Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time: Literature Guide

I was eleven years old. It was a Saturday, I think, because my Dad was running errands and my Mom was making me go with him. I usually loved running errands with my Dad, but this particular day I found it difficult to go anywhere because I was almost...almost! at the end of the one of the most riveting books I'd ever laid eyes on.

My parents were used to me reading anywhere and everywhere, so it's no surprise I took the book with me. I remember hunkering down in the car, hunched over those final pages of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Yes, we were traveling down an ordinary road on an ordinary day in Virginia. But I wasn't really there. I was thousands, perhaps millions, of miles away, walking into the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building on the planet of Camazotz.

And Twenty-Eight Years Later...

I was there again, my heart still pounding as I walked with protagonist Meg Murry into that building. The ultimate scene in Wrinkle, in which geeky, awkward, early adolescent Meg overcomes the power of evil by loving her baby brother Charles Wallace out of the clutches of the disembodied brain IT and back into his right mind...it still works for me. I am still carried away on this narrative, even though I read it with adult eyes, and even though I've read it dozens of times in the intervening years.

Author Madeleine L'Engle, truly one of the authors of my heart, passed away on September 6th at the age of 88. It was hard for me to know how to react to her death, since her work had such an influence on me over the years. Her books, both fiction and non-fiction, carried such an intimate voice that you felt as though you knew her. I grieved as I would for a real life and long loved friend. And then I went back to my shelves (which contain over 40 of her books) and I started reading again.

And what better place to begin reading but A Wrinkle in Time? Though it eventually won the Newbery Medal of 1963 and now has achieved near-classic status, once upon a time this book was just looked at as a total oddity.L'Engle had a very difficult time finding a publisher for it -- I think over 20 publishing houses turned it down. It was about life and death and a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. Maybe people thought it was too difficult for children, but as Madeleine always said herself, when she needed to write about difficult things, she put them in stories for children, who could usually handle them better than grownups.

Wrinkle seemed to fit no genre completely. It still doesn't. It contains a dash of science fiction, some fantasy elements, and deep Christian undertones, replete with numerous Scriptural allusions. It's about ordinary kids with braces and unruly hair who get into trouble at school and struggle when not accepted or liked by their peers. But these same kids are also brilliant at math and science and, at least in the case of five year old Charles Wallace, can communicate in some unknown telepathic fashion. At any rate, whether Meg Murry, Charles Wallace Murry, and Calvin O'Keefe, the three main characters, are considered ordinary or special is almost a moot point with the narrative itself. Just as they are, including all their gifts and faults, they are called. Unequivocally called, to act on the side of right in a spiritual battle bigger than any of them can guess. And specifically called to travel through time and space, to "tesser" (or "wrinkle") to other worlds in order to save Meg and Charles Wallace's father, a scientist whose experiments went awry and who now finds himself imprisoned in a totalitarian world run by one great brain.

Sound bizarre? Why yes, it probably does. And yet it works. Generations of children have enjoyed this book and returned to it, in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. I was surprised, actually, to find how slim a book it is and how quickly it read this time around. It helps that I have portions of it practically memorized. And yet it really is very fast-paced, told in spare and powerful language. I think I was remembering it as bigger, both because it had such impact on me as a young person and because I recalled the epic inner proportions of the story. The children's quest is a huge one, and their participation is vital. They are needed in this fight against evil and darkness.

What amazes me now when I re-read the book is how strong the characterizations are, even though the pace is quick and the chapters short. L'Engle drew her young protagonists with a deft hand, making nerdy Meg, awkwardly sincere (but sweet and somehow dashing) Calvin, and even prodigy Charles Wallace feel real. More than that, she imbues the oddly, other-worldly characters, mostly especially Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which (the guardian angels who call and assist the three children in their task) and the ferocious looking but actually gentle Aunt Beast, with a realness that comes across despite their unusual appearances. Mrs. Whatsit remains one of my favorite fictional characters (and within L'Engle's "time quartet" probably topped only by the cherubim Proginoskes in the first sequel A Wind in the Door).

If you've never traveled to distant worlds via this wonderful book, now's your chance. It's never too late to revisit a classic story like A Wrinkle in Time.

~befus, 2007

This review was written with a three-fold purpose in mind.

First, I wrote it to honor the memory of Madeleine L'Engle, now gone from us (at least on this earth). I am so thankful for what her books have meant to me.

Next, this is my contribution to pestyside's banned books write-off 2. For reasons I cannot entirely fathom, A Wrinkle in Time has been a regular on the ALA list of most frequently challenged books (it stood at #22 on the 1990-2000 list). I suspect it is far too religious for some folks and not religious enough for others (there's a wonderfully punny character called the "Happy Medium" who looks into a crystal ball, which probably upsets some people). A book like this is not easy to pigeonhole. It also has something important and real to say about the power of love in overcoming evil, and that message has a habit of making people nervous...as we've seen more recently with the Harry Potter books.

Finally, this is also my contribution to the fight illiteracy write-off hosted by hadassachana and dramastef. I will be sending a copy of Wrinkle to the Mississippi Humanities Council later this week. A book like this needs to be shared!