Was
Geoff Ryman

review by: Chris Orcutt
Date: 10/9/02

For seven years I worked as a buyer for the world's largest bookstore. Pretty impressive, right? Well, like just about everything else it sounds a hell of a lot better than it actually was. But I did get to see thousands of books, and I worked with a lot of people who were very passionate about turning others on to books they'd discovered. I have and have read many, many phenomenal books that never really made it into the big picture and that I know most people haven't heard of. One of those books is Was by Geoff Ryman. It's like nothing I've ever read before or since, and every time I lend it to someone I don't get it back because it has been passed on to someone else as, "You HAVE to read this."

Was is an incredibly imaginative meditation on The Wizard of Oz that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. The 'real' Dorothy was a shy, pretty girl who came from Chicago to a Kansas frontier settlement with her dog after her mother died. She is thrown into a horribly cruel and abusive life with her Aunt and Uncle and in turn becomes withdrawn and resigned to her terrible life. It's painful to read, knowing, as we all do, how young and innocent Dorothy was in the movie. After years of abuse she encounters a kindly substitute teacher that sees and encourages some glimmer still within her and Dorothy has a total breakdown, really affecting him. The teacher is L. Frank Baum, who was the author of the original book The Wizard of Oz, and he goes on to write the life Dorothy should have had.

Interspersed throughout are many stories, each weaving in and out of the other. Ryman is such a skilled and eloquent writer that though you may see different events in different times involving characters who can be the same person (the 'real' Dorothy, a young, pre-fame Judy Garland performing with her family), the whole story builds so beautifully that you can feel things coming together, though you can't imagine how it actually will. His pacing is phenomenal.

There are many secondary characters who have their own personal connections to The Wizard of Oz, though some of them only discover it as the story unfolds. Bill, a doctor in a nursing home, is taking care of a mean old crazy woman when the movie comes on. She becomes still and rapt with attention watching the movie:

"It was about me," she whispered. "I really am Dorothy. Dorothy Gael from Kansas."

Is it her, in old age, after a terrible life that drove her crazy? The liberation that Bill gives to this woman is one of the book's shining moments, but he still has another part to play. Another of his patients, a dying man, has such a profound connection from his childhood with the movie that his dying wish is to find the house where Dorothy grew up, and Bill plays a major part in his liberation too.

The ending to the book is so magical and profound that when I finished it I knew I'd just read one of the best books of my life. Was truly redefines fiction, and could only be pulled off by a really gifted, enormously compassionate writer. I hope you won't get turned off by the subject matter – I never thought much about The Wizard of Oz, but this book came so highly recommended that I knew it was going to be worth reading. And the whole point of the book is to pose, in many different ways, the same universal question that the movie did: Can you ever really go home?