'A Wrinkle in Time' by Madeleine L'Engle

It was a dark and stormy night.

Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure—one that will threaten their lives and our universe.

Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic Time Quintet.

MY THOUGHTS:

Wow, this book is off this planet in more ways than one! L'Engle has incorporated science, philosophy and theology  in thisYA fantasy novel which was initially rejected by several publishers who thought that complex content and kid characters were too big a clash. But she persevered and it became a Newbery medalist and famous classic. She even borrowed, 'It was a dark and stormy night' as her opening line, which turned out to be an excellent move. Although Madeleine L'Engle didn't make up that line, it wouldn't surprise me if several readers throughout the years assume she did. 

So here's how it all goes down. 

Meg Murry feels like a loser in every way. She's unpopular at school, considers herself plain looking, relies on glasses for her near-sightedness, and struggles in several subjects. She is actually quite a brilliant maths nerd, yet because she's so awkward, the teachers seem to have overlooked this. Her beloved little brother is being picked on, and her father is missing. Mr Murry is a physicist doing top secret government work, but nobody has heard from him for several years. 

A weird trio of ladies squatting in a local derelict house seem to know what's going on with the children's dad. Chatty Mrs Whatsit is a shapeshifter with weird dress sense; bespectacled Mrs Who speaks in famous quotes because she finds it way easier than coming up with her own words to use; and Mrs Which, the most ancient of all, is hazy and ethereal. 

It turns out Mr Murry is stranded on a planet named Camozotz, where he's been helping fight an evil black shadowy force which is also closing in on earth. Meg, along with two boys are enlisted to help rescue him, without getting themselves embroiled in inescapable danger in the process.  

One of the boys is her precocious 5-year-old brother, Charles Wallace. He's rumoured to be slow on the uptake but knows full well he's a genius with an uncanny knack for intuition. Charles Wallace's intellect is probably way too vast for such a young head, which is his biggest weakness. How can a pre-schooler arm himself against a superiority complex when he understands stuff like quantum physics?

 The other boy is 14-year-old Calvin O'Keefe, who knows he's admired at school for the most unimportant reasons, such as athletic prowess and good grades. But Calvin's home life is a train wreck, which keeps him wistful and envious of those with solid, loving families. When Meg and Calvin realise their home and school personas are complete reversals of each other, it gives them a sort of bonding of opposites.

The sci/fi nature of the story begins when they travel via tesseract. If you compress a long piece of paper to look like a folded fan and then leap across the creases, that's similar to what our little gang do through space and time. There's no actual time travel though. I think the book is more of a 'space' story than a 'time' story, despite what the title may suggest.  

Meg begins the adventures very skittish and easily frightened. I stopped counting the number of times she needs to clutch another person's hand for security, but I honestly find this a refreshing blast from the past in our modern era of brave and bold heroines whose authors fear backlash from our reactive feminist culture if they give them a moment of weakness. With female main characters now being typecast as consistently kickass, timid readers have fewer literary counterparts to draw from.  That's truly sad, and I find Meg Murry's cowardice under the circumstances completely understandable. I'm sure if I were in her shoes, I'd be clutching Calvin's hand until it turned to pulp. 

Her faint-heartedness early on makes her later courage more impressive, especially when she reaches for Calvin's hand for about the hundredth time, then decides she needs to stop relying on others to help her through. Her final big challenge will have to be done alone. (I'm sure many girls hope that any future hand holding with Calvin will be for an entirely different reason.)  

Camazotz turns out to have a brainwashed population who are totally conformed by the ruling power (IT) to be completely uniform. Readers of the sixties assumed that was L'Engle's dig at Communism, but her intent is also to help Meg embrace her own differences rather than wishing to be like others. I've been reading a few books about the drawbacks of our western individualistic culture, so coming on the heels of them, this story is a reminder not to swing too far the other way. 

Okay, I can't deny Madeleine L'Engle's themes are unsubtle and her heavy-handedness sometimes becomes almost cartoonish. Take for example the adventurers' quick mishap on the 2D dimensions plus their interactions with the 'Happy Medium' who is just as she's described. Yet I still have a compulsion to keep reading on despite these corny moments. I think it's because the unlikely main trio are all interesting enough to keep their interactions fun. (I'm talking about the three kids, and not the Mrs Ws.)

I want to keep on reading more of L'Engle's time series, but I've heard they're not easy to find, so it will depend on whether or not I can get my hands on them. Now that it comes down to it, I hope I can. 

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