From: rrizzo@star-trek.bbn.com (Ron Rizzo)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: WAS by Geoff Ryman
Keywords: Oz; Dorothy, friends of, fiends of
Date: 21 Aug 92 15:45:07 GMT
NNTP-Posting-Host: archive.bbn.com


[SPOILER!  The publisher's blurb on the dust jacket gives a lot away.  A lot
 more is blurted out below.]


			PEOPLE IN VAGUELY AUTISTIC PROFESSIONS


       Rhine music from Wagner's Ring cycle is soaring on the radio as I type
this.  I used to scorn the movie THE WIZARD OF OZ and loathe the cult of Judy
Garland.  Only AFTER I came out did I feel impelled to watch the 1939 confec-
tion and like it.  I still couldn't stomach the weepy sentiments embedded in
the story like dates petrified in a 30-year-old fruitcake, but the fey charm
of the film was clear.

	A few weeks ago JT Kittredge recommended Geoff Ryman's WAS (Alfred A.
Knopf & Sons), his 4th novel.  (Is Ryman from Ontario?)  The book takes up THE
WIZARD OF OZ's themes by making Dorothy Gael, Emma & Henry Gulch, L. Frank
Baum, Judy Garland, and people marked by Oz (an actor dying of AIDS, a psychi-
atrist from Dorothy's hometown) its characters and imagining their lives by a
graphic reconstruction of the world they might have known.  What sounds like
a hokey scaffolding of conceits produces a complex, well-built and often
dazzling set of intercut individual tales that intersect and twine into a
story whose resulting line, if it exists, is hard to trace.

	It's *really* good.  Ryman's power of invention is frightening.  I
found the book more moving than most gay novels I've read.  WAS is a book
with serious gay interest.  Whether it's a gay novel in a narrower sense I
don't know.  

	I should mention that the story's aim is not moral uplift or even
entertainment, though it has a rather satanic urge to amuse and fascinate
by giving the reader glimpses of both the horrors and raptures the "real"
characters experience as they struggle to live through the often nasty
historical situations into which the author has dropped them.  The completely
fictional characters have a reality equal to the "real" ones so that their
experiences register with equal force.  The fates of most of the book's
characters are unhappy, and the convincing description at the end of the
mental and emotional deterioration of Jonathan, the dying actor, may not
be for every reader.  

	I watched AGNES OF GOD on the tube last night, and in some ways its
double message, deliberate confusions and ambiguities resemble WAS.

	Jonathan's childhood autism is hilarious.  Ryman precisely captures
the tenor of Jonathan's marriage to Ira, his lover, a young Los Angeles
lawyer.  The treatment of "bad girls", the desperate Dorothy Gael and a
younger confederate, as they systematically terrorize classmates and teachers
in a prairie school, is wicked.  The blind pentecostalism and crippling 
yankee selfrighteousness of fanatical Aunt Emma is repulsive but shown to
be the personal tragedy of a carefully drawn 19th century woman who settled
Kansas only to ruin her life like most pioneers.  The monstrous effect on
Dorothy of Uncle Henry's pathetic lust is agony for the reader, nevermind
the character, but the banal yet inescapable character of the sexual abuse
is so effectively told as to cause both claustrophobia and disgust at how
generic it is.  The result is a nauseating realization of how common it must
have been.

        Ryman is fond of turning the knife in the wound but everything seems
credible, even pre-ordained once it happens.  Despite the stagey premise of
the book the author manages to weave together strands of "biography" in
surprising ways.

	Has anyone read any of Ryman's other novels?


Draped over the ottoman
in a state of deschabile,
Ron


*******************************************************************************
Wayfarer:   Excuse me, sir, is this the Emerald City?
Gatekeeper: That it is, by the grace of our Queen, the great Dorothy!  Identify
            yourself.  Are you friend or fiend?
Wayfarer:   Weeell, a little bit of both, I guess.