(part 3 of 4) 1963: A WRINKLE IN TIME BY MADELEINE L'ENGLE
“My child, do not despair. Do you think we would have brought you here if there were no hope?”
(here’s part 1, here’s part 2)
The time has come to unlock my second-most nuclear Take on children’s literature1. I have contacted the team, we are entering the launch room and turning our keys all at the same time, we are unleashing this Take upon the world, and the world will just have to deal with it:
A Wrinkle In Time isn’t the greatest children’s novel of all time, it’s not the greatest science fiction novel of all time, and I know this because it isn’t even the greatest Madeleine L’Engle novel of all time. It’s time to spread the gospel of L’Engle’s actual greatest novel of her career, the 1981 Newbery finalist A Ring Of Endless Light.
L’Engle referred to her five-novel series on the Murry family, which began with Wrinkle, as her “Kairos” books, the books that are on God’s time, “pure numbers with no measurement”. The Kairos series skips across interstellar distances and wrinkles time and meets alien and celestial beings and contains all of these traditional science fiction elements. But L’Engle’s other famous series of children’s novels, about the Austin family, are her “Chronos” books, the books set in “ordinary, wrist-watch, alarm-clock time”. The Austins - who first appeared in Meet The Austins, a novel that predates Wrinkle by two years - do not leave Earth, they don’t travel in time, and the science fiction elements of these novels are significantly more subtle than those you’d find in the Kairos series. The themes are all classic L'Engle - death, love, rebirth, self-sacrifice, and ultimately the goodness of existence over nothingness - but grounded in a much more realistic setting. And this also allows L'Engle to be more autobiographical in her writing.
Ring is narrated by fifteen-year-old Vicky Austin2, whose family has decamped to a New England island for the summer to accompany Vicky's grandfather in his home as he begins dying of leukemia. This is, obviously, a very heavy story, one based on L’Engle’s own teenage experience with her family. Vicky’s grandfather is a retired Christian preacher, and the Austin family - based more closely on the L’Engles than the Murry family ever was - is a family of devout and joyful Christians who sing their grace before meals, read Shakespeare to each other every night, marvel at the beautiful scenery around them, and dedicate themselves to the service of others. The Austin patriarch is a physician, and all of Vicky’s brothers and sisters want to grow up to be doctors as well; Vicky is the odd one out as she’s an aspiring poet and writer. And so Ring is L’Engle’s slow and steady exploration of how people of faith get their heads around death, not in an abstract sense of something that happens before you’re welcomed into Heaven, but of real, messy, terrifying death living in their house every day as his breathing slows bit by bit.
Everybody in the family talks, and thinks, and grieves, and looks for some way to continue affirming the goodness of life in the face of death, to sing alleluias at a funeral, as Vicky’s grandfather does in the opening scene of the novel. He also introduces Vicky to the poetry of Henry Vaughan, from where the novel gets its title; Vaughan describes capital-E Eternity as a ring of endless light, a great expanse of peace standing above rapidly hurtling pieces of capital-T Time. On top of all of this, Vicky herself is caught up in a very teenage problem this summer: her best friend has caught feelings for her, her rich and snotty bad-boy ex3 has shown up on the island for no reason, and she is smitten with one of her brother’s co-interns at the marine biology lab. As Vicky tries to understand what her world looks like now that real death has been introduced into it, she’s also navigating an awkward love quadrilateral. And there is one additional complication: Vicky has recently learned that she has the ability to telepathically communicate with dolphins.
I said that the science fiction elements of the Chronos novels were more subtle, but they’re still there. And the dolphins in Ring do represent, for Vicky and for the reader, a very different perspective on death and eternity, one closer to that expanse of peace standing separate from time. Vicky, who pairs up with her brother’s co-worker as he researches dolphin communication, grows closer to the dolphins on the island and better learns to communicate with them throughout the course of the novel, at least as best as she can. Because - to state something that probably doesn’t need stating - dolphins don’t communicate the same way that humans do. Because dolphins, as it turns out, do not perceive reality and time the same way that humans do. As her crush explains to Vicky, dolphins possess the bone structure in their flippers that suggest that they had hands at some point. Which suggests, in turn, that dolphins could have once been land animals that somehow returned to ocean-dwelling. Which, in turn, suggests all sorts of things:
“‘Do you suppose way back millions of years ago the dolphin had to choose to give up its hands in order to have that kind of freedom?’
‘I don’t know.’ Adam started toward the ocean, so that the dolphin pens were hidden by an arm of dune. We were in a larger cove, a wide, gentle curve of sand. ‘Without writing, writing down words on stone or papyrus or parchment or paper or microfilm so they can be kept, we wouldn’t have history. And without history there isn’t any future.’
...I thought of Grandfather reading to me the day before: I saw Eternity the other night like a great ring of pure and endless light. And then I thought of the dolphins returning to the sea, and losing fingers and thumb and the ability to grasp.”
What Vicky finds in her visits to the dolphins is a community urging her to let go of her linear concept of time and start thinking in terms of capital-E Eternity, which requires her to leave a lot of other questions behind:
“Dolphins are communal creatures, Adam had told me. They cannot give birth alone; they need midwives, need friends. What about dying? What does a pod of dolphins do when one of them has been hurt - maybe by a harpoon - or is old? How do they help, birthing or dying, without hands? Do they surround the one who is dying and hold him by their presence. Do they have any conscious thoughts about life and death? Can they ask questions? Or do you give up questions when you give up hands?”
Of course, while this isn’t as completely out-there as the interstellar settings of L’Engle’s “Kairos” novels, these themes are very much in step with what you’d find in Wrinkle, a novel in which time and space don’t move in predictable straight lines and are viewed from all sides simultaneously. No history, no future, just Eternity.
Paradoxically, this also instills a strong sense of perspective in Vicky, who struggles throughout the novel to come to terms with her grandfather’s impending death, but who learns from her new dolphin friends that every life has significance, has value over nothingness and nonexistence. This is discussed at length throughout the novel in different conversations between characters, as well as in Vicky’s internal monologue, as with the example below:
“If I’m confused, or upset or angry, if I can go out and look at the stars I’ll almost always get back a sense of proportion. It’s not that they make me feel insignificant, it’s the very opposite, they make me feel like everything matters, be it ever so small, and that there’s meaning to life even when it seems most meaningless.”
And, if it weren’t obvious enough that this was a L’Engle novel, we get very clear echoes of the “Kairos” stories in this conversation between Vicky and her friend Leo, as they discuss black holes and other outer space phenomena:
“‘How does anybody’s individual death fit into that enormous picture?’...
‘If a star’s dying matters [Mrs. Whatsit was a star that died], so does a person’s.’
‘To you and me. But to the universe?’
‘I don’t think size matters. Every death is a singularity,’ I said slowly. ‘Think of all the tiny organisms living within us. I think every mitochondrion and farandola has to be just as important as a giant star.’”
L’Engle uses the above bit of dialogue to basically draw giant red arrows in the middle of the book and say “HERE. IT’S HERE. THIS IS THE SAME SET OF THEMES I TALK ABOUT IN ALL OF MY OTHER BOOKS. THIS IS AS OBVIOUS AS I CAN MAKE IT.” And this is, to be clear, as obvious as she can make it. L’Engle references a dying star in the above passage. Mrs. Whatsit of Wrinkle was a star, once, too, one that went nova and burned out fighting The Black Thing. But her contribution to the fight as a star was no more important than Meg’s or Calvin’s or Charles Wallace’s will be as human beings. L’Engle talks about mitochondria and farandolae4 in the above passage, but Wrinkle’s first sequel, A Wind In The Door, is literally set within one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria as Meg and Calvin try to sway the movement of one of the farandolae within that cell; this sub-molecular battle is presented with the same stakes, if not higher stakes, as the intergalactic battles of Wrinkle. The perspective of Eternity and the flattening of time do not erase or minimize any of these lives or any of these struggles; rather, they are all magnified and raised to the same level of gravity in the fight against nothingness.
And that remains the overarching theme of Ring, and of all of L’Engle’s fiction, the ring of light above all of the characters and timelines and tesseracts jumping around in her work. Life is good and better than death, existence is good and better than nothingness, being - any kind of being - is good and better than oblivion. L’Engle’s most insidious villain, from Wrinkle, was a black void, the absence of existence. In Wind, the villain becomes the Echthroi, demonic beings of nothingness who seek to “X” out all existence as if it had never been in the first place. In Ring, there aren’t demonic beings, but you have Vicky’s dickish ex-boyfriend who, deep down, is terrified of being alive and terrified of what death means for the immediacy of his life. It is Vicky’s grandfather, in his acceptance of his coming death, and the dolphins, in their view of Eternity, who show Vicky a view of death that affirms the fundamental goodness of existence. L’Engle not only wrote to her readers, in every novel, that “it is okay for you to be here in this unknowable world”, but that “here” was the only place worth being.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. This is the third of four installments on Madeleine L’Engle's 1963 medalist, A Wrinkle In Time.
The first-most nuclear Take is yet to come in a later installment of Newburied.
Who was portrayed by Mischa Barton in the inexplicable and very loose 2002 Disney Channel Original Movie adaptation of the novel.
Who is twenty years old and trying to get with a fifteen-year-old, which is perhaps not the part of Ring that has aged the best.
Mitochondria are real - the powerhouse of the cell! - but farandolae were invented by L’Engle, are not actual sub-cellular organs, and are named after a dance.