Season of the witch
By Christopher Muther
Globe Staff
Gregory Maguire knows what his dissenters are thinking, but their proverbial sticks and stones can’t hurt him.
On the surface, it appears that the Boston-area author is shrewdly building a franchise off of his best-selling 1995 novel, ‘‘Wicked,’’ and the Tony Award-winning musical it inspired. For those who have been living in their own private Oz for the past decade, ‘‘Wicked’’ tells the back story of the Wicked Witch of the West, answering long-lingering questions about the origins of Elphaba’s luminous jade epidermis and her educational background. This month, Maguire returns to the Emerald City with ‘‘Son of a Witch,’’ a novel that looks at the fate of the witch’s possible scion.
A sequel on the heels of such massive success may give the appearance that Maguire is attempting to transform himself into the local equivalent of J.K. Rowling, sans blond coiffure. But Maguire, who reads from ‘‘Son of a Witch’’ in Boston on Saturday, explains that long before ‘‘Wicked’’ was published, he was already working on its sequel.
‘‘.‘Wicked’ came out in such a gush,’’ says Maguire, ‘‘that there was a lot of what I can only call, for lack of a better word, afterbirth. I kept writing about both the characters and the situation in Oz for about another year. That was way back in 1994. It was going to be a sequel called ‘The Education of Tin and Straw.’ It was, according to my agent, not very good. He advised me to bury it in my file cabinet and not to send it to my publisher.’’
Maguire followed his agent’s advice, and ‘‘The Education of Tin and Straw’’ languished in storage. As he explains it, ‘‘I had other horizons to peer over at the time.’’ Those other horizons included reworking of a pair of Grimm Brothers fairy tales: 1999’s ‘‘Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister,’’ which revisits the story of Cinderella, and 2003’s ‘‘Mirror, Mirror,’’ an expansion of ‘‘Snow White.’’
After ‘‘Wicked’’ was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2003, Maguire began receiving letters from children, primarily young girls, who had read his book after seeing the play and were curious to know what happens to a political prisoner named Nor who is held by the Wizard at the end of ‘‘Wicked.’’ At the same time, Maguire was seeing the images of the abused captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and suddenly the Wizard’s political prisoner was back on his mind.
‘‘It was an overlay of ideas, like the acetate overlays in those old books where you can see the digestive system over the skeletal system,’’ Maguire says, between interruptions from his five-year-old son and a knock at the door from a cluster of Jehovah’s Witnesses. ‘‘When there’s an overlay, the ideas become three-dimensional. And then it’s not a case of ‘Can I do this?,’ it’s a case of ‘Can I avoid it?’ I had to write this story because it wouldn’t get out of the room, and it was going to stay there until I wrote it.’’
Little of ‘‘The Education of Tin and Straw’’ made it into the new book, pleasing both Maguire and his agent. Without giving away the plot, ‘‘Son of a Witch,’’ offers several possible openings for a third installment of the story. But Maguire contends that he has no interest in another novel set in Oz.
‘‘It may not appear to be true,’’ he says. ‘‘But I’ve made quite an effort to avoid being tarred, encrusted in emeralds, and forced into a pair of ruby slippers.’’
