Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

After taking on L. Frank Baum's Oz mythos in The Wicked Years series, Cinderella in Tales of an Ugly Stepsister, Snow White in Mirror, Mirror and Alice in Wonderland in After Alice, author Gregory Maguire turned to Hoffmann's Christmas classic in Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker.

What many of these books have in common is that Maguire will select a character or themes and take his own spin on the tale from another perspective, sometimes telling the life story of the side characters.

In Hiddensee, Maguire selects the character of Godfather Drosselmeier from The Nutcracker. (I've not addressed it before, but with the spelling of Drosselmeyer's name varies in different versions. I typically stick to the one with a y, but the one with an i instead is just as valid.)

Maguire's Dirk is a foundling: an abandoned child. He was taken in by a couple who lived in the woods and raised him. As he learns to cut wood, an accident happens, leading Dirk to have a strange experience. After many years, he goes to learn more about the world. As he learns from a minister, he is given his last name: Drosselmeier.

Dirk meets various people through the years, chiefly Felix Stahlbaum, a man who appreciates him for who he is, even if he doesn't fully understand him, and there is even a homoerotic moment between them.

The story returns to a legend of a golden walnut that contains a key, Drosselmeier eventually making a nutcracker that he claims will open the nut one day. It is, of course, this nutcracker that is eventually given to Claire-Marie (or "Klara") Stahlbaum, an imaginative child who Dirk particularly loves.

The book offers a take on the Nutcracker story wholly its own. While Maguire relishes in the mundane looking for fantasy (he describes hair color like "frozen mud" or "melted marzipan"), he creates in Dirk a man who may yet be the mysterious and nearly sinister figure from Hoffmann's original story, but is yet not particularly a bad man, just one who seeks to find more from life than it willingly offers, and in the end, his lone lasting accomplishment is giving inspiration to a child one Christmas Eve.

I found some of the book particularly lengthy with discussions and thoughts about Dirk's past experiences and philosophy filling pages and pages. Yet it goes for just under 300 pages, rendering this on the shorter end as some novels go.

References to other works appear, with Dirk's adoptive mother telling stories to one of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen is mentioned, and it's even mentioned that Dirk has a copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This makes it impossible for the story to neatly complement Hoffmann's original story, dating from 1816-1818, while Dickens' famous story was first published in 1843, 21 years after Hoffmann's death. This is rather disappointing as Wicked retells many of the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, just from the perspective of the Wicked Witch in a version of Oz different from Baum's, but could arguably be out of the perception of Dorothy.

Another disappointment I had is that Hoffmann's Drosselmeyer is first introduced with his clock repair and his ability to create clockworks. One would think that having a young Dirk become fascinated with clockworks and finding out how they work and mastering them for himself would lend itself well to the storytelling. At over two-thirds of the way into the book, I was wondering if it would come in at all. It finally did, with his mastery of clockwork being briefly mentioned to explain how he made a few toys, especially the clockwork castle from Hoffmann's story that Fritz quickly grows bored with.

Overall, I would only recommend Hiddensee to those familiar with Maguire from his other works. It's not as out there as some scenes in Wicked (if you read it, you know what I mean), and provides an interesting story on its own. As a companion to Hoffmann, it falters in a few areas.