16 The New York Review
Time (1989).) In contrast to chronos,
or “clock time,” kairos is “real time,”
although “what that is, nobody is quite
sure,” L’Engle writes in a previously
unpublished essay included in the first
Library of America volume. “We expe-
rience glimpses of kairos,” she contin-
ues, “in moments of intense joy, when
everything is more beautiful, clear,
wondrous, than in ordinary every day
experience.”
Young readers of the books, espe-
cially Wrinkle, are drawn to them by
the way L’Engle combines her own
rather fantastic version of science fic-
tion with an emotionally accessible
story: a girl’s fight to save her father,
and later her brother, from the forces of
evil. But those who return to the novels
as adults, as many of us do after having
children of our own, may be surprised
to find them not exactly as we remem-
bered. “Aare yyou llosingg ffaith?” the
stuttering Mrs Which asks Meg at one
point. Even more than the many theo-
logical memoirs L’Engle wrote later in
life, in which she vigorously asserted
her identity as a Christian artist, Wrin-
kle and its successors represent her
spiritual autobiography. “I was trying
first and foremost to tell a good story,
because that is my business; I am a
story teller and nothing else,” she later
said. “But like it or not, I was also writ-
ing about a universe governed by the
kind of loving God in which I hoped to
believe.”
Children seem to have little trouble
accepting A Wrinkle in Time as a sci-
ence fiction novel, albeit an unconven-
tional one featuring a prickly, plain
teenage girl and a five- year- old boy
who snacks on liverwurst- and- cream-
cheese sandwiches. But adults attuned
even remotely to religion will discover
Christian symbolism on nearly every
page. Even so, they may be taken aback
by the revelation, in Leonard Mar-
cus’s generous notes to the Library of
America edition, of just how integral
L’Engle’s religious references are to
the novel. The first planet the chil-
dren visit is called Uriel, which means
“God is my light” in Hebrew and is
the name of one of the four archangels
recognized by the Episcopal Church.
It orbits the imaginary star Malak, a
version of the Hebrew word for angel.
The creatures who live there sing a
hymn based on a passage from Isaiah.
And so on. The Mrs Ws, as Calvin will
later try to explain to Meg’s surprised
father, are “guardian angels” or even
“Messengers of God... beyond human
understanding.”
These religious trappings are
pressed, sometimes awkwardly, into
the service of L’Engle’s idiosyncratic
brand of spirituality, which is layered
with science and secular humanism and
incorporates many personal quirks, in-
cluding her use of the Hebrew- derived
“El” as a name for God. At the root of
all her writing is her vision of Christi-
anity as a religion of love. Her God is
not the fearsome (in her interpretation)
God of the Old Testament but the for-
giving, welcoming Jesus. “What I be-
lieve is so magnificent, so glorious, that
it is beyond finite comprehension,” she
writes in Penguins and Golden Calves,
a book inspired by her journey, at age
seventy- four, to Antarctica, where the
purity of the landscape leads her to
fulminate against the degradations she
perceives in American culture—casual
sex, pornography—and to reassert her
credo:To believe that the universe was
created by a purposeful, benign
Creator is one thing. To believe
that this Creator took on human
vesture, accepted death and mor-
tality, was tempted, betrayed, bro-
ken, and all for love of us, defies
reason. It is so wild that it terrifies
some Christians who try to dog-
matize their fear by lashing out at
other Christians, because a tidy
Christianity with all answers given
is easier than one which reaches
out to the wild wonder of God’s
love, a love we don’t even have to
earn.It is through harnessing her own
power to love that Meg must fight evil:
love of her father (which needs only the
slightest shift to be read as love of the
Father) and love of her brother Charles
Wallace, who is named for L’Engle’s
own father, Charles Wadsworth Camp,
and her father- in- law, Wallace Collin
Franklin, to whom Wrinkle is jointly
dedicated. The book is, essentially, a
paean to fathers and children.
Wrinkle has been embraced by evan-
gelical Christians as “a book written
about a universe created by a power of
love, and entered into by Very God El-
self,” L’Engle writes in The Rock That
Is Higher, in which she credits her re-
covery from a nearly fatal car accident
in 1991 to her faith. But what famously
got her in trouble with some fundamen-
talist Christians was not her unconven-
tional terminology—the name “El,”
she explains, comes from the Hebrew
word “Elohim”—but her inclusion of
secular heroes alongside religious fig-
ures in her personal pantheon. In a no-
torious passage, Mrs Whatsit asks the
children to list some of the “fighters
against evil” throughout history: Jesus
naturally comes first, but they quickly
add Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach,
Beethoven, Gandhi, Buddha, Euclid,
Copernicus, and Schweitzer. At an
event in 1990 at Wheaton College in
Illinois, an evangelical school to which
L’Engle would donate all her papers
and which she regarded as a spiritual
home, she was heckled by visiting
protesters who accused her of incor-
porating witchcraft into the book (it
includes a character called the Happy
Medium) and putting Jesus on thesame level with Einstein and Buddha.
L’Engle professed herself bewildered
by the criticism. “I wrote A Wrinkle in
Time as a hymn of praise to God, so
I must let it stand as it is and not be
fearful when it is misunderstood,” she
wrote.
The sequels to Wrinkle are all es-
sentially variations on its themes. In A
Wind in the Door, the fight against evil
takes place microscopically, within the
cells of Charles Wallace, whose mito-
chondria (one of the building blocks
of cells) are under attack. But the sci-
ence fiction elements quickly fade into
the background as religion dominates.
Blajeny, Meg’s new guide on her quest
to heal Charles Wallace, arrives with
the traditional announcement of anangel—“Do not be afraid!”—and is
accompanied by a creature he calls
a cherubim. (Yes, it’s singular.) Mar-
cus notes that the character could be
named for “the Russian saint Basil the
Blessed, also called Vassily Blajenny,
or Basil ‘the fool for Christ.’”
The evil that must be fought here is
nihilism, represented by the Echth-
roi, a word for enemy that comes from
Greek versions of the Bible. They seek
to “X,” or turn to nothingness, what-
ever they come into contact with; for
reasons we aren’t told, they have cho-
sen Charles Wallace as their target. The
book is heavily influenced by L’Engle’s
reading about the “butterfly effect,”
the term coined by the mathematician
and meteorologist Edward Lorenz to
describe the potential impact of small
weather- related changes in one area
on conditions elsewhere. It is often un-
derstood more generally, in Marcus’s
words, “as a metaphor for affirming the
significance of seemingly inconsequen-
tial events”—such as the fluttering of a
butterfly—“in the grand scheme of the
cosmos.” Here and elsewhere, L’Engle
invests the metaphor with a profound
moral significance. “It is not always
on the great or the important that
the balance of the universe depends,”
Blajeny says. Later, another character
elaborates: “It is the pattern through-
out Creation. One child, one man, can
swing the balance.” This lesson feels
very powerful to children, who are
often told by the adults around them,
either explicitly or implicitly, that their
thoughts and actions aren’t important.
In L’Engle’s world, even something as
microscopic as a mitochondrion canhave cosmic significance, and a child
can save the universe.L’Engle takes these ideas further in
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, in which the
Murry family’s Thanksgiving dinner
is interrupted by a call from the White
House to inform Mr. Murry that the
South American dictator Mad Dog
Branzillo is about to launch nuclear
weapons: “One madman... can push a
button and it will destroy civilization,
and everything Mother and Father have
worked for will go up in a mushroom
cloud.” Calvin’s mother—now Meg’s
disagreeable mother- in- law—recalls
lines from “The Rune of St. Patrick,”
an ancient prayer that she learned as
a child, and teaches them to Charles
Wallace, who summons a unicorn that
allows him to mentally travel through
time seeking the roots of fratricide in
an effort to prevent the nuclear attack.
(Lest the word “rune” raise suspicions
of paganism, Marcus assures us that
the prayer was composed “in prepara-
tion for converting the Irish High King
Lóegaire and his subjects” to Chris-
tianity.) Charles Wallace’s challenge
is to intervene as a particular pair of
brothers and their descendants quar-
rel throughout history, transforming
the fate of the world by disrupting the
dictator’s lineage. These clashes, again
and again, have to do with encoun-
ters between Native Americans and
European Christians, specifically two
Welsh princes who arrive in what is
now America and fight over the native
woman they both want to marry. The
result is a family line of blue- eyed na-
tives, some of whom will ultimately sail
to South America, becoming the dicta-
tor’s ancestors.
Rereading Planet as an adult, I was
surprised by the detail with which I was
able to recall much of its intricate plot
and the profound emotions it evoked.
As L’Engle works her way further and
further into the family saga, parts of
Planet are deeply moving, especially
a later section in which Charles Wal-
lace vicariously experiences the sordid
family life that helped transform Meg’s
mother- in- law from a spirited teenager
into a ruined, bitter old woman.
More difficult to accept, however, are
the implications of the book’s moral les-
sons, which are likely to be a stumbling
block for an adult who overlooked them
as a child. Granted, this is a novel that
appeared just over forty years ago, and
it is unfair to apply today’s politics to a
text that is anachronistic in many ways,
not only politically. Still, even then it was
preposterous to suggest that blue eyes,
especially in a Native American per-
son, are a sign of innate goodness. This
idea was not an anomaly in L’Engle. In
Dragons in the Waters, the second in the
Polly O’Keefe series, a tribe of Indians
in Venezuela have for centuries been
waiting patiently for the return of “the
Phair,” a white man who impregnated a
native girl and abandoned her.
One could argue that it is not racial
prejudice, precisely, that underlies
these books, but Eurocentrism, which,
at the time they were written, was ex-
periencing its last gasp of social ac-
ceptability. I imagine L’Engle would
have happily owned up to this charge.
In A House Like a Lotus, the third of
the Polly O’Keefe books, a group of
characters attending an international
literary retreat bond by singing “Silent
Night” in their native languages. EvenMadeleine L’Engle with her granddaughters Charlotte and Lena, circa 1973Crosswicks,^ Ltd.