With the exciting film release of A Wrinkle in Time, the Fiction Unbounders went back to the source material and re-lived some childhood magic. Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s book series, beginning with A Wrinkle in Time, are highly beloved fantasy books on par with C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Before we see the movie, we wanted to go back over what we loved and what we didn't love about the books and share it with you.
Danyelle C. Overbo: Science Meets the Art of Fantasy
I first read A Wrinkle in Time in 6th grade. I believe it was assigned in my Reading class (weird to think “reading” was a class). I remember being enthralled immediately. As my classmates read the early chapters slowly and out loud, the teacher would let me go outside in the Vegas heat to sit on the portable stairs and read by myself. I was too far ahead and couldn’t put the book down. A Wrinkle in Time left a huge mark on me. From that day forward, I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, like Meg’s father. I wanted to discover the mysteries of the universe. I believed that the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. I believed in traveling by tesseract.
There is magic in certain books read at a certain time in one’s life. These books held that magic for me. I began to make up my own weird physics theories and desperately hoped that one day I’d understand how to prove them and make them real. I took it so far, I entered college with a major in Chemical Engineering (a good undergrad degree if one wants to end up in Theoretical Physics) and then stuck with it through a year and a half of college. I graduated with an elective credit in Organic Chemistry for goodness sakes, as if anyone takes that for fun! I am stubborn like that, but I had to eventually admit that I didn’t have the head for engineering and high-level physics. I had the imagination, though, which is why I’m a writer today.
Part of what makes A Wrinkle in Time so special is how it merges science with the imagination and never shies away from either. At the heart of the story is the classic fight of light against the darkness, and the characters Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which make it very clear to the protagonists that both science and art are tools that can aid in the fight against the darkness. The ultimate horror the children have to face is called IT, and IT wants everyone to be exactly the same.
“The man [with the red eyes] lifted his lips into a smile, and his smile was the most horrible thing Meg had ever seen. ‘Why don’t you trust me, Charles? Why don’t you trust me enough to come in and find out what I am? I am pease and utter rest. I am freedom from all responsibility. To come in to me is the last difficult decision you need ever make.’”
The horror of IT is in its ability to subsume individuality in service to a corrupted and perverse collective. Anyone deviating from the collective is reprogrammed by IT.
Madeleine L’Engle merges the fantasy elements of her story with scientific reasoning and a message that love is stronger than hate. This is how our capable, smart protagonist, Meg, eventually saves the day. Her unbreakable family ties and a new friend, Calvin, give her the strength to grow and learn and, ultimately, be the hero of her story. I cannot wait to see what Ava DuVernay does with A Wrinkle in Time, one of my all-time favorite novels.
Amanda Baldeneaux: An Allegory of Depression
A Wrinkle in Time told me, a fifth grader with glasses and braces, that being “different” and “weird” were ok, that faults could be strengths, and that too much “sameness” can take the joy and vitality out of life. Reading the book again, I found myself focused less on the message that weird kids fit in, and more on the darkness that sabotages light and joy. As a young reader, the Darkness was an external threat. As an adult, it’s internal, and Meg’s overcoming of its absolute control is inspiring to me in an entirely new way.
Mr. Murry is lost to the darkness, but rather than the vision of a man behind a black space cloud I held when younger, my mind conjured a man “lost” to his family and his work behind a deep, impenetrable fog of depression. In the novel, Mr. Murry is stranded on Camazotz, a “dark planet” ruled by the absolute authority of IT, a being that promises “peace and rest” to those who submit, as IT molds everything and everyone into rigid uniformity.
Mrs. Which tells Meg and Charles Wallace that their father “iss behind thee ddarrkness, sso that eevenn wee cannot see hhimm.” Mrs. Whatsit says their father “needs help, he needs courage, and for his children he may be able to do what he cannot do for himself.” And Mrs. Who, in her manner, quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest, describing when Ariel was “Into a cloven pine; within which rift / Imprisoned, he didst painfully remain.”
The three ladies also give the children hope, pointing out that our “little planet” has had its share of “fighters” against the Darkness, including great thinkers and creatives, people who have used their minds and talents to shine lights into the world. “All your great artists. They have been lights for us to see by,” Mrs. Whatsit says. Of course, as artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Anne Sexton remind us, sometimes being a light is not enough to win the fight against the darkness. As the children witness a star dying in the sky, Mrs. Whatsit tells them “A star giving up its life in battle with the Thing. It won, oh, yes, my children, it won. But it lost its life in the winning.” Sometimes, despite the lights shone to tear holes in despair, the darkness still overpowers.
After tessering off Camaztoz with her father and Calvin, Meg is almost lost to the darkness; “The coldness deepened and swirled all about her and through her, and was filled with a new and strange kind of darkness that was a completely tangible thing, a thing that wanted to eat and digest her like some enormous malignant beast of prey.” Meg is paralyzed, angry, and withdrawn after the Darkness takes hold of her. To anyone in that state, the offer of IT might begin to sound appealing: “I am peace and utter rest. I am freedom from all responsibility. To come in to me is the last difficult decision you need ever make.” What IT offers isn’t real freedom, though, but death. L’Engle implies this death is of the creative spirit, but it’s also interpretable as literal death, a removal from the emotional and physical pain depression brings.
Meg, after battling the Black Thing’s hold on herself, reaches Charles Wallace in the thick of Darkness, pulling him back into the light with love. I wish it could be that simple off the page, that love would always be enough to save those so far on the other side of Darkness that they seem impossible to reach. There’s still comfort and advice in Mr. Murry’s words to Meg, though: “Don’t be afraid to be afraid.” If Darkness is fueled (in part) by fear and our natural aversion to it, then keeping that advice - it’s ok to be afraid - close at hand gives us a tool akin to Mrs. Who’s glasses, a little light that lets us see clearer when everything around us seems dark.
CS Peterson: The Specific and the Universal
A Wind in the Door is the second book of L’Engle’s Time Quintet. In it we encounter a namer, a mysterious teacher, a cherubim who has memorized the names of all the stars, and an evil imposter who is an ‘un-namer,’ x-ing out whole swaths of the universe.
In the first book the darkness was oozing about like an amoeba, like an oil slick. The planet that had given over to evil had succumbed to a ruthless conformity. In the second the darkness is more violent. It tears the stars from the sky and leaves a terrible nothingness. A scream accompanies every annihilation. But it is not just the exterior cosmos that is effected. In A Wind in the Door, the cosmic and the cellular are connected. Mitochondria, the tiny semi-autonomous symbiotic organelles that power our cells, are dying in Charles Wallace. When they die they scream, and the cosmic scream and the microscopic scream are one and the same.
In A Wrinkle in Time the children won a battle against the darkness, but it was only one battle in a war. Again, the only thing that can undo the damage is love. Love is harder to accomplish this time however. In the first book, Meg already loved her dad, and she loved her little brother Charles Wallace so much she would brave anything to save him. In book two, her first test is to find something to love in a human being she finds unlovable, the principal Mr. Jenkins. More tests follow.
When L’Engle wrote book two it seemed the fabric of America was unraveling: the Vietnam war was raging, the Watergate break-in occurred, there were riots across the country, a performance of ‘Hair’ in central park disrupted when 13 Black Panthers and the show’s writer were arrested for smoking pot.
When Charles Wallace comes home from school each day with a new bruise from the bigger boys who regularly rough him up, Meg says“It's not right in the United States of America that a little kid shouldn't be safe in school.” Meg’s parents say “Think of the things going on in our own country that you wouldn’t have believed possible only a few years ago...the irrational violence is even worse in the cities.” In the early 1970’s L’Engle could have been writing about a country that had never seemed more divided, both on the macro-scale of the world stage, and in the microcosm of a small child’s school.
L’Engle writes that the manuscript of Wrinkle was rejected by 26 publishers before it found a home. It “was too different…delt overtly with the problem of evil…was too difficult for children, and was it a children’s book or an adult’s book, anyhow?” It was also a science fiction book with a female protagonist, no market for that. Nevertheless, Wrinkle has been in print continuously since its publication. Perhaps that is because the there is a magic in her writing, both for Wrinkle in Time and the other books in the series, that seems so specific to the moment, yet is universal enough to be relevant to our specific historical moment, nearly fifty years later.
Sean Cassity: Meg Murry, Barefoot and Pregnant
In the first two books of The A Wrinkle in Time trilogy, Meg Murry is a reluctant hero. Not incredibly reluctant. She rises to the call without too much resistance. But she is ever eager to have an older male take over and solve things for her. In the first book, it is her father she expects to set everything right. In the second book she hopes it will be Calvin who takes over when he appears not too long into the story. In both cases she is disappointed. They can help her, but she cannot hand the story over to them. A man is not a victory plan. If Evil is to be dealt one more small defeat, Meg must take a lead role in defeating it.
In both of those cases, the evil must be defeated in order to save her little brother, Charles Wallace. But in the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, when the fate of the whole world is at stake, when there is a nuclear war to be averted, Meg cannot take the lead. She must not go outside. She might catch cold. She is an invalid. She is pregnant. Much like when the Joker shot Batgirl in the stomach and the paraplegic Barbara Gordon became Oracle, the shot Meg took leaves her stranded in a room, occasionally sourcing intel to feed to the real hero, in this case, Charles Wallace.
Meg remains the point of view character, technically, but only technically. Through her kything telepathy with Charles Wallace, the story is told through a series of characters that he enters as he travels through time and across millennia. He experiences their lives and subtly encourages them through key points in their history. It is an odd sidelining of Meg and basically everything she discovers for Charles Wallace he eventually witnesses himself anyway. The story wants to keep the team involved, but the mechanics of this ambitious, interwoven time travel narrative can only have one consciousness interfering with all of the ancestors of the brothers who have brought the Earth to the brink of disaster. Ergo, Meg is pregnant, Calvin is away on business, and the twins and parents remain determinedly oblivious.
It’s too bad, really, especially for Meg. I remembered not a line of this book, though I remembered much of the previous two in my rereading, to where I now doubt if I really did read this one in fifth grade after all. So when I discovered Meg was still the POV character and that she was pregnant, I was excited to have pregnant, cosmos travelling adventures with her. Seeing Meg so conventionally subdued by parenthood, so conventionally pampered and patronized by her family was like running into your local alt-rock guitar hero at their retail day job. Nothing of her on stage theatrics in the last two books can rescue her from her humdrum existence between shows. She spends almost the entire book laying in bed petting a dog. It’s an accomplished novel, but our veterans deserve better.