Fairies

There isn't a plot until about halfway through the book, but I enjoy Baum's writing so much that it didn't bother me. This is a highly enjoyable undersea adventure that is fantastical and funny. ( )

There isn't a plot until about halfway through the book, but I enjoy Baum's writing so much that it didn't bother me. This is a highly enjoyable undersea adventure that is fantastical and funny. ( )

I’ve been reading a blog called Burzee of late, which is about a pair of Oz fans working their way through the canonical Oz works, plus related stories. Thus far, every novel they’ve done has been one I’ve read before, but when they hit the two Trot and Cap’n Bill books that L. Frank Baum wrote during the Great Hiatus between Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, I decided to read along with them, as I’d never read them before. So the commentary that follows is mostly a response to Sarah and Nick’s commentary at Burzee.

I’m not even sure I knew The Sea Fairies existed when I was a kid; while I owned some of the other Baum fantasies that tied into Oz, like Queen Zixi of Ix and Dot and Tot of Merryland, I kind of remember being perplexed as how Trot and Cap’n Bill knew Button Bright already in The Scarecrow of Oz, which would seem to indicate I wasn’t even aware of a book that would plug the gap.

I didn’t like this very much. It wasn’t terrible, but I did find it dead boring. I have a friend who really likes children’s fantasy but can’t get into the Oz novels because they’re so plotless—so many of them are about getting from point A to point B, with just a series of visits in between, like Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, and so on. This doesn’t bother me if the places are interesting and there’s some kind of urgency to the quest (I like Dorothy and the Wizard a lot, Road less so), but Sea Fairies is like one of those novels except no one is going from anywhere to anywhere! There’s no goal or purpose to anything that happens in the first half of the novel, it’s just a travelogue without the actual travel. Sarah and Nick connect it to The Twinkle Tales, a series of short fantasies for younger readers, but I found that pretty hit-or-miss, which I guess corresponds to my reaction to this book. Nick says the book eventually clicked for him… but it never did for me! (I guess there were some good bad puns, though.)

The arrival of a villain in the character of Zog halfway through wasn’t a “merciful release” for me as it was for Nick, though, because by the time the plot turned up, I was so disinterested that I didn’t care what evil he did. And the powers of the mermaids are so amazing and absolute that it’s hard to feel like anyone is ever actually in real danger.

I did like Trot and Can’n Bill more than Nick and Sarah did—they both have a nice practicality to them. Bill sort of veers between out of his depth (heh) to the only person on top of things, but I guess it depends on how closely he can connect his fairyland experiences to a real world one. (He does a pretty good job leading the troops in Sky Island, I feel.) Having an adult along is interesting, and something Baum didn’t do a whole lot: the Wizard in Dorothy and the Wizard and the Shaggy Man in Road, and Rinkitink in, well Rinkitink in Oz seem to be principle ones.

My Dover edition’s illustrations aren’t very high-quality reproductions, and it omits the color plates, sadly. I don’t think there’s a reprint that has them. As a result, the illustrations didn’t make much of an impact on me. I’m glad I read this at last, but I have to agree that it’s hard to imagine giving this to a kid now. I was starting to wonder if Baum was a terrible writer, and I only liked his other books because I was nostalgic for them! Thankfully Sky Island was much much better.

Sarah connects Sea Fairies to Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, and I did too, but in the context of the 1978 film, which maybe gives an indication of what a 1980s adaptation of The Sea Fairies (which was supposedly planned) would have been like. Having seen the film I can easily imagine an adaptation of Sea Fairies in the vein of The Water Babies, which features Jon Pertwee as a singing Scottish cartoon lobster. (Actually, there are some elements of The Water Babies film that are closer to Baum’s novel than Kingsley’s!)

added April 2022:
As I said above, what confused me as a child was that the author's note at the beginning of The Scarecrow of Oz indicated Trot and Cap'n Bill were being brought to Oz by popular demand... but how did any of Baum's readers know who these characters were if they hadn't yet appeared in a book? It wasn't until much later that I learned about The Sea Fairies and Sky Island (I think maybe when I was in high school), and even later than that when I finally got around to reading them (I was in graduate school, as discussed above).

So I wondered if I could construct my son's Oz journey in a way that would avoid my youthful confusion, and create the kind of demand for Trot and Cap'n Bill going to Oz that Baum's contemporary readers experienced. In strict publication order, these would be read between Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, but I wasn't about to delay getting to my favorite Oz book, so I decided to work them in slightly later: after finishing Patchwork Girl, I gave him the choice of Tik-Tok of Oz or The Sea Fairies, and he picked The Sea Fairies, even with my explanation that it was not an Oz book per se, but one that took place near Oz. (The fact that we had already read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus gave some precedent for this.)

Unfortunately, I still think this book is not up to much. It's one of those Baum books where no one has a goal; Trot and Cap'n Bill are sort of kidnapped by mermaids and made into mermaids, then they spend a hundred pages just being taken on a tour of what's underwater. Halfway through, a plot finally turns up, but it's one in which they play very little role, as most of their problems are solved by other characters. That said, I do like Cap'n Bill (a gruff sailor voice is exactly the kind I like to make), and this time I had an appreciation of Baum's worldbuilding. He wasn't always great at coherent extrapolation, but the explanation he offers for how mermaids work is one he explores all the implications of. Mermaids are surrounded by thin pockets of air which let them breathe, and keep their clothes from getting wet; this also lets them do things like cook. Trot and Cap'n Bill meet other humans underwater, who were kidnapped by an evil sea creature and given gills, and these ones have to wear wet clothes all the time and don't get to eat good food.

I don't know how much my son liked this one, but he seems to like Trot and Cap'n Bill themselves because he was game for returning to them with Sky Island.

Although far from being Baum's best fantasy, The Sea Fairies has an easy charm - magnified, I'm sure, if you're a small child growing up on the California coastline. The first half of the novel is pure underwater tour, sending the reader to look up antiquated and euphemistic terms for various sea creatures; the plot doesn't really kick in until chapter 11, when the protagonists are captured by a soft-spoken, genteel adversary who might as well be Satan by another name. In a slightly disquieting set of chapters, we meet the slaves he has made from sailors presumed drowned, and our heroes are nearly boiled alive and frozen to death in his attempts to gain the upper hand. Everything ends happily, but it all gets a bit dark for a book that otherwise seems to be for very small children.

The Sea Fairies lacks the awkward stop - start - stop - start inconsistency that plagues some other Baum books of the period, but it's still easy to see why this wasn't a huge seller. Fortunately, even a lesser Baum book still boasts many aspects to enjoy, and illustrator John R. Neill seems to have been inspired to draw incredibly glamorous, even sensual mermaids. It's a gorgeous book, particularly in its original edition with two-tone color plates. ( )