When I was a kid I didn't sleep much. I had terrible insomnia and averaged about 4 hours a night. My parents and I somehow came to an unspoken understanding: I had to lie quietly in the dark from bedtime (around 8) until I fell asleep (between 11 and 12), but once I woke up (always at 4), as long as I was quiet and stayed in my room I could do whatever I wanted. Of course the list of things a 7-year-old can do quietly in her room is very short. Sometimes I drew pictures or played with my trolls, but mostly I read. Because I was doing all this reading in the wee small hours of the morning, my reading was undirected by any adult and varied widely. I read all the Baby-Sitters Club, most of the Newberry winners, and a few Sweet Valley High, but somehow I skipped the Wrinkle In Time series.
I did read some Madeline L'Engle books. I read a few of the Vicky Austin books (Seriously, how hot was Adam? After the hospital, when he stripped her down to heal her by swimming with the dolphins? Hot.) and I remember loving An Acceptable Time, even though I felt like I was missing something when they talked about Polly's parents and uncles. So a few months ago when I was browsing Barnes and Noble and saw a boxed set labelled "The Wrinkle In Time Quintet" I figured it was time to see what I was missing.
I have always been told that Meg Murry is an amazing female character, someone for girls to look up to and emulate. And at the start of the books, she is a finely drawn picture of a girl nearing the end of childhood, smart, easily frustrated by adults, brave, vulnerable, angry at her lack of control. She saves her brother with her capacity to love. And she names that crappy principal. And gets that farandolae to root, saving her brother yet again. But by the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, she's chosen the sideline. At home and pregnant while her husband presents his research in London, lying in bed kything while Charles Wallace saves the world, occasionally reading the encyclopedia for him like some library assistant. She's absent from Many Waters, and her only mention in An Acceptable Time is when her mother (Nobel Prize winning scientist) and her daughter (general badass) discuss her decision not to pursue a career. They decide it's because she feared being less than her mother. It felt like kind of a letdown. What happened to the girl tessering to distant planets, saving them from the darkness?
And what is the deal with such an abstract villain? While I was reading, I couldn't help but compare these to the His Dark Materials Trilogy, and that's unfortunate. The stories are actually very similar, but Philip Pullman is able to turn abstract concepts into real concrete details. Every world Lyra and Will visit is firmly rooted and believable, whereas L'Engle's worlds, villains, and creatures are vague and amorphous. She does better when she stays on earth and just moves through time. I once heard an SF writer say that it works best when she takes reality and changes one thing. And that one change creates the whole story. This is the case in An Acceptable Time, and it is the best of the series. Meg's daughter, Polly, is living with her grandparents when her neighbor accidentally opens a "tesseract" between her time and 3000 years ago. Instead of interstitial space travel and unicorns and self-sacrificing stars and giant telepathic furballs, there's just the conflict between modernism and ancient superstition. And there's a lot less vaguely Christian Unitarian philosophy.
If An Acceptable Time is the best book, Many Waters is far and away the worst. It's the only book that features the Murry twins, Sandy and Dennys, and with good reason. They don't seem to have personalities. All the prior books tell us is that they're average and have a big garden. In this book we learn that they like to eat and don't like being thrown in trash heaps. Also that they sunburn easily. And at some point while you're reading, you will realize that they have accidentally been transported back to the time of Noah just before the flood. And at that point you will roll your eyes. There are seraphim (good) and nephilim (bad) and all the people are tiny and brown and unicorns follow the uncertainty principle and can only be touched by virgins. And then there's this passage:
She was the most spectacularly beautiful girl he had ever seen. Tiny, like all the people of the oasis. She wore a white goatskin which covered one shoulder. Her hair was a sunburst of red. Her eyes were almond-shaped and as green as the spring grass at home. Her body was perfect, her skin the color of a peach.
Um, you guys? L'Engle just described Wilma Fucking Flintstone.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011