Policeman Bluejay - The Paradise of Birds

The Paradise of Birds

Baum enriches the text of Policeman Bluejay with realistic details of the natural world. Yet Baum was not a naturalist but a fantasist, and the seven chapters (XII — XVIII) that he devotes to the Paradise of Birds are the heart of the fantasy. The author restricts himself to a simple language for his young audience; yet within this simplicity he paints a lush, lustrous, luxuriant prose poem of imaginative effects.

Policeman Bluejay delivers his young charges to the Guardian of the Entrance to Paradise (the Jay himself is too deeply tainted by the outer world to enter). The Guardian accepts them and turns them over to Ephel, the Royal Messenger, who guides them on their tour. Ephel brings them to the royal court of the King Bird of Paradise; the King's lecture on the virtue of vanity is the comic high point of the book. Ephel shows the children the Lustrous Lake with its singing fish, the curious lake of dry water, and the Gleaming Glade where the birds perform their Beauty Dance.

The Paradise of Birds is in fact Eden: "There is a legend that man once lived there, but for some unknown crime was driven away. But the birds have always been allowed to inhabit the place because they did no harm." Since these are "fairy Birds of Paradise," they occupy their own domain of reality; the reader does not need to picture actual Birds of Paradise in an actual American woodland. (Baum's combination of Eden with fairyland raises interesting complexities.)

Baum exploits concepts and images that are used by fantasists before and after him; readers familiar with the genre will perceive echoes of other works. The Paradise of Birds has trees "not made of wood, but having trunks of polished gold and silver and leaves of exquisite metallic colorings" — reminiscent of the gold and silver foliage in The Twelve Dancing Princesses. The barrier of wind that prevents entrance to the Paradise foreshadows the similar barrier in Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter. And the flowers with human faces in Chapter XV have a range of parallels.