R-rated spin to the spirit of Oz

EVEN before its copyright expired, L. Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz" (1900) was quickly appropriated for what John Updike described as vigorous commercial activity. Inventive developers had no trouble recognizing the book's multiuse possibilities, and today we have "The Wiz" (a musical with an African American cast), "Was" by Geoff Ryman (an elegiac literary sequel about homes sought and lost by Dorothy and others), "The Annotated Wizard of Oz" (a complete guidebook to Oz) and numerous other prequels, sequels and adaptations.

Baum's classic tale has, for the most part, miraculously escaped becoming a victim of ruthless exploitation and more often acts like a cultural agent that migrates with ease into new technologies and media, at home wherever it goes. Unlike many classics that end up succumbing to cultural entropy as they are recycled, Baum's tale seems enlivened and reinvigorated by the efforts of new hands. Salman Rushdie, in a book-length appreciation of MGM's 1939 "Wizard of Oz," reports that the film made him want to be a writer. The cinematic Oz has been seen by many as an improvement on the novel, turning Baum's American literary tale into the stuff of folklore -- a global cultural story about leaving home and finding a way back.

And then there is Gregory Maguire's novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," which constructed a prequel charting the fortunes of Elphaba (a name created from L. Frank Baum's initials) before she died at Dorothy's hands -- perhaps just by accident -- and became forever associated with evil incarnate. It was a smash bestseller in 1995 and led to a 2003 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. That astounding success may have inspired Maguire to consider taking the storytelling possibilities of his characters even further.

In "Son of a Witch," Maguire follows the fortunes of Liir, a boy who, at the end of "Wicked," disappeared into the Emerald City in search of his half-sister Nor. The shift in focus from Dorothy and her antagonist to an adolescent boy rumored to be the dead witch's son may produce a sense of mild disorientation, but it arouses all those feelings associated with what J.R.R. Tolkien referred to as the "arresting strangeness" evoked by fantasy's brave new worlds.