Since 1900, when the first book in the series was published, Baum’s creations have succeeded in staking a substantial claim to the imaginative spaces of the minds of both children and adults, helped along by any number of movie and stage adaptations, of which the MGM musical version is clearly pre-eminent. Dorothy, Toto, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Wicked Witch of the West are all characters we have grown up with and recognise, whether or not we have actually read any of the books!

Gregory Maguire has quite clearly read all of the books and, after doing so, has re-imagined Oz and its inhabitants. Departing from Baum’s original intention, he seeks to flesh out that much maligned character, the Wicked Witch of the West, giving her a history that makes her penultimate encounter with Dorothy Gale from Kansas not just a personal disaster but a national one as well.

In this interpretation the Witch is the product of a strained marriage between a displaced aristocratic mother and a fundamentalist minister father. Elphaba (for that is the witch’s real name) is born amidst thunder and lightning at a time when dark superstitions are sweeping across the lands of Oz. The fact that she is born with an unmistakable green tinge to her skin and a set of teeth that takes the finger off one of the midwives present at her birth instantly sets her apart, not just from her distraught parents but from the fear-laden community generally. The first word she utters is the Mr Kurtz-like “horrors”, which only serves to reinforce in her parents’ minds that she is no ordinary child and, more likely than not, a curse imposed for some past misdemeanour.

She is also most definitely not a witch, not to begin with anyway, and Maguire’s aim is to chart young Elphaba’s formative years as a means of explaining how she came to that fateful moment in the tower of her castle, closeted with Dorothy and that awful bucket of water. She is not born evil and, within the framework of Maguire’s “biography”, never even becomes evil. She is, indeed, one of the few characters genuinely concerned with the very concepts of good and evil, her outward appearance belying the torment within as she becomes aware of the wickedness around her and the manner in which it can conscript even the services of an unwitting orphan girl from Kansas to achieve its ends.

In fleshing out this one particular life Maguire also of course fleshes out the life of Oz itself, giving it a geo-political profile more akin to a middle-European nation than a fantasy never-never land. The Wizard is more dictator than benficent ruler, his regime propped up by bully-boy squadrons of thugs and an elaborate network of spies and agents-provocateurs. The Yellow Brick Road is not a magical golden thread binding together a happy land but rather a means by which the centre can enforce control and exact taxes and wealth from outlining regions. The smaller states that constitute parts of the greater Oz are rife with religious and racial intolerances, independence movements constantly threaten to fracture the body politic and suppression is the order of the day. Glinda, ditzy socialite and Elphaba’s unwilling room-mate in college, presents a physical ideal associated with fairness and light (the opposite of Elphaba’s wicked-witch greenness) but, in fact ,performs her good-works along the preordained lines of a greater and more malignant power.

As seen through Maguire’s eyes, Dorothy’s innocent involvement has devastating consequences for a land already embroiled in socio-political upheavals. As Elphaba, self-styled Wicked Witch of the West, melts in the flood of Dorothy’s well-intentioned dowsing so too melts any hope for Munchkinland independence and the liberation of Oz’s intellectually advanced Animal population (the capital “A” is important here). So skillfully does Maguire introduce these very un-fantasy like elements into this fantastic landscape that we simply accept them as we would any scholarly extrapolation of historical fact.

Fantasy lands have to have internal logic and consistency, Baum himself recognised that, and what Maguire does here is take this mythical world and layer over it a harsh, Machiavellian template that wrenches it out of its cosy childhoodishness, forcing it to “grow up”. It’s no longer such a fun or lovable place to be ( and that for some will be a negative) but it’s a terrific extension of a fabulous, pre-existing fiction which heightens, if that is possible, one’s appreciation of the original conception. That there is a labour of love going on here is in no doubt, but that it is a labour which enhances its source material whilst creating something utterly unique is an achievement I don’t fully comprehend. What I do know is that, whenever I see Margaret Hamilton dissolving in a cloud of steam bewailing her “beautiful wickedness”, I for one will feel a pang of remorse for the life that just might have been.