DD17 – A Wrinkle in Time
I guess it is difficult now to understand the impact of Madeleine L’Engle’s book, A Wrinkle in Time now, some sixty years after it appeared. Today, science fiction and fantasy books for children are commonplace, with new titles appearing every month. Back in 1962, a story for young people that addressed such themes as light and darkness, good and evil, several worlds in different galaxies and conflicts over love, goodness and the nature of spirituality was out of the ordinary and very exciting. I bought my first copy, a couple of years after it appeared, as part of a collection I was building up for my baby daughter, relying on the Puffin imprint to ensure I was buying good books. Naturally enough I read it. I was amazed and hooked, as well as thinking this was clearly not a book best described as a ‘Young Puffin’!
The premise of A Wrinkle in Time was simple (and seems almost pedestrian today). Dr Alex Murry, a physicist, has been abducted, and his two children, Meg Murry and Charles Wallace Murry together with their friend Calvin O’Keefe travel through time and space to rescue him, a task which leads them into a battle with the mysterious ‘Black Thing’. Perhaps not an unusual story in contemporary terms, but it was wonderfully written, and left enough tension and uncertainty throughout to keep any youngster enthralled. It was to become a multiple award winner, including the Newbery Medal, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (an American annual for books were deemed to ‘belong on the same shelf’ as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass) and was runner up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (often described as the Nobel Prize for children’s books).
Early on in the book, we learn that before he disappeared Dr Murry had been working on the ‘tesseract’, which was a fifth-dimensional phenomenon, a ‘folding [of] the fabric of space and time’ which allows for space travel (‘tessering’). The three children meet three supernatural beings (Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which) who offer to help them find their father. They are tessered through the universe, and their adventures take them to a planet, Uriel, on to Orion’s Belt, and finally to a dark planet, Camazotz. Teasingly, towards the end of the story, the trio reach Central (the Central Intelligence building!), the core of a group mind agency. Today, having the equivalent of the CIA appearing in a story is commonplace – and rather boring!
I don’t want to spoil the story for those that read it. It is fast paced, with just enough disasters and knife-edge moments to keep you on the edge of your seat (well, for those young enough to live like that!). It has also been subject to many analyses. Madeleine L’Engle’s memoir explains her book was conceived and written “during a time of transition”, as she and her family moved from rural Connecticut to New York. She wrote “we drove through a world of deserts and buttes and leafless mountains, wholly new and alien to me. And suddenly into my mind came the names, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which.” That insight came in the spring of 1959.
When asked for more information in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983, L’Engle responded “I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.” L’Engle has also described the novel as her “psalm of praise to life, [her] stand for life against death,” but it is also notable for revealing her interest in science, as A Wrinkle in Time includes references to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Max Planck’s Quantum Theory, let alone her own invention of the tesseract.
Science was the critical issue in this, gaining increased attention in the media. Alongside new stories, the decade between 1953 and 1963 saw a burst of creativity in science fiction. For an English schoolboy, that began on television with an extraordinary television series broadcast by the BBC, the Quatermass Experiment. Over six half-hour episodes, it told the story of the first crewed flight into space, supervised by Professor Bernard Quatermass, a leader in the British Exerpimental Rocket Gropup. This was the first science fiction adventure written for a British audience aimed at adults, but immediately devoured by children, especially nine-year old boys like me.
The opening was chilling. The spaceship which had been transporting the first successful space crew returns to earth, but two of the three astronauts are missing. The third, Victor, has changed, and we see he’s behaving strangely. We soon learn that some kind of alien presence had entered the rocket during its journey into space. The race is on for Quatermass and his colleagues to destroy the alien before it destroys the world.
The success of The Quatermass Experiment was immediate. It was at the start of a theme that grew over the next ten years. Science Fiction was hot, and it was scary! Some series explored journeys into space, and others were focussed on aliens coming to the Earth. As far as I am concerned, one of the best was the 1961 distinctly weird series A for Andromeda, written by a well-known British astronomer, Fred Hoyle. I could have suggested that it was the story that made it such a success in my eyes, but perhaps the fact one of its minor stars was a then relatively unknown Julie Christie could have been a little influential, too?
However, just a year after A Wrinkle in Time was published in the US, Dr Who appeared on the BBC. As a quirk of history, the first episode was broadcast eighty seconds later than intended on Saturday 23 November, delayed because of announcements about President Kennedy’s assassination the day before. The series had been developed over a year, and was originally planned as a family show, an an educational programme using time travel as a means to explore scientific ideas and famous moments in history.
Early in 1963, one theme being explored was mutations, in this case resulting from a neutron bomb attack, creating creatures to be called Thals. Rewrites were to see a second group in the story, the Daleks, shift from being the victims of an attack to become the aggressors. The BBC hierarchy were alarmed, and the proposed programme was rejected as they determined it was not permitted to include any ‘bug-eyed monsters’ in such a series. That left the team with no choice: “we only had the Dalek serial to go … We had a bit of a crisis of confidence because [management] was so adamant that we shouldn’t make it. Had we had anything else ready we would have made that.” Terry Nation’s script couldn’t be abandoned and became the second Doctor Who serial – The Daleks – and any pretence at an educational series disappeared. Following that serendipitous start, 26 seasons of Dr Who were broadcast from 1963 to 1989; and then a second series commenced after a break and has been appearing every year since 2005. In all there have been 871 episodes of Dr Who, covering 300 stories.
Looking back at The Quatermass Experiment, A for Andromeda and the early Dr Who series, those first ventures into TV science fiction now come across as rather amateur. Scenery was often flimsy, sets were often inadequate, (sometimes an eagle-eyed viewer would notice what turned out to be a cardboard wall would wobble), but the stories shared a characteristic with L’Engles’ book: the events were realistic, frightening, even uncompromising in many respects. Perhaps the key point was that, despite weaknesses, the adventures were often scary, with a palpable sense of danger, thrilling for the young audience. More contemporary television science fiction programs are far cleverer in technical terms, but a series like Stranger Things seems less plain scary (but that, of course, might be me compared to a child sixty years ago).
If A Wrinkle in Time seems far more sophisticated than those early episodes of Dr Who, that was not nor surprising given the development of children’s television and the limited money available for productions back in the early 1960s in the UK. However, L’Engle’s book does illustrate another difference, a difference it shares with C S Lewis’s ‘Lion, Witch and Wardrobe’ series, with the frequent reference to and use of religious symbols and themes.
The novel has a clear spiritual theme, especially with its elements of divine intervention and prominent undertones of theological messages. In 19881 one commentator, James Beasley Simpson, suggests the overwhelming love and desire for light within the novel is directly representative of a Christian love for God and Jesus Christ (in Humankind – Religion – Spirituality, Boston). Episodes in the book find the children encountering spiritual intervention, evidence of God’s presence in the ordinary world as well as the world of fantasy. Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy works are clearly linked to and indicative of her Christian viewpoint, in the same way several of C S Lewis’s books contain quite explicit Christian references. If her writing is more subtle than Lewis’s, that hasn’t stopped L’Engle’s liberal Christianity becoming a target of criticism from conservative Christians, especially with respect to themes in A Wrinkle in Time.
Actually, I find her use of religious references and allusions enjoyable, and far from proselytising. Among the locations in the novel, Camazotz is the name of a Mayan Bat God and the name Ixchel refers to a Maya jaguar goddess of medicine. The planet Uriel is described as having extremely tall mountains, which appears to be an allusion to the Archangel Uriel, particularly as it is inhabited by creatures that resemble winged centaurs! Incidentally, it is “the third planet of the star Malak (meaning ‘angel’ in Hebrew), to be found in the spiral galaxy Messier 101”, which would place it at roughly 21 million light years from Earth. L’Engle’s fascination with science is evident.
The theme of a fight of good against evil depicted as a battle between light and darkness frequently recurs in A Wrinkle in Time, and there are times when the three Mrs Ws reveal their secret roles in the cosmic fight against darkness. They ask the children to name some figures on Earth, a partially dark planet, who fight the darkness. They suggest Jesus, and later the Buddha. In her personal journal referencing A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle confirms the religious content within the novel: “If I’ve ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it.” (quoted in The Washington Post, November 29, 2018).
Does this matter? There are many children’s books that draw on religious beliefs. Today this leaves her open to some criticism, but L’Engle’s fiction for young readers addresses some important issues, and she was one of the earlier Post War childrens novelists to focus directly on the deep yet delicate topics that young people must face, such as death, social conformity, and truth. Like other commentators, I find her stories uplifting because she is able to look beyond the surface values of life from a perspective of wholeness, exploring both joy and pain, uncovering the complex nature of human experience.
While we would not be as surprised finding this in a contemporary book, sixty years ago L’Engle was unafraid to describe Camazotz as a planet of extreme, enforced conformity, ruled by a disembodied brain called IT. Camazotz is similar to Earth, with familiar trees such as birches, pines, and maples, an ordinary hill on which the children arrive, and a town with smokestacks, which “might have been one of any number of familiar towns”. The horror of the place arises from its ordinary appearance, endlessly duplicated. The houses are “all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray”, which, sounds rather like sprawling American suburbia. The people who live in the houses are similarly described as “mother figures” who “all gave the appearance of being the same”.
Another element of praise at the time was that A Wrinkle in Time was seen as empowering young female readers. Critics have celebrated L’Engle’s depiction of Meg Murry, a young, precocious heroine whose curiosity and intellect help save the world from evil. The New York Times described this portrayal as “a departure from the typical ‘girls’ book’ protagonist – as wonderful as many of those varied characters are”. L’Engle has been credited for paving the way for other bright talented heroines, including Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter books, and Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of The Hunger Games. Regarding her choice to include a female protagonist, in her acceptance speech upon receiving the Margaret Edwards Award, L’Engle commented “I’m a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male?”
If this seems commonplace today, at the time of the book’s publication Kirkus Reviews said: “Readers who relish symbolic reference may find this trip through time and space an exhilarating experience.” The Horn Book Magazine added: “Here is a confusion of science, philosophy, satire, religion, literary allusions, and quotations that will no doubt have many critics. I found it fascinating … It makes unusual demands on the imagination and consequently gives great rewards.”
Inevitably, A Wrinkle in Time had to end up on the American Library Association list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–2000 at number 23. The novel has been accused of being both anti-religious and anti-Christian for its inclusion of witches and crystal balls, and for containing spiritual themes that do not reflect traditional Christian teachings. On that topic, Madeleine L’Engle should have the last word: “It seems people are willing to damn the book without reading it. Nonsense about witchcraft and fantasy. First, I felt horror, then anger, and finally I said, ‘Aw, the hell with it.’ It’s great publicity, really”.
I don’t want to overstate the case. I think A Wrinkle in Time is an excellent book, but I have to concede it is clearly dated. What made it remarkable when I first read it seems more familiar today. I believe it’s still an exciting adventure for pre-teens to read, but past that age, I fear there would be yawns and a quick drop in interest. The almost insatiable desire for something ‘more’ inevitably diminishes the value of what we have from before. It reminds me of the case of Dr Who, where a brief uptick in audience following the introduction of a female Dr (horror, how could they!!), appears unlikely to sustain the series much longer.
Of course, that is both simplistic and overdrawn. I suspect that A Wrinkle in Time appears less distinctive now because it hinges around science fiction, and this is a genre that has grown in sophistication in the past few decades. It is a novel, and relationships play a key part in the story, but perhaps not enough to sustain it. Those SF children’s books from the past that last and last are ones that touch more centrally on themes that hardly change at all – relationships between family members, friends, growing up, and all the other mess of personal lives. As just one example, a science fiction book like Becky Chamber’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, succeeds because its marvellous science fiction is an adjunct to a story about relationships, including some that cross species as well as genders. For me the complexity of relations between people will always triumph over clever technology.
