A Wrinkle in Time

[sawyl]

I'm not quite sure how I managed to miss Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time when I was growing up — perhaps my local library didn't stock it. Whatever. Prodded by positive comments about it in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, I've finally corrected my oversight. And I'm very glad I did, because it's very, very good.

It is a Dark and Stormy Night and Meg Murry can't sleep. Heading down to the kitchen, she finds her mother and younger brother Charles Wallace making cocoa. The cosy situation is disrupted by the arrival of Mrs Whatsit, one of Charles Wallace's eccentric friends, who drops a some cryptic hints about Meg's missing father and shocks her mother by casually mentioning something about a tesseract. The following day, after a bad time at school and a visit to the headmaster's office, Meg happens to bump into Calvin O'Keefe, a schoolmate she only knows from afar, and the two become firm friends. With guidance from Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which, Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace find themselves whisked — tessered — off across the universe to fight evil and rescue the missing Dr Murry. Along the way they encounter singing aliens, dark shadows, and authoritarian states where equality and uniformity are treated as synonyms

Among a strong cast of characters, Meg Murry stands out as particularly good. Clever but struggling at school, written off by her teachers as a dead loss, stuck halfway between Charles Wallace's and Calvin's strangeness and the normality of her bumptious twin brothers, bespectacled and braced, she's the poster child for all of us who didn't quite fit in. Charles Wallace is good, using superiority and overconfidence to mask his true feelings, and Calvin is wordy and charismatic and understands the rules in a way that makes it plausible that, even though he doesn't feel as though he fits in, he could put up a convincing facade of conformity.

Even though the story features a core of Christianity, featuring a fight between good and evil, a set of strange and otherworldly angel, and the idea that love is the greatest of the virtues, L'Engle applies her themes in a direct way that avoids some of the problems of CS Lewis's allegorical approach. Indeed the Christian views espoused by the book are so liberal, eschewing complex metaphysics in favour of broad-brush morality, that there isn't a great deal for a non-believer to object to.

A delightful 20th century classic.