Gregory Maguire didn't invent the game of re-imagining The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with Wicked; John Boorman's Zardoz aside, Geoff Ryman beat him to the bunch with Was, a fantasy novel masquerading as a realist dirge.

For the first few hundred pages of Was I was wondering why it was included in the Fantasy Masterworks series. The book opens with Jonathan, an actor struggling with AIDS and the role of the Scarecrow in a 1980s stage production of The Wizard of Oz and his obsessive researching of the history behind the play. It spends a little time following the career of Judy Garland from various perspectives. Most of the time, however, it focuses on the story of Dorothy Gael, a young girl sent to Kansas in the 1870s after her father abandons her and her mother dies of diptheria.

Ryman's devotion to historical accuracy and research is impressive. Many of the people inhabiting the towns of Manhattan and Zeandale in his vision of 19th Century Kansas are drawn from life. Ryman is determined not to present an ignorant Wild West image of life on the American frontier, such stereotypes being products of East Coast tabloids and Hollywood movies, and he succeeds in displaying the best and the worst of the real Kansas - the tent revivals, the fresh wounds of Civil War violence and banditry, the cultured intellectual scene, and, yes, more than a little country insularity and willingness to turn a blind eye to certain things.

Dorothy Gael, however, is an invention of Ryman's. The essential premise of the novel is that this girl provided L. Frank Baum with the inspiration for his Oz protagonist, even though she herself lives a life of loneliness and abuse. After the first third of the book, just when we think that Dorothy is going to have a good time after all, her creepy Uncle starts molesting her and everything becomes decidedly grim, to the point where I almost put the book aside. "How can I ever watch The Wizard of Oz or read the books again", I'd ask myself, "when I'd be constantly reminded of this filthy nightmare?"

This is where Ryman pulls a skillful bait-and-switch by switching the focus back to Jonathan. Dying of AIDS and slowly going mad, Jonathan is guided by visions to Dorothy's home, to bring things full circle, and before he finally disappears forever is given a brief moment of redemption. Was is really a story of the magic which Oz has worked on Jonathan's life, prompting him to engage with the world as a child (and possibly curing him of autism) and granting him a release as his life comes to an end. And the way in which the narrative hops about in the timeline suggests to us that through Jonathan's redeption Dorothy, too, finds some sort of inner peace. This is catharsis in the most exact sense of the term: Ryman is able to bring the reader to the point of despair and then lets us leave smiling and wanting to read the Oz books or watch the movie all over again.

If, as Ryman says, the Oz books were written for children by a man who remembered what it felt like to be a child, Was is written for adults by someone who understands what it feels like to be an adult.