vovat | There's nobody here but us frogs

So,

bethje and I met in Philadelphia today, to volunteer for the pledge drive at WHYY, the local NPR affiliate. I took the train in, and a fair number of people riding it were going into the city for a car show. Anyway, both of us had volunteered at WHYY before, but it was the first time we'd done a pledge drive. It wasn't as hard as I had feared, although it was a little hard to hear the people on the phones, what with all the noise in the background. I think it's something I would do again, albeit maybe not all that regularly.

While on the train, I finished reading The Frogman of Oz, and I have a few things to say about the book.

This was the first March Laumer book I'd ever read. I had read some of his short stories that had appeared in Oziana (I know "The Woozy's Tricky Beginning" was his, and there was also one about the Cowardly Lion's real name), and I wasn't a huge fan of them, but I DID like this book. Laumer, who died a few years ago, had a reputation for writing "adult" Oz books. I'd even seen his works described as pornographic, but most of the people who have read the books think this is going too far. There really wasn't anything sexual in Frogman, but there were some things that would probably have been out of place in a more typical Oz book, including a report of an extramarital affair; and some rather graphic descriptions of the actions of the cannibalistic Compleat Cook, and the gruesome demise of the Abominable No-Man. The scenes with the Cook and the No-Man were rather disturbing results of the lack of death in Oz. Along the same lines was a story about a suicidal gardener, whose body eventually healed itself after losing all of its blood. I did think the scene where Kabumpo and his friends were drunk was a bit gratuitous, but not as much so as Glinda dancing around in the nude, which I’ve seriously seen mentioned as a scene from a not-yet-published Oz manuscript. I thought Kabumpo seemed a bit out of character in general. Yes, he was as elegant and proud as ever, but he struck me as being slightly off. There were also a few details about him that weren’t quite right—I’m pretty sure Ruth Plumly Thompson described him as gray, rather than purple, and I KNOW that he lived in Pumperdink, rather than Regalia (although he spent a fair amount of time in the latter kingdom). Indeed, while Laumer obviously knows Oz and its characters quite well, he doesn’t always do the best job at writing them. The Frogman was pretty much true to form, though, and an unforeseen complication of Ozma’s time as Tip added an interesting dimension to her character (there was a bit of a theme that breaking transformations doesn’t always work out for the best). I didn’t find DesPlessis d’Arc to be a particularly engaging character, although I DID like the revelation as to his true identity. While I won’t give it away, there’s an aspect to that part of the story that reminds me of a conversation Beth and I had recently, where I mentioned that it would be kind of creepy to date someone that you knew as a child while you were an adult, even after that person had grown up.

While on the subject of characters, I have to say that I didn’t totally get the hatred everyone but Ozma and Glinda seemed to have for Till Orangespiegel. He’s an egotist and a bit of a drama queen, but I didn’t find him quite as bad as all that. Maybe The Magic Mirror of Oz, an earlier Laumer book in which the character had appeared, gives some reason as to why Till is so unpopular.

The characters that I thought came off the best, though, were Gayelette and Quelala. If you’ve read The Wizard of Oz, you might remember these two from a story told by the Winged Monkeys. They never actually appeared in the official Oz books, though, leaving more recent authors to come up with explanations for their absence. I know they appear in Roger Baum’s Dorothy of Oz, and I think they might show up in at least one of Donald Abbott’s books. I had actually considered writing a story about their fate, but I’m not sure I’ll go through with it. I have to say that Laumer’s explanation works quite well, and gives an interesting perspective on Quelala’s reaction to the marriage. (He was, after all, chosen by Gayelette to be her husband while he was still quite young.) Mombi is involved in the story, and there’s also an added twist to make things more interesting.

There were a few oddities in the book, like Kabumpo referring to “Chapter Seventeen of Ozma of Oz,” rather than an actual historical event. I also noticed several typos. Overall, though, I enjoyed the book, and I would gladly read more of Laumer’s books. Magic Mirror would be one of the highest on my list, I think, since there are several allusions back to it in Frogman. I’m not particularly interested in his The Green Dolphin of Oz, which I’ve heard is by far his worst.