A Wrinkle in Time
Austin Allen has a lovely post on Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time up at Big Think:
L’Engle insisted that her novel be published as a children’s book, but she nearly gave up on finding anyone willing to do so. More than two dozen houses turned it down before Farrar, Straus & Giroux took a gamble. It’s not hard to see why: how many kiddie books feature imaginative riffs on Einstein’s theories or inside jokes about Macbeth? How many feature both?
In fact this tale of physicists and witches, Genesis and general relativity conflates so many genres and worldviews in 200 pages that there’s something unassimilated about the finished product. L’Engle claimed that “it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant,” and while this might sound like standard authorial coyness, I actually believe her.
What she seems to have intended to do is add a new twist (wrinkle?) to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Those, too, combine fantasy with a religious message; The Magician’s Nephew even includes an element of planet-hopping sci-fi. But while the Lewis of Nephew was a veteran children’s author who knew, metaphysically speaking, where he stood, the L’Engle of Wrinkle was a relative newcomer, and there’s something less slick and complacent about her universe. Blend pagan myth with Christian themes and you’re repeating an old formula; stir in large quantities of secular literature and modern science, and you get a more intriguing, more volatile chemistry.
This book, and the other novels in the series, are some of my favorite fantasies. I remember reading it as a child. It was one of the most frightening books I’d read at the time. The evil is quite palpable while at the same time remaining, at least for me at the time, sort of vague. This made it even more disturbing. Years later I’m still puzzling over it.
I’ll have to read it again, I suspect, before I can say anything particularly profound or interesting. I wonder if anyone will attempt another remake of the book – I didn’t see it but a made-for-tv film was done at one point – now that animation technology has advanced so far and fantasy has gone mainstream? I’m not sure how they could pull it off.
It isn’t the kind of adaptation you meant, but the cartoonist Hope Larson is currently adapting A Wrinkle In Time into a graphic novel. Most novel-to-comics adaptation suck, but this one might actually be good; Hope is a great match for this story, and the publisher is giving her 400 pages to work with, so the usual compressing-all-the-life-out-of-it problem that happens when novels become comic books won’t apply here.
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That actually sounds really cool.Report
In 1977, I met Madeleine L’Engle in Wheaton Illinois. At the time, she was something of an odd duck in the corpus of contemporary Christian authors. Many evangelicals rejected her outright.
My mentor, Clyde S. Kilby befriended her and she started giving her materials to the special collections of Wheaton College.Report
One of the nicest little moments during my time living in New York was shaking her hand during an evensong service at St. John the Divine.Report
I actually had to read Wrinkle for school when I was in primary 6. I liked Charles Wallace a lot rigt until the time he got swallowed by IT.Report
I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was in grammar school and loved it. I read it several times after that. I loved it so much, I bought a copy for my stepson when he was about 11 or 12, but he never touched it or took it back to his other house with him. I just came across that copy during our recent move and thought “wow, I should read this book again.” I’ll definitely do so now. I imagine I’ll get even more out of it than I did when I was a kid.Report
Thanks for linking to that post, ED, you are absolutely spot-on as to its loveliness. I too will have to reread it before having much to say – but L’Engle is one of my favorite authors, and this book saw me through some very rough spots as a kid.Report
Er, where it-the-first = the post and it-the-second = the book, of course.Report
You’re welcome!Report
There are a lot of weird little fantasy series like this that were the only thing the author was ever famous for, and it has this cult following but never takes off. “The Dark Is Rising” is another one like this.Report
Another of my favorites, as it happensReport
One of mine, too, and another book that I found somewhat frightening as a child.Report
A big +1 for the entire post, but an especially big +1 about the being scared as kid reading it. I remember having nightmares about this book; I can;t think off the top of my head of any other book that did this.Report
Nightmarish, really.Report
For reasons that I cannot even begin to explain, I always pictured the Red-Eyed Man as being made of marble and looking like the statue in the Lincoln Memorial. For a long time in the 3rd grade seeing pictures of the LM made me nervous.Report
I’ll have to re-read the book.Report
L’Engle’s books were some of the first novels I read as a child along with John Christopher’s Tripod Series and other books. (I suspect The Giver would have had the same effect, but I was in my 30’s when I read it so I’d like to think I was less impressionable) All of them scared the bejeebus out of me and I loved it because they didn’t scare me in bogeyman under the bed kind of way, but in what I now understand to be a more existential way. The worlds depicted in all those novels frightened me and I was terrified that’s what the future would be.
I will take issue with one part of E.D.’s otherwise wonderful post. He wrote “This book, and the other novels in the series, are some of my favorite fantasies.” If he was just referring to “A Wind in the Door” and “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” I’d be all over that. But she eventually let this family, of books and the O’Keefe’s, sink into rather formulaic young adult pablum and the religious and spiritual symbolism becomes more and more ham fisted. Maybe I was a lot older when I got around to the “Second Generation,” but I recently went back and reread the first three and a couple from the remainder and it is pretty clear to me, L’Engle is more self-consciously trying to write young adult fiction rather than fiction she wanted to market to young adults.Report
I didn’t read past A Swiftly Tilting Planet actually.Report
Don’t. It’s all down hill starting with Many Waters, though technically that book is part of the “First Generation” of O’Keefe’s and is suppose to be part of the Time Quartet. It sends Sandy and Dennys back to meet Noah just before the flood.Report
And I keep saying “O’Keefe” which is the second generation. It’s the Murray’s who are the first. My apologies for the errors.Report
I kind of liked parts of it, such as the way she treated mythological creatures and earth-bound angels. I was also a pre-adolescent when I read it, so perhaps it wouldn’t stand up as well under repeated reading, which “Wrinkle” does quite well.Report
I vaguely recall reading this in school. I had a series of teachers who loved sci-fi and fantasy, and our classes read a bunch of such books – some well-known, some that were cult hits. Consequently, a lot of the stories bleed into each other in my memories, and I can rarely remember which book was which. Such is the case with A Wrinkle in Time.Report