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Was, Oz, and YesApril 20, 2007 I just finished Geoff Ryman's Was. It's not a new book -- it was first published in 1992 -- and I've meant to read it for almost that long. One of Ryman's early novels, The Unconquered Country, blew me away in 1987 (I know this because I wrote it in my copy). Usually when I'm that impressed, I track down and read everything the author ever wrote, at least until something I read suggests that the author has either lost his/her touch or is headed in a direction I'm not interested in. I read and liked The Warrior Who Carried Life, then stopped. Bound galleys of The Child Garden have been on my shelves through several moves and a couple of major book-downsizings, but despite enthusiastic recommendations from people I trust, I still haven't read it. Ryman's Air won the 2005 Tiptree Award; Ryman came to WisCon to accept it (he looks great in a tiara). I bought a copy of the book and started reading it on the way home. Loved it, but still it was 10 months before I took Was off the shelf and read it. Was is, sort of, about Oz, and especially about Dorothy. It combines several timelines. In one little Dorothy Gael goes to live with her Aunt Emma Gulch after the death of her mother. This Aunty Em is no saint, but Uncle Henry is worse. Dorothy's life goes from hard to nightmarish; finally, in her midteens, she runs away. In another timeline, another little girl grows up (more or less) to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. In the 1980s an actor who was enthralled by Oz as a child and who has since made lots of money starring in an endless series of horror films is cast as the Scarecrow in a big charity performance of The Wizard of Oz but is diagnosed with AIDS and has to back out. Instead he goes to Kansas, in search of Dorothy, and Oz. Was looks like a historical and/or a contemporary real-time novel but it's got fantasy all over it. Sometimes real life squelches fantasy, other times fantasy pushes reality right off the stage, plenty of times you're in the funhouse with fantasy in one mirror, reality in the other, and you don't know what's up, down, or sideways. Did you know that for decades L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a forgotten, denigrated, and all but banned book because fantasy was considered harmful for children? At the end of Was (my index finger just beat out my ring finger and showed me just how close Was is to War), Geoff Ryman wrote an epilogue. It's called "Reality Check." It begins:
You know how sometimes you can't find the meeting or make the phone call because deep down you know it's going to change your life in ways you're maybe not ready for? I had to stop reading for the same reason. I am a realist writer who fell in love with fantasy. Because I am a realist writer, I am particularly aware that every work of fiction, however fantastic, is real. . . . Ryman was about to tell me something I needed to know so badly that I clapped my hands over my ears. Talk about Allie spooking at tarps by the roadside and trolls in the woods! I came back late the next day. "Reality Check" is mostly an homage to sources, the ones that exist and the ones that don't and the ones that are no longer. At the end, though, I found what I was spooking at. Here it is.
Extracts are © 1992 by Geoff Ryman.
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