A 'Wrinkle' for All Time

Last week, I spent time with an old friend for the first time in more than 40 years. I was reading the 50th anniversary edition of Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time.

Like all such reunions, I worried a bit about what I'd find. Would it be as I remembered it? Or had the years magnified the wheat and erased the chaff? Would I be sorry I decided to get us back together?

No worries. The book stands up to the test. It's joys were as joyful and its flaws as inconsequential to me as they were back when I checked it out of the library and it helped set me on my lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy.

Not that my memories were complete or perfect. I recalled it was pretty cosmic. I did not remember how explicitly religious the story got.

For those of you who never read the book and are still reading this column, I'm not sure how much I can tell you to make you understand what a big deal this novel was and has been in the lives of many readers. J.K. Rowling can only hope that readers feel this way in 2047, a half-century after the first publication of that first Harry Potter book.

A Wrinkle In Time is a book mostly picked up by ‘tweens and young teens. Its main characters include a sister and brother, ages 13 and 5, named Meg and Charles Wallace. A sudden friend named Calvin, a couple of years older than Meg. Three literally unearthly characters named Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which. Who appear with no periods after their honorifics.

The story spans the cosmos. And what a cosmos. Everything in our universe is apparently sentient and engaged in an enormous battle of good versus evil. A stellar supernova, for instance, is the ultimate way for a star to use its light to drive out the evil dark.

The personification of evil in this story is called IT. IT is a disembodied extra-large pulsating human brain. I'll take your Sauron and Voldemort and see you IT for the creepy effect that had on me as a kid.

But it is also an intensely focused tale about people, relationships, and triumph in the face of incredible horror. And L'Engle roots her writing in the small details that put us right there. Here's a nugget, after the good guys win. (Fortinbras is the family pooch):

"They were talking and laughing all at once, when they were startled by a crash, and Fortinbras, who could bear being left out of the happiness not one second longer, catapulted his sleek black body right through the screened door to the kitchen. He dashed across the lawn to join in the joy, and almost knocked them all over with the exuberance of his greeting."

If there is a more jubilant passage in literature, I've not read it.

In re-reading, I was struck by explicit nods to earthly religions that I'd sailed right past those many years ago. At one point there's a discussion about our world's warriors against the darkness:

"Jesus!" Charles Wallace said. "Why of course, Jesus!"

"Of course!" Mrs Whatsit said. "Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They've been lights for us to see by."

"Leonardo da Vinci?" Calvin suggested tentatively. "And Michelangelo?"

"And Shakespeare," Charles Wallace called out, "and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!"

Now Calvin's voice rang with confidence. "And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!"

"Now you, Meg," Mrs Whatsit ordered.

"Oh, Euclid, I suppose." Meg was in such an agony of impatience that her voice grated irritably. "And Copernicus."

More pointed and specific is a song sung by angelic beings in a world far, far from earth:

"Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth,
ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein;
the isles, and the inhabitants thereof.
Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift their voice;
let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains.
Let them give glory unto the Lord!"

While my younger self may have recognized the cadences as biblical, I can guarantee I did not spot it as having been lifted without much alteration from Isaiah 42:10-12.

L'Engle doesn't offer pat explanations for any of this, any more than she is particularly clear about traveling in time and space or why Mrs isn't punctuated for those three characters. (Or who (or what) they might have been married to so that they merited "Mrs.") Which makes the book all the stronger, for leaving lots of room for the reader's imagination.

L'Engle was famously a member of an Episcopalian church. But her personal theology was not much more orthodox or limited than her characters'. Placing Jesus in the same category as Buddha and Copernicus? And she was accused of being a Universalist -- believing that everybody eventually is granted salvation. Her denials that I've read are less than clear. She told Christianity Today: "No. I am a particular incarnationalist."

Say what?

Between being too religious and not having what some folks think is the right sort of religion, "Wrinkle" is among the most consistently banned books in America. What a waste of effort!

It's fiction. And kids know that. But beyond that, it opens young minds to the possibility of possibility. To thinking about "what ifs" that carry us far beyond the mundane and material. What if the universe were alive in some sense? What if love is transcendentally important? What does courage mean if our fear is about the loss of identity and not simply about physical pain?

These were excellent questions 50 years ago. They still are.

What makes it all work is that L'Engle spins a story about people who, in many ways, are as familiar as the insides of our own heads.

My nephew is 13, not so far from the age I was when I first read the book. I'm ordering him his own copy.