The Wrinkle in Time Quartet

A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
The original novel seems to be most people's favorite, and certainly I had fond memories of it from when I was a kid. It's filled with great concepts: Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit; the Happy Medium; the tesseract; the dystopia of Camazotz including IT the giant brain and the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building. Meg is a great character, and Calvin is basically the best boyfriend in all literature as far as I'm concerned.

I found myself somewhat unmoved this time. I liked the early stuff in the book, about Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, the family in general. Meg's a great character for capturing what it is to feel weird and alone and unaccomplished. (That said, one scene I remembered really liking turned show more out to actually be from A Wind in the Door.) Once the characters move into traveling through space/time, though, it felt like a succession of events more than a story: oh now they're here, oh now they're here. And I don't think it's a fault of L'Engle, but Camazotz was frightening and fascinating to me as a kid, but a lifetime of reading dystopian fiction later, and I felt like I'd seen it before, even if L'Engle was one of the first. I like that Meg saves the day by embracing her own faults, but eh, I dunno. When I got to the end, my reaction was, "I can see why I liked this as a kid, and I can definitely imagine giving it to my own kid, but I didn't find much to get out of this as an adult."

The notes here by editor Leonard S. Marcus are interesting: he has a lot to say about the varied manuscripts of Wrinkle, and also there are some good cultural insights. In particular, the fact that the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building is a comment on the CIA had never occurred to me. Clearly it would be easy to read Camazotz as a Cold War–era commentary on communism, but L'Engle was also criticizing her own country's actions.

A Wind in the Door (1973)
Something I hadn't realized reading these books as a kid is the long time period they were released over. This came out over a decade after A Wrinkle in Time. No wonder there are no direct references to Wrinkle in it, not even very obvious ones (surely the Echthroi are somehow related to the Black Thing?); anyone who had read Wrinkle in Time as a kid when it was released would have been an adult by the time of A Wind in the Door. She would have been chasing a whole new audience!

As a kid, this was always my least favorite of the original three novels. Other than the story about Calvin's plant and his home life, it did nothing for me at all; in particular, I found all the stuff about the farandolae inside Charles Wallace's mitochondrion tedious in the extreme.

To my surprise, this was my favorite of all eight Kairos novels. As an adult, the challenge of Meg figuring out who was the real version of her obnoxious high school principal, and who was the Echthroi impersonator, resonated much more with me. I really liked the idea of Naming, that to Name someone is to love someone, and therefore in order to Name Mr. Jenkins, Meg needed to figure out a way to love him. I liked the way this headed in the climax of the story, which features a particular audacious act of Naming—and thus of loving—from Meg. As someone who takes his responsibilities seriously (I hope, anyway), I liked that the villains were merely beings who wanted to avoid theirs. It was a natural but tragic path.

Above all else, I liked this conversation between Meg's parents. Mrs. Murry is despairing about both the state of her son Charles Wallace and the state of American society in general:

[H]er father reach[ed] across the table for her mother's hand. “My dear, this is not like you. With my intellect, I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can’t settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it."
     “What else is there?” Mrs. Murry’s voice was low and anguished.
     “There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises. Even little ones, like your cooking stew over your Bunsen burner. You may be in the middle of an experiment, but you still remember to feed your family. That's enough to keep my heart optimistic, no matter how pessimistic my mind. And you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

In a time where it feels very easy to give into despair, I found here a little bit of hope to cling onto, and that's the real power of this book—for all her fault, Meg can save the world through love.

This is the first book to indicate that the Murray novels take place sometime in the future. Meg's mother is old enough to remember the moon landing... but young enough that another character thinks she might not remember the moon landing. So born in the early 1960s? (My parents were born in 1963 and '64, and my father remembers the moon landing but my mother does not.) I don't think we ever get a specific age for Dr. Kate Murry, but given she's old enough to have a teenage daughter, that would seem to put these novels in the late 1990s at the earliest, probably the early 2000s. (If the Murrays are about the same age as my own parents, it makes me want to think of Meg as the same age as me, which would put this book in the year 2000. If the Murrays waited longer to have children, then it takes place even later.) There's also a reference to humans landing on Mars. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal article that teaches Calvin about the emotional lives of plants is said to be very old (it's wrapping up china in the O'Keefe attic), but it's a real article that actually came out in 1972, the year before the novel.

Many Waters (1986)
I decided to make an exception to my usual practice of reading Library of America volumes in chronological order, and I swapped Many Waters with A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I had a couple reasons for this. For one, I read the original three Meg books many times as a kid and only discovered Many Waters much later, so having read them in publication order to begin with, I was curious how they would work in chronological order. Second, I remember not liking Many Waters very much, while Swiftly Tilting Planet was my favorite as a kid, and I preferred that my reading of the Murray novels would end on a high note.

Meg and/or Charles Wallace are the protagonists of the three original Murray novels; Many Waters focuses on Sandy and Dennys, the "ordinary" twins between Meg and Charles Wallace in age. They accidentally travel back in time to the age of Noah's Ark...

...and it is so so boring. Like, inexplicably so. Unlike all the other books, there's nothing at stake. There's no reason for Sandy and Dennys to travel back in time, either from a narrative standpoint (there's no threat they're alleviating) or a personal one (all the Meg/Charles Wallace novels have her learning and growing through her actions, but the twins are just there). You could write a book about them coming to terms with their (supposed) ordinariness, or about them coming of age sexually, but this book doesn't really give you those things, it just hints at them.

I also agree with Mari Ness that the book's past era just doesn't convince: "somehow, perhaps because of the language, or because this culture does not fit in with either the Bible or archaeological evidence of any early society (and not just because of the unicorns), it never manages to feel quite real. [...] [I]t [...] serve[s] to reduce any suspense the novel might have had. It’s not just that I know the flood is coming anyway, but that I can’t bring myself to care about the complete destruction of a place that never feels quite real."

Bizarrely, even though it has the least going on of any of the Murray novels, it's also the longest. So it just keeps on going and going and geeze louise was I bored.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978)
The last Meg novel was my favorite as a kid. I guess I was a weird kid, because this is a weird book. Nuclear war is seemingly imminent on Christmas Eve, and Meg and Charles Wallace must stop it by using a unicorn to travel across time, untangling a family lineage that goes from Wales to Connecticut to South America with the help of a mystical Irish poem. While Meg remains in the present day, telepathically communicating with Charles Wallace, he subsumes his personality into historical figures to better understand what's going on and give the occasional nudge.

Rereading it as an adult, I was less into the time travel shenanigans—much more familiar to me as someone who has watched too much Steven Moffat Doctor Who—and a bit metaphysically bothered by the novel's idea that families could be doomed across time. But the book has some captivating chapters, in its vignettes across the years. The story of Calvin's mother is darkly tragic stuff.

The poem L'Engle uses to unify the narrative isn't her own composition, but is used in an utterly captivating way. Rereading it all these years later, I found it still contained the power I first found in it as a child. On the whole, I liked Wind in the Door more this time through, but I still found a lot to like here. Like L'Engle's best work, it hints at a strange cosmology beyond our comprehension, but also a universe where the most powerful force is ultimately our ability to listen to one another.

Also it's interesting to note that a big part of this book is a legend about a Welsh prince who came to North America before Columbus, and a year before this book came out, there was a historical novel about that same topic: Madoc, Prince of America by Bernard Knight. Now seemingly forgotten, but did L'Engle read it and get inspired? show less

An omnibus volume containing Madeleine L'Engle's four novels feturing the Murry family. I'll comment on each of the novels here separately.

A Wrinkle in Time: The classic kids' story about a girl who -- along with her precocious baby brother and a newly acquired friend -- is called upon to save her father, who is lost somewhere in time and space.

This book was incredibly special to me as a kid. Heck, if there was one defining book of my childhood, this was unquestionably it. I first read it at the age of eight or so, then spent what seems like the rest of my childhood reading it over and over and over.

So, of course, I was more than a little trepidatious at going back to it as an adult. All too often, revisiting books that meant a lot to show more you in childhood is a sad lesson in "you can't go home again." So I'm pleased and relieved to report that it is, indeed, still special. Not in the same way or to the same degree that it was to me as a kid, of course. And I can see flaws in it now that were not apparent to me then, or would not have even struck kid me as flaws. The dialog has a weird, unrealistic quality even before the story itself gets weird, for instance. The physical appearance of the villain IT, which freaked me out immensely as a child, now strikes me as a cheesy SF cliche. Meg Murry, the main character, spends more time becoming distraught and asking the male characters to do something than I am entirely comfortable with. And the explicitly Christian metaphysics of the whole thing does not please adult, atheist me.

But it's still special. And I can so, so see how it resonated so strongly with me as a child. The cast of misfit characters whose misfit nature proves so valuable and so worth preserving. The science fantasy elements that seem to give us a glimpse of a universe full of profound wonders that we little humans can participate in, even if we do not fully understand them. The abstract ideas it throws around almost casually. Yes, it's no surprise this held the kind of appeal it did for the proto-geeky intellectual misfit kid that I was. (Even if there now seem to me to be an astonishing number of things that must surely have gone over my head at the time.) If anything, it's left me wondering to what extent this book meant as much to me as it did because of who I was, and how much it had a role in shaping who I was becoming.

So. Yeah. I still found it very much worth revisiting as an adult, both because I still enjoyed the story itself, and because it made me think some interesting thoughts about my past. But, man, the experience of re-reading it was weird. It'd been so long since I last visited it that I couldn't have even summarized everything that happens in it. There were entire scenes that I seemed to have mostly forgotten. And yet, there were so many moments where reading it felt less like reading words on a page and more like using the page as an aid to bring to the surface words that had been sitting buried in my brain for decades. It was like experiencing 133 pages of pure deja vu.

A Wind in the Door: This one's set a year or two after the first book, and features Meg and friends having to pass some tests or ordeals in order to save her little brother Charles Wallace's life, including going deep into a world that exists inside his cells.

My (extremely vague) memory of this one is that I read it only once, years after my initial fascination with A Wrinkle in Time, and was less impressed with it. The story was better than I was expecting based on that memory, though. If nothing else, I liked the way that it takes an extremely unlikable minor character from the first book and does something interesting and redemptive with him.

It did create some weird conflicts in my brain, though, because if anything it's even more thoroughly steeped in religious-mystical elements than the first book. L'Engle actually does a pretty amazing job of depicting a universe that, on every scale, is permeated by mind and morality, by a constant struggle between good and evil, and by love as an almost tangible force. She does this well and powerfully, and inner-kid me wants to just be swept up in the beauty and intensity of it all, while rational adult me holds back, insisting on pointing out the real-world religious viewpoints she's using as the starting point for her fantasy universe, and all the problems I have with those viewpoints. It makes for a slightly uncomfortable, cognitively dissonant read for me, but in an interesting kind of way.

Unfortunately, whatever its virtues or points of interest, it also suffers from some really terrible science. L'Engle throws a lot of astronomical and biological facts at us, and I think every single one of them, apart from the fact that mitochondria are a thing that exist in our cells, is wrong.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet: This one is set a full decade after the first book, when Charles Wallace is a teenager and Meg is an adult woman expecting a child of her own. The world is being menaced by the mad dictator of a fictional South American country, who is threatening a nuclear missile launch. Charles Wallace, with the help of a unicorn, has to travel back in time to witness the events, across the generations, that lead to this dictator's birth, and give things a little nudge at the right moment to make them happen differently.

I think I read this one at least twice as a kid, probably a few years after my first encounter with A Wrinkle in Time. My main memory seems to be that it was kind of intense, and made my brain buzz a little. Looking at it now, I'm pretty sure the feeling of intensity game from the way it played off of the Cold War terror that was always lurking in my mind at that age. The brain buzz, I suspect, may have come from difficulty in concentrating on following the story as it jumps around in time, focusing on various sets of people who all have very similar names to all the other sets.

Sadly, this one didn't evoke the same internal conflict as the previous two books, where my inner child is caught up with the wonder of the story and the emotions it evokes, while my rational adult self points out flaws and things it doesn't believe in. This time, we were both a little bit bored. That's not to say there wasn't any wonder. I mean, hey, time-traveling unicorn! And the basic concept seems like it should be pretty cool, that tracing through time to see how we got to now and how things might have gone differently. But none of the people from the past are particularly interesting, and the different time periods aren't exactly vividly brought to life.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the way L'Engle writes the Native American tribe who play such an important part in this history. They're utterly generic Noble Savages who, as far as I can see, bear no resemblance to any historical culture. They also have a prophecy about how everything will be OK for them as long as there is evidence in every generation that they bear some Caucasian blood, which... Yeah, that's not uncomfortable at all. And, to be honest, I'm not much happier with the Cain-and-Abel narrative underpinning the whole thing, in which the lineages of good and evil brothers are forever tainted through the generations.

I'll admit, it probably really didn't do this novel any favors that I read it so soon after Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, which also traced the descendants of siblings down many generations and focused on the evil that human beings do to each other. It's horribly unfair to compare them, as they're very different books, of different times, intended for different audiences. But it's difficult not to notice which of the two gets the subject right.

All of which isn't to say that this book was awful. But, unlike the other two, it's definitely not one that's held on to much of its magic on adult re-reading. I will say, though, that, like A Wind in the Door, it does a somewhat pleasing job of taking an unlikeable, rather stereotypical minor character from the previous book and giving them an unexpected amount of depth and value.

Many Waters: In this one, twins Sandy and Dennys, the "normal" ones in the Murry family, get to have their own adventure, as they are accidentally (or perhaps not-so-accidentally) transported to what they initially assume must be an alien planet, which instead turns out to be the Biblical past.

My memory is that I read this one once, as a teenager, and didn't care for it. Which maybe isn't too surprising. At that age, I'd only just recently deconverted from the religious beliefs I'd been (admittedly rather loosely) raised with, and wanted nothing more to do with Bible stories, thank you very much. So I was, I think, quite miffed to find myself tricked into reading one. As an adult, though, I've gotten over myself a little bit and am quite capable of appreciating the Bible as a source of fascinating myth and history, if not as a basis for religious faith. And L'Engle does some moderately interesting things with the Bible story she's building on, including incorporating some of the weirder and more obscure bits of Christian mythology (Nephilim!) and taking just an eensy bit of a feminist perspective on things.

I can't say, however, that the novel itself contains a great story. Honestly, there's not really a whole lot of story here at all. So, ultimately, while I'm more forgiving of this installment than my younger self probably was, I doubt adult me is going to find it all that much more memorable than teen me did.

Rating: Geez, how do you even rate this kind of strange, nostalgic reading experience? I'm just going to give it an overall 4/5 and be done with it. If only because I'm not sure my inner child would stand for the idea of rating any volume with A Wrinkle in Time in it lower. show less

For many years, when people would ask me about my favorite book I would promptly say that it was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Recently, I started to wonder if my love for the novel had stood the test of time so I picked up the 4 book series entitled the Time Quartet (I have the box set that I got years ago) from my shelf and dove in headfirst. Reading the first book in the series, A Wrinkle in Time, completely transported me back to middle school when I first discovered the delightful writing of L'Engle. The book was just as fantastic as I remembered but with the passing of time I see more clearly the overt references to Christianity which were lost on me as a child. (She's a bit like C.S. Lewis in the way that she writes for show more children about Christianity but instead of fantasy devices she uses science fiction and fantasy.) This literary device would increase as the series continued and in a lot of ways it took away some of the enjoyment of the books for me. One of the bonuses of L'Engle's writing is that it is never 'dumbed down' for her child audience. She uses technical terminology and speaks of scientific endeavors as if the reader should already be aware of them. When I first read that book, this was a foreign concept to me as I didn't think I was any good at the sciences when I was in school. (Now look at how many scientific books I've read and reviewed!)

The main character in the first book is Meg, eldest sister of the Murry clan, and we see everything from her point of view. A large portion of why I loved this book was that Meg wasn't a typical girl of her age and I strongly identified with her (and I had a crush on Calvin). A Wrinkle in Time focuses on Meg's relationship with herself, her family, and her peers (especially Calvin). She sees herself as 'other' except when she's with Charles Wallace or her mother (or Calvin...yes, I'm enjoying myself). It doesn't help that their father has been missing for so long that the postman in town has started asking impertinent questions. (The whole town is gossiping or so it seems.) While Meg plays a large role in A Wind in the Door, the main part of the plot is written with Charles Wallace (youngest Murry son) as the main character. Both books are full of adventure and self-discovery. Both Murry children come into their own and use their unique strengths to help them accomplish their goals. The stakes are always set extremely high and the pace is alternately rushed no-holds-barred action and so lackadaisical as to seem stagnant. (Note: If you don't enjoy books with a lot of descriptions and copious amounts of symbolism then I'm afraid this isn't the series for you.) By A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I felt almost overwhelmed by the underlying religious messages and the conclusion, Many Waters, which focuses on the twins, Sandy and Dennis, was so far-fetched as to be ridiculous. (Books 3 and 4 are so convoluted that I don't feel like I can talk about them in detail other than to say they are out there.) Part of me wishes that I had stopped reading at A Wrinkle in Time (as I had done for so many years) so as to not shatter the illusion of what this series meant to me but part of the reason I started this blog was to explore new books and to give as honest a review as possible. The hope is that even if I don't enjoy a book it might interest someone else. With that being said, A Wrinkle in Time remains in my top 50 all-time faves but the others...not so much. 9/10 for book 1 and a 3/10 for the series overall.

A/N: I just did a little Google search and discovered that although I have the box set which is called the Time Quartet there was actually a fifth book written called An Acceptable Time and which called for a new set to be created, the Time Quintet. I feel like I've been hoodwinked! Does this mean I need to find a copy of this book to complete the experience?! (Spoiler alert: I am probably not going to do this.) show less

I was fully prepared to love this book, but in the end, I just liked it. The heavy handed religious stuff made me uncomfortable, and the teleporting left and right seemed rather too easy to me.

I did like that Meg’s flaws are also her strength, and I loved that she’s a girl who excels in math in this book from 1963. Most stuff I read from that time has a firm ‘girls belong at home’ moral going, even if in the end her brain didn’t make that much of a difference for the plot.

Considering that it’s almost 60 years old, this book is brilliant and new and ahead of it’s time. That said, I live and read in the here and now, and in the here and now I liked it, but didn’t love it.

First read these when I was a boy; then read them to my first daughter (now 30) and about a year ago to my second (now 7). These are very interesting to bright kids: imagination-stretching. From my perspective as an adult, I find it a little disconcerting how many intelligent writers who work in this vein fall back so readily on fundamentally Christian paradigms, as though they can't quite operate without that ready-made cultural scaffolding. Still, this sequence is quite brilliant in its way.

A friend gave me the set of these books, and I finally got around to reading the first one, for the second time. The children in the Murray family encounter a strange set of ladies who eventually lead them to another world through a sort of time travel where they eventually rescue their father. There are many predictable YA themes such as the love of family, courage, new experiences, etc. This first book won the Newbery Medal and is considered classic children's literature.

Madeleine L'Engle is one of my all time favorite authors. Both her characters and storylines are thoughtful, well written and intriguing. She writes books that I can read again and again. These particular novels are some of my absolute favorites and I have enjoyed them both as a written books and as an audios.