor decides to stay in Oz and Dorothy makes it back home again.  The going back home again is literally the final line of the book, Dorothy and Toto going to sleep in Oz with the promise of waking back up in Kansas.  The Road to Oz lacks stakes, the goal to get to Oz is for Ozma’s birthday party and nothing more.  This is after the journey is well underway, until it is mentioned by one of the people met along the way the aimless nature of the wanderings is what dominates the book.

 

This time the inciting incident is one with surrealist potential but it gets dropped pretty early on.  The mentor figure is the Shaggy Man, an early example of the kindly hobo, who just asks Dorothy for directions to Butterfield, so he can avoid it, before they both slip out of reality down a trail of several roads.  The Shaggy Man is a character who fees distinctly early 20^th century, reflecting this attitude that is arguably kinder to a certain type of homeless person.  There is a distinction between hobo, a tramp, and a bum is this: a hobo being an almost respectable drifter who works while a tramp is a simple non-working traveler unless they must, and a bum neither travels nor works.  The Shaggy Man is not a bum, he is largely respectable with a proto-communist view on money and takes Dorothy’s kindness as given for being a good, American girl.  Baum’s economic philosophies coming out is nothing new with how previous books have characterized Oz as at this utopian monarchy, though The Road to Oz claiming there is no money in Oz should be fascinating.  Baum plays it off as just a normal thing, but does not actually explore it beyond that.  It’s also not just Oz, it seems the lands surrounding Oz also function without money.  When I discussed Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz there was a general sense that the thematic resonance of the previous Oz books was gone, and The Road to Oz does not actually improve matters.  This lack of money is a hint at some thematic relevance, there are a few lines that at least make the reader think what life might be like if people just helped each other instead of relying on the exchange of money for goods and services, but it’s a background detail.

 

The other two characters joining Dorothy, the Shaggy Man, and Toto are Polychrome, daughter of the Rainbow, and Button-Bright, a fool.  Polychrome is a perfectly fine character, fitting in well with the fantastical vibe that Baum hangs these novels on, but Button-Bright is one of those characters meant to be annoying and succeeds in being annoying.  The character is a commentary on the idea of the psychological blank slate, taking the world at face value and not really having his own sense of identity.  The individual adventures are also quite rapid here, Baum just stopping them whenever he gets bored and despite tributing A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a portion of the book, none of them particularly stick out when everything is said and done.  The final adventure is essentially a list of cameos from previous Oz characters, almost preternaturally quoting The Wizard of Oz 30 years too early.  That and including characters from other books Baum has written, a marketing stunt to increase sales of the books Baum clearly enjoyed writing more.  At least Jack Pumpkinhead’s cameo has this darkly comic edge of having several heads that have rotten and having his own graveyard.  The Road to Oz reads as a once great author falling because his readers are almost too demanding.

Overall, The Road to Oz is a book that at the very least might be enjoyable to young children who want more Oz stories, but there really isn’t much for even the slightly older children to really latch onto.  Devoting parts of the book to an advertisement for other work by Baum while including a surface level analysis of communism is at least a funny choice, Baum financially wasn’t doing as well at selling non-Oz books so the need to market is sadly there.  The road to Oz is a long one and one that is about as generic as the series has gotten, reminding readers of better stories instead of telling a story of its own.  4/10.