My 1975 copy of L’Engle’s most famous novel has yellow pages, a $1.25 price and a cover illustration showing Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace astride a noble centaur with rainbow wings. In 1975, when I was nine, I thought both the cover and the book were perfect. Now that the book is approaching its fiftieth anniversary, I was curious to see how it held up. Was it as perfect as I remembered?
The answer is “yes.” A Wrinkle in Time has traveled well, perhaps because it’s not cluttered with pop culture references, so it doesn’t feel dated. Perhaps because I just couldn’t and still can’t resist Meg Murray, with her unruly hair, her braces and glasses, and most of all her impatience and intelligence. Who could resist a heroine whose faults become tools in a cosmic mission to save her father? Mrs. Whatsit, one of several guides/godmothers, on handing out gifts to the three journeyers, says, “Meg, I give you your faults” (100). Meg, of course, would prefer another gift “(“But I’m always trying to get rid of my faults”[100]), but her faults, and her virtues, are exactly what’s needed.
The general theme of acceptance pervades the novel: both self-acceptance and the acceptance of others. Meg, her little brother Charles Wallace, and a teenage neighbor, Calvin, are all different from their peers. (I remember quite clearly learning a particular meaning of the word “sport” from the novel—“sport” as genetic anomaly. Calvin and Charles Wallace both claim to be “sports”). This acceptance, though, accompanies the high seriousness of the novel. I think, even at age nine, particularly at age nine, I appreciated that seriousness, and the way it co-existed with the ordinary reality of life (Meg’s often wounded feelings, for example). I appreciated L’Engle’s refusal to talk down to her child reader. Mrs. Who spouts quotations in other languages? Great!
In mixing the mundane and the cosmic, L’Engle is like nobody if she isn’t like C.S. Lewis (could any reader of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe forget how Edmund’s love for Turkish delight leads him astray?). Though A Wrinkle in Time doesn’t come across as a missionary text as Lewis’s do, her novel, like his works, is shot through with Christian paradoxes (the weak, in particular the child, shall defeat the strong; faults become virtues; passion and love are stronger than reason). But Meg is a richer character than any of the Pevensie children, more complicated, more fully developed. And when she has her epiphany . . .well, even after all these years, I was still moved.
I know that L’Engle’s text has been read as a response to the Cold War, and her evil society, Camazotz, as a communist society. The novel, however, loses nothing if we see it as a critique of group think more generally, or of relinquishing individual thought to technology. I’m reading the book to son #2 right now; he’s engrossed, and wants to read out loud all of Mrs. Who’s interesting quotations. I’ll have him give his own report when we’re done.
Worth buying? Yes!
Awards: Newbery Award (1963); runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award (1964;) Sequoyah Book Award; Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
Publication Information: L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. New York: Dell-Yearling, 1962.
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