Another novel discussion thread: A WRINKLE IN TIME (spoilers likely)

Cafe Society
1

Hey, remember when I was going to open a new thread a week to discuss novels?

Me either. That must’ve been some other guy named Skald.

Anywhistle … let’s talk about A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. Hell, we can talk about the rest of the time quartet too, if anybody wants, but let’s leave the non-kairos stuff (Vicky Austin, etc) for another day.

Wrinkle was probably my favorite book in elementary school; there was at least a year there that I checked it out at least once every six weeks from the school library. I’d have a hard time explaining why now–which I admit not to denigrate its quality, which I still find excellent, but rather because the things I loved about it are subtle and, for lack of a better word, subtextual. Somehow, even as a pre-teen black boy from the south who lived with two relatively uneducated parents, I really identified with an ungainly teenage white girl from New England who was the daughter of two Ph.Ds. Why, I’ll leave for another post.

A quintet of discussion topics and then I’ll toss this thread into the fray:

  1. If you were a fan of this story, what about it attracted you to it?

  2. Charles Wallace: fascinating little hyper-genius or insufferable little prat?

  3. How does Wrinkle stack up against its three sequels. (Well…companion volumes.)

  4. Do the fantasy elements add to or detract from the emotional content of the story? What about the religious elements? Would the novel have been better served by being more overt or more subtle?

  5. Madeleine L’Engle actually said in an interview that Da Vinci Code doesn’t suck. Does that mean she’s senile? :wink:

And we’re off.

2

I loved this book (and the others in the series) as a child…

…but damned if I remember what it was about now that I’m in my mid-30s. I remember sidewalks and bouncing balls, and some sort of large, gray, soft creatures…? And a very mysterious explanation of a tesseract that didn’t really mean anything to me at the time.

And there was a dog.

3

Ditto–I remember enjoying the book a lot growing up (even re-reading it I suspect), but hardly remember anything about it. I’d take it up again, but my Reading To Do list is enormous as it is…

(maybe I’ll wait for the movie to jog my memory :wink: )

4

I loved this book as a kid, for all the stereotypical reasons. While I wasn’t a young black boy living in the South, I was a young white girl living in the suburbs of Chicago, so I know EXACTLY what you were going through. :smiley:

OK, but seriously, I really identified with Meg. I’m not sure why. Re-reading it, we have absolutely nothing in common. But she was a girl, and she was cool and she was in a book that didn’t involve menstruation or baby-sitting clubs, so I thought we were like sisters. I liked Charles Wallace a lot as a kid, but now think he’s an insufferable twat.

I’m afraid I don’t remember whichscenes were in which books, but the scene from the series that’s always haunted me is the Suburban Bliss scene, with the kids coming out of identical houses, bouncing identical balls in rhythm, catching the balls simultaneously and walking back into their homes. Brrr…creepy. And, on the other end of the spectrum - Aunt Beast. Ooooh, Aunt Beast. Could there be anyone warmer and sweeter and more comforting? I was surprised when reading it last summer to find that she’s a little ominous and a bit frightening. When I was a kid, she was nothing but love and nurturing. Aaah.

5

Cool book to pick!

I love this book, I read it for the first time in 5th grade, and have re-read it many times since. I think the initial hook was that I was also a not-very-popular girl who wore glasses, and was smart but lacked the social skills to be successful in school. For me, this book was the ABSOLUTE VALIDATION that I was possibly not doomed to be a friendless freak loser.

When I was a kid, I thought Charles Wallace was fascinating, although as an adult reader I have more of a “oh puh-lease!” reaction to some of his more precocious moments. I also enjoyed the “companion books,” although Wrinkle stands out as the clear front runner, IMHO.

Probably the best thing about the book is how the different plot thrusts come together in a great way, there’s the fantasy stuff, the “ooooh, Calvin is sooooo dreamy” stuff, and actual edge-of-your-seat type adventure. It’s full of cool little touches that you wish would show up in your own life – Aunt Beast is one of my all-time favorite characters in literature, ever. The star-watching rock is awesome. (And it’s from another of the books, but whatever) Dr. Louise the Snake is perfect. I want to hang out with Dr. Louise the Snake! The old New England house with the attached stone dairy (I think it’s a dairy) used as a lab – I definitely want to live there.

Being the most clueless child ever, I missed out on most of the religious stuff when I read it the first 50 or so times. It gets more heavy-handed as the series goes on, and it always makes me feel a little squirmy. I do think it works in the book with Sandy and Dennys when they go back to the Flood – I guess I think it’s better to keep religion to religious themes. L’Engle I’m sure would protest that everything is a religious theme. I was also very pleased when the twins got their own book, I did always have a nagging feeling that they were somehow being “punished” for being well-adjusted by missing out on all the adventures in the earlier books.

And probably my most important comment on this book:
I would also like to note that I was about 27 when I realized that “Dennys” was a alternate spelling of “Dennis” and not pronounced like the restaurant chain.

6

Just curious, what is considered the ‘quartet’ you mentioned? I have a five-pack I got years ago that includes Wrinkle, and they’re all related.

I still don’t see the religious stuff in it, honestly. I mean, some of the stuff in Many Waters I get, but I’ve never noticed a religious bent to it at all.

There’s one book in ther series I’ve never managed to read twice…I can’t remember the title, but Charles Wallace winds up inhabiting a bunch of different people from the past and Meg watches him. I read it once and liked it, but I tried to re-read it a couple years ago and I could not get into it. I generally like the series though, mainly because of the mix of fantasy and philosophical elements–that’s something I really enjoy seeing in the books I read. I like the other books in the series, but my favorites are A Wind in the Door and the one about Meg’s daughter. The former has some neat conceptual elements in it, and the latter has druids.

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[QUOTE=Jayn_Newell]
Just curious, what is considered the ‘quartet’ you mentioned? I have a five-pack I got years ago that includes Wrinkle, and they’re all related.

[quote]

A Wrinkle in Time. A Wind in the Door. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters.
I don’t know what five-pack you could be referring to, but if I had to take a guess I’d say it was the first three I just mentioned, along with The Arm of the Starfish and the beautifully depressing A Ring of Endless Light. Starfish includes, as supporting characters, Meg & Calvin grown up & married, and its protagonist, Adam Eddington, is a supporting character in A Ring of Endless Light. I can easily imagine those five getting put together, but the latter two don’t fit well as they aren’t as overtly fantastical.

Well, I said it was subtle; it’s not Narnia, after all. Some other time I’ll rant on why the Chronicles aren’t really a allegory, but for the moment pretend that i think they are. L’Engle’s work shares a similar Christian sensibility and moral view, but there is, we’ll all concede, no Jesus figure in it.

That’s Planet, my least favorite by far.

8

I wasn’t a huge fan of the book, but the brainwashing scene creeped me out then, and still sort of does. It was the bit where they’re trying distract themselves from getting brainwashed by doing multiplication tables, or nursury rhymes, and the creepy dude with the red light keeps getting in their heads. Gah.

9

My favorite book by far growing up for reasons already listed, plus -
Her mom was a scientist and beautiful and cool? Her dad was absent but she wanted him to come back? Her brother (Charles Wallace)was a pain in the ass but she loved and defended him anyway? Things that got my mind working.
My real favorite was the dragon in the second book - Proginoskes. I’m pretty sure he was my first non-human crush.

10

That’s wierd… I remember the books being blatantly, explicitly religious, even to the extent of including at least one barely-oblique reference to Christ. Its been years since I read it though. I could be remembering wrong.

That’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the best of the bunch IMO! :slight_smile: But I do remember feeling the plot was a little thinly composed.

-FrL-

11

I can say honestly that that book is a large part of why I am where I am today. Ever since we read it in fourth grade, I’ve wanted to be an astrophysicist. Now, here I sit. I’m not sure what exactly the resonance was; part of it was the tesseract, of course, and part of it was the characters. I think that at that age I was already self-identifying as a nerd, and I knew that the Murrays (except for the twins, of course) were my kind of people.

Charles Wallace was always the character I identified most strongly with (though I identify with Meg rather more strongly than I do most fictional characters). He’s more extreme than I was, of course, but my childhood had a lot of the same elements, that few folks ever seemed to really understand me, and I understood more than was maybe good for me. Whether he was an insufferable prat, I can’t say, but if he was, then so was I.

A Wind in the Door was nearly as good as Wrinkle, though it was weakened (I thought) by the absence of Charles Wallace. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Many Waters, and I think I only read it once (unlike Wrinkle and Wind, which were on my darn-near-memorized list), but I remember finding it a decent story. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, though, represented a severe downturn, and the books I’ve seen by L’Engle since then have been even worse. It seemed as though she were stretching a few bare plot points too thin, and it was never clear what was being accomplished.

The religious aspects, I considered a definite strong point to the books, and they really wouldn’t be the same without them. Jesus is explicitly mentioned at least once, as an example of one who had fought against the Darkness, though it’s never made explicit that Christianity is any more correct than any other good religion. Later in her career, though, she seemed to lose sight of her religious principles, and just treated them as a form of magic: In a long-after sequel featuring Meg and Calvin’s daughter (the name of which eludes me), for instance, a cheesy postcard picture of an angel acts as a sort of talisman against evil, as for that matter does the Rede of St. Patrick in Planet. It’s like the things are what’s important, and that their importance happens to derive from God is almost irrelevant. I think this is a large part of what made the later books weaker.

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It’s probably because I read Wrinkle in the 1960s as a kid and didn’t read any of the others until at least high school (mid-70s or later)… but none of the others holds a candle.

I always liked Ms Whatsit. :slight_smile:

13

Who the hell is that?

::teleports **AHunter3 ** a gross of Rs::

I think you’ve put your finger on why I and many others so love this book. Meg is an outsider, and frightfully, horribly lonely; and her mother is unable to help her much, not because she doesn’t try or want to, but because her beauty and intelligence only highlight what Meg sees as her ugliness and awkwardness. I can empathize with that.

It’s also why the Wind and Planet are so much weaker: Meg is less of an Other in them.

There’s exactly one explicit Christ reference in Wrinkle: the three Mrs. Ws tell the children to list persons in human history who have fought against the Black Thing, and Christ’s name is mentioned first.

As I said in an earlier response, it isn’t Narnia. (Of course, that one explicit mention of Jesus is more than he gets in all of the Chronicles, where he never takes off his Lion suit). Wrinkle isn’t a story about Christian theology; it’s not an apologia meant to bring people to the faith. Rather, it’s a fantasy novel set in a universe where Christianity is true.

How old were you when you realized “Sandy” was short for “Alexander”?

14

I also loved the book as a child, but I guess I am alone in loving Many Waters as well, and having a crush on Sandy and Dennys. I thinked I liked MW particularly because Sandy and Dennys were all sexy and adolescent (I was like 12 at the time). Also, certain aspects of the rest of the books (besides Many Waters) irritated me. Particularly Meg growing up to be attractive and marrying Calvin. It just seemed too cliched; particularly when L’Engle had seemed to try to defy stereotypes when she created the character of Meg. So, it’s okay to be young and awkward, but you can’t grow up to be older and ugly and that be okay? In addition, I didn’t like Meg marrying her childhood crush; how fairy tale is that? I guess it’s a kid’s book and has to include some of that stuff, but still . . .

On a somewhat humorous side note, for the longest time, the name of the book really confused me. I interchanged the concept and terminology of"A wrinkle in time" with “a stitch in time” from Ben Franklin’s adage. For the longest time, my interpretation of “a stitch in time saves nine” was that there was some vague ancient historical threat posed to the base ten numbering system which put the existence of the number 9 in jeopardy, but some intrepid time-traveler managed to put a little pucker (stich/wrinkle) at some point in the space-time continum and saved the number 9. I realize now and even then that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, nor does it have any applicability to our lives as an adage should. But I had this fuzzy grasp of what “a stitch in time” meant and I was holding on to it.

Gestalt

15

Depends on what you mean by “explicit”. There’s a line in The Last Battle to the effect of “Once on our world as well, a stable contained the whole world”, a pretty clear reference to the Christmas story, and hence to the Earth version of Aslan.

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By explicit I mean “name actually typed in manuscript.” What do YOU mean?
:wink:

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I actually liked A Swiftly Tilting Planet the best. Until I read Ender’s Game, it was my favorite book. I think as a kid I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of it – reading about all the characters and trying to figure out how it all fit together. I’m sure if I read it now, it would seem stretched-thin and obvious. But I definitely loved it as a child.

18

I apologize in advance for my faux pas in quoting nearly this entire post, but there’s a lot of stuff to respond to!

I felt really betrayed by Meg as an adult. She seemed to just fade away somehow, no personality. And I never warmed up to Polly very much, she always seemed very overwrought and hand-wringy. Are we allowed to menion in this thread how FREAKING ANNOYING Zachary is? I can’t believe (or don’t want to believe) that anyone related to Meg would get sucked into his stupid drama.

This doesn’t bother me so much (although I see your point) because I can imagine that sharing that kind of experience would forge a bond that could very well be life-long. Some people go to the Senior Formal with their crush, others go to different planets and defeat giant disembodied brains. One is probably more memorable.

Well bless you for holding on to that one, because it is a pip of a concept, no doubt!

19

So, I never believed that Meg really was particularly unpretty, or that her mother erally was particularly beautiful. I took these to be Meg’s judgments, but I did not take her judgments to be trustworthy.

I no longer have copies of the book readily available to me, or I’d try to find passages and see if I’m remembering wrong or something.

But did no one else also get this impression?

-FrL-

20

Oh, this was one of my favorites. Actually, for years I was a L’Engle addict, and to this day I’m still hoping to buy a few titles I’ve never seen. I have most of her writings, fiction and non.

I totally identified with Meg. I was a shy geek, awkward, with wild hair and glasses (and braces!) and wanted desperately to believe Mrs. Murry’s opinion and that I would grow up lovely too. (I wound up reasonably nice-looking, which is fine.) I wasn’t a math genius, in that way I identified with Vicky, but otherwise, I pretty much was Meg. (I, too, am annoyed by the way she melts into quiet background motherhood–I’m a mom and I still have plenty of personality!)

I liked Charles Wallace OK at the time, but would now find him insufferable.

I liked all the companion volumes, especially Proginoskes (who is a cherubim, not really a dragon!) and Many Waters. I haven’t read them in a long time and would now be annoyed by Planet and by the insufferable mousey thing in Door.

Being a religious fantasy addict, I don’t object to either element.

She said The DaVinci Code doesn’t suck? Well, another illusion gone. However, I haven’t liked her writings nearly as much for the past 8 years or so (I find her a bit annoying these days, I’m afraid), though she did help me get through adolescence, for which I am forever grateful, and introduced me to the metaphysical poets, another thing to be grateful for.

I cannot understand why Zachary hung around through 4 or 5 novels. He is so dang annoying, why does anyone want to talk to him at all, no matter how gorgeous he is?? (Hm, is this why I tend to distrust gorgeous guys?)