Writing yesterday about Rebecca Stead's Newbery medal win for When You Reach Me I was catapulted back to my 11-year-old self and my total adoration for Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Stead's heroine is engrossed in L'Engle's book, itself a Newbery winner published almost 50 years earlier, and according to reviews A Wrinkle in Time plays a large part in Stead's novel (I haven't read the Stead yet but it sounds fun and is on my ever-expanding list.
Strangely, I'd reread A Wrinkle in Time only a couple of weeks ago, after spotting it in a secondhand bookshop complete with one of its follow-ups, A Wind in the Door, which I'd never read before. Having written previously about children's books that don't live up to an adult reread, I was slightly nervous about tackling such a favourite, but it was just as wonderful 19 years on and I can't believe I'd forgotten about it for so long.
Starting, Bulwer Lytton-esque, with "it was a dark and stormy night", L'Engle pitches us immediately into the world of Meg Murry, a bright, geeky, independent misfit who desperately misses her absent father, adores her "dumb" baby brother Charles Wallace and "hate[s] being an oddball". Meg is deliciously grumpy as a heroine, and Charles Wallace sweetly precocious and bossy – he's not actually stupid, he just didn't speak until he could do so in full sentences, and he's also psychic.
The stormy night whisks a strange old tramp, Mrs Whatsit, into the midnight kitchen where Meg, Charles and their mother are sipping cocoa, leaving them with the enigmatic statement that "there is such a thing as a tesseract". Their mother goes white: it turns out their father is missing because he's travelled through a wrinkle in time – a tesseract – to fight the evil dark Thing which is taking over the universe. "The fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points," says Charles Wallace (told you he was precocious).
The children are quickly spirited away from the adults (essential to remove grown-ups from children's fiction as quickly as possible) by Mrs Who, Which and Whatsit, who actually turn out to be stars who gave up the fight against the dark Thing. After leaping around the universe a bit they end up at Camazotz, a terrifying planet where everything is regulated and regimented and the same, all controlled by IT, a disembodied brain which has Mr Murry in its power and quickly takes over Charles Wallace. The scene where he's in IT's control, his eyes twirling, a "revolting twitch" in his forehead, brought tears to my eyes just as it did as a child. "Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home," thinks Meg, disorganised, unruly, rude and called on to save the day. "Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you."
I hadn't realised A Wrinkle in Time was one of the most frequently banned/challenged books in the US (apparently a parent thinks it "undermines religious beliefs [by promoting] witchcraft, crystal balls, and demons", according to this report).
The Guardian's children's books editor Julia Eccleshare, in her obituary of L'Engle, tells us that L'Engle – an Episcopalian - was also attacked "for being too religious by the most secular of critics while ... being one of the authors most banned from Christian schools and libraries that regarded her brand of religion as deeply suspect".
Well, it's their loss – A Wrinkle in Time is, I think, one of the truly great children's books, and fully deserving both of its eight-million-and-counting sales, and its role in Stead's own win. The scope of the book feels so much larger than the 200-odd (fairly large-type) pages it encompasses:. "I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't,'" writes Cynthia Zarin in her New Yorker profile of L'Engle. I'm happy to say I'm one of them.
Posted by Alison Flood Tuesday 19 January 2010 15.07 GMT guardian.co.uk
thank you, thank you for featuring this! this is my absolute favorite book and my heart leapt when i saw this in my rss feed :D never has a book made me believe this much in love, family, and the preciousness of being an oddball (aka me). hugs.
Posted by: Alia Ali | Monday, April 05, 2010 at 14:40