The story is set in Holland in the 16oo’s, against the backdrop of the tulip boom.  The eponymous ugly stepsister is Iris, a young girl who flees from England to Haarlem with her mother, Margarethe, and silent sister Ruth.  Once there, they find the family that they expected to take them in are dead and so the family take up work as housekeepers in a painter’s studio in order to survive.  When a rich businessman comes to commission a painting of Clara, his beautiful daughter, with some of his prized tulips Margarethe sees the opportunity for advancement and acts to unite her poor family with Clara’s rich one.  But, as in all fairy tales, all is not entirely as it seems and plans go awry.

Often when books choose to take an alternative perspective on a well-known story it is to show that character in a more sympathetic light, so I was surprised by the very balanced way in which Maguire presents Iris and indeed all his characters.  Iris is downgraded from ugly to merely plain, she cares for her disabled sister, tries to befriend Clara and is credited with intelligence, but she is headstrong (and not in the pretty, charming way that a lot of heroines are headstrong), sullen and uncooperative.  Maguire hasn’t made her seem nice, he has made her seem real and believeable.  Clara, the Cinderella figure, is likewise knocked down from her fairy tale princess pedestal and into the realms of mere humanity.  She is beautiful and intriguing, yet on the other hand she is fey, neurotic and unable to accept things outside of her own terms.  Where Cinderella’s beauty traditionally liberates her from a life of drudgery, Clara is very aware that she has very little control over her own fate in spite of her attractive appearance, something which makes the schemes of Margarethe, the wicked step-mother, seem more reasonable and justified and imbues her with a steely resolve that is more driven by self-preservation than cruelty.  Ruth, the second sister, is by far the most interesting character despite playing an ostensibly minor role in the story; readers of fairy tales will know never to trust appearances and Ruth does not disappoint.

The choice to place the story in the context of the tulip mania of the 1600′s, when tulips became so popular that a single bulb could sell for more than ten times the annual wage of a skilled labourer, is a clever one.  As Clara’s family soon learn to their peril, the tulips had no inherent worth and the speculation which had artifically inflated their price was all an illusion and so the setting encourages questions about true value, worth and beauty which are particularly fitting for the story.  Why should Clara be considered worth more than Iris just because she is aesthetically pleasing and Iris is plain?  Why is Clara’s father happy to use his shy daughter as promotional material for his business venture?  Is value inherent or something subjective that the beholder or buyer adds?  It definitely provides an interesting background against which to read the story of Cinderella.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire.  Published by Headline Review, 2008, pp. 397.  Originally published 1999.

Title:

Author: Gregory Maguire

Published: Headline Review, 2009, pp. 426

Genre: Fantasy

Blurb: While civil war looms in Oz, an oracle named Yackles prepares for death.  Before her final hour, the Cowardly Lion arrives searching for information about Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West.  Yackles, who hovered on the sidelines of Elphaba’s life, demands some answers of her own.

Brrr surrenders his story: abandoned as a cub, his earliest memories are gluey hazes, and his path from infancy in the Great Gilikin Forest is no Yellow Brick Road.  In the wake of laws that oppress talking Animals, he avoids a jail sentence by serving the war-mongering Emperor of Oz.

Where, when and why: I was given this book as a present last Christmas, so I thought it was about time I got round to reading it while I could still vaguely remember the other two books in the trilogy.  It also counts towards my Books Off the Shelf Challenge and is book 18/50.

What I thought: This book is the third and final installment in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked trilogy and I have to say I’m rather relieved.  I found Wicked odd, but enjoyed it because of the inventive reimagining of the land of Oz and its characters.  Son of a Witch was even more peculiar and only interesting in the light it shed on events in the previous book.  With A Lion Among Men I couldn’t help but feel that Maguire had deliberately left loose ends in book two purely so that he could write a trilogy, as the book was forced and at times even painful to read.

A Lion Among Men tells the stories of the Lion and Yackle, neither of which, unfortunately, are particularly interesting or relevant because they are so far removed from the original tale of Dorothy and Elphaba.  This tenuous link is the only thing which makes this book bearable: if it were about different characters then there would be nothing to recommend this story at all.  The two narratives are haphazard in their organisation, unbalanced in their delivery and unrelated to one another, so don’t really interweave very well.  Plot twists which were presumably meant to be surprising came across as irrelevant and were dismissed rather than developed.  It felt as though Maguire was being perverse for the sake of it a lot of the time and that does not a good novel make.

Ignoring the confused plot and annoying characters, there were moments of this book which I quite enjoyed.  I liked the importance of books in this novel and how they were described:

Books could seem to unleash all the hallelujahs of hell…but even books that did not detonate into history, as the Grimmerie had, could still whisper their private secrets. (p. 19)

He didn’t remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity.  Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal.  And what new life can emerge from a book.  Any book, maybe. (p. 399)

The descriptions are evocative, and  seem peculiarly appropriate given how I spent my time at university learning that all books are essentially about sex.  Either that or my lecturers were particularly obsessed.

I also enjoyed some of the humour.  Some of it fell very flat, but there were a few gems which stood out.  I particularly liked the moment when the Lion asks the Dwarf if he knows what will happen next, to which the Dwarf responds:

Of course I don’t know…  I’m the servant here.  When did you ever know a dwarf to be in charge? (p. 382)

This is the sort of mockery of fairytale and fantasy stereotypes which made Wicked work, but which has been sadly lacking from both of the subsequent installments.  Such a shame.

Where this book goes: The completist in me demands that I keep this book as I have the rest of the trilogy.  If I ever run out of shelf space the whole set are in dire danger of going though.

Tea talk: Thanks to the delightful August weather (apparently nobody told the weather that it’s meant to be summer), I’ve had a rotten cold for the past few days.  I’ve been combatting this with lots of delicious Lady Grey tea, laced liberally with honey.