Madeleine L’Engle is weirder than I remembered

How much weird religious-scientific exposition there is. Cherubim and mitochondria, making a sort of Episcopalian-psychedelic (Episcodelic? Psychopalian?) mélange. It’s like a cross between Harry Potter and Dante’s Purgatorio

I have never read any L’Engle, but that makes me think immediately of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”.

Not really religious, but with some of the same feel, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series is pretty cool. It starts with So you Want To Be A Wizard

Something about Meg’s father always makes me think of the guy with the pipe in the alt-weeky comic strip Red Meat.

I’ve got a great deal of love for L’Engle’s work, and still do.

Her memoir Two-Part Invention, about life with her husband and mourning his death, was a comfort and maybe a life-saver in the wake of my father’s death. It really helped to share the experience of grief with someone accustomed to epic flights of fantasy, now very forcibly grounded for a while.

For several generations of children, L’Engle had several things simultaneously: a great sensawunda imagined universe, an amazing guide to the universe (Mrs Whatsit), an outcast protagonist young readers could identify with, and a plot with real evil and choices children just like the reader had to make. At the time of Wrinkle‘s publication in 1962, I think Meg Murry was one of the very few female protagonists in YA SF, and in many ways L’Engle helped create the category as a viable niche. The Wikipedia entry is probably best seen as a labor of love for many editors.

I recently re-read A Wrinkle in Time, which I loved as a kid. It was more moralistic and less well-written (in the sense of “well-written” I have now, as a grown-up) than I remembered, but I guess those are just endemic dangers to reading children’s books as an adult, and not necessarily counts against the book in particular. That said, about the writing . . . it was really startling to me how overly “scripted” the plot felt, how much it just consisted of magical helpers whisking the uncomprehending characters from one plot point to the next. Which is very efficient, I guess, and didn’t strike me as a bad thing as a kid because I hadn’t yet learned to get annoyed with choices that seem overly convenient for the writer. (The book’s influence probably explains a lot of the awful fantasy stories I remember writing as a kid, which tended to have the same “largely description-free whirlwind tour across time and space” structure, though of course not done nearly as well.)

The one part I actually remembered from my original childhood reading of the book was the scene where Meg recites the periodic table (among other things) in an attempt to resist IT’s mind control. That was awesome, and struck me (even as a kid, I think) as a nice subversion, since in a more clichéd version of this universe, rote memorization of scientific concepts would be the sort of thing your conformist overlords would make you do. But no, even Camazotz can’t appropriate the wonder of science.

One simple thing that’s great about the book is that it creates its own fictional universe that’s neither a simple extrapolation of modern science or a nostalgic rejection of it. (His Dark Materials did a similar thing.) It’s disappointing how uncommon that is among adult books, even these days. Are the bounds of genre less restrictive for YA/children’s books? My memories of childhood reading say yes, though it’s not clear to me why that would be the case. (Do writers imagine that children value novelty more than adults? That wouldn’t be such an unreasonable supposition, I guess.)

Religious sci-fi with mitochondria likely will not seem unusual at all to generations growing up after Star Wars.

A bit off the topic, but it reminds me of my eleven year self being totally terrified late at night alone reading H P Lovecraft. One of Lovecraft’s tricks was to combine his space creatures with Egyptian myths and with an otherwise quite normal New England town. All this gave a heft of verisimilitude to his creepy tales. By the time 40 years later I gave Lovecraft to my own kids it had all become quaint. No late night terrors for them!

Kids love weird and scary stuff, and to a certain extent the more the adults around them think it is weird and bad the more they like it.

Cranky

Speaking of YA authors, sad to see that Jean Craighead George of My Side of the Mountain and Julie of the Wolves fame just died.

IMO the Time Quintet goes downhill after A Wind in the Door, which is, along with A Ring of Endless Light, L’Engle’s masterpiece. A Swiftly Tilting Planet is fun but not as good as the first two, and has the blue-eyed-good/brown-eyed-evil aspect that Peter Hovde mentioned. An Acceptable Time is eminently forgettable.

The other L’Engle books I recommend are A Ring of Endless Light (poetry and telepathic dolphins), The Young Unicorns (my absolute favorite of anything she wrote, featuring an ex-gang member re-learning why trust matters, a “blind child prodigy” who is a real, breathing character with frustrations and hopes and friendships, and as Phil said, a nightmarish church conspiracy), and The Arm of the Starfish (Calvin discovers how to regenerate limbs in humans, trippy religious allegory with an atheistic, Beethoven-loving Jesus-analogue, set in Fascist Portugal).

Avoid Dragons in the Waters and A Severed Wasp at all costs.

Other authors- Philip Pullman has a lot more in common with Madeleine L’Engle than C.S. Lewis. They both combine fantasy and theological speculation with a sci-fi idea and emphasize joy and talent and learning. For a ten-year-old His Dark Materials is a good place to start. His Sally Lockhart series is possibly even better but might be better for a twelve or thirteen-year-old.

Diane Duane’s Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry also have this quality, though most other books in the Young Wizards series don’t reach that level. High Wizardry has this transcendent moment where a nine-year-old science nerd uses Obler’s Paradox to fight evil. (“Light, Dairine thought, we need more….The universe stopped expanding.”) It also has some of the redemptive/universalist feel of L’Engle’s books.

C.S. Lewis had a deeper and more interesting religious fantasy than the Chronicles of Narnia, “Till We Have Faces,” but it isn’t for kids at all, but rather an adult meditation on how “each man kills the thing he loves”. It makes up for the “battles are ugly when women fight” moment in TLTWATW with a harrowing scene where the female protagonist kills a man in single combat and thinks afterward that she now knows she could have killed her abusive father and can kill her own vulnerability. I am honestly baffled as to why this book is not as well known as the Chronicles.

I loved the Wrinkle in Time series as a kid (1980s). I’ve only reread that one book since then, and I still thought it was fantastic. Her Christianity bothers me less than Lewis’s, because the whole thing is less a transparent allegory for the particular Christian story of salvation through Jesus (like the Narnia books, which I loved deeply as a kid but get annoyed by now) and more of a strange mix of old Anglo-Catholic mysterianism and the combination of post-nuclear terror and confident futurism I associate with 1950s–60s science.

I like how unabashedly intellectual the Murrys (Wallaces) are even as they’re having absurd cosmic adventures. I liked how, for ten or fifteen years after I read the books in third grade, I would still find myself learning something cool, in some fairly nerdy field or other, and flashing back to a phrase or reference in L’Engle that had resonated in my mind before I had any idea it was related to anything real. Farandolae, mitochondria, the Greek word ‘echthroi’, the tesseract (of course), Patagonia, cherubim, Blaise Pascal, the Rune of St. Patrick, the Sanskrit word ‘Ananda’ (Meg’s dog), and so on. I also found certain passages wildly, strangely evocative as a kid, in ways I couldn’t quite understand — like this weird, violent stream-of-consciousness bit: “[g]reen stems, sickly trickling ooze”.

I had a similar reaction just a couple of weeks ago: I was in the library browsing for a book for my daughter, and I paged through A Wrinkle in Time. I decided against getting it. Then again I don’t remember those things bothering me when I read it as a child.

On another note, I can’t help being amused by the “Recent Comments” list at the top of the webpage which says things like “isaiah on Madeleine L’Engle is weirder than I remembered”.

Since they have English friends, they have a preëxisting understanding of the varying meals (supper, dinner, tea and so on) which so baffled me as a child, so that’s nice. I did understand about dinner and supper, because that’s the same in the South, but tea just threw me, and then they would be having a picnic too, and I don’t know whatall. A thermos of tea!! And biscuits and a bar of choc! Tinned peaches and pineapple! Food is endlessly fascinating to children, it is a good 50% of a children’s book’s success. Harry Potter really nailed this one.

If you think the first two books are weird wait until you get back to Many Waters. Uncomfortably crowded with temptresses and coercive fallen angels. I revisited the whole series about a year ago and I must not have finished that one when I was a kid because I would never have forgotten something so bizarre.

I really enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time, though I haven’t re-read it as an adult. One passage still sticks with me, in which the characters are talking about fighters on the side of light (goodness, or perhaps enlightenment? I don’t remember). Jesus is mentioned first, but then Leonardo, Shakespeare, Buddha, and a dozen others. That struck me, as a kid raised Catholic–there are many paths to doing or being good.

I really enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time, though I haven’t re-read it as an adult. One passage still sticks with me, in which the characters are talking about fighters on the side of light (goodness, or perhaps enlightenment? I don’t remember).

Both, I think- L’Engle of course grew up in an age when it was considerably easier to be confident that the two always go together, and retained it even after living though so many events that have made such confidence a lot harder to come by. (That passage really stuck with my 13 year old self, as well.)

In Lewis’s favor (I think), he’s erudite in a way L’Engle isn’t. L’Engle is erudite in the way you’d expect of a woman who attended excellent European boarding schools and lived all of her life among educated people. Lewis can draw more deeply on the literary tradition. But pernicious as the standard paint-by-numbers girls’-fantasy “rescuing” theme is, IMHO, girls-with-swords doesn’t touch as closely to the issues girls actually face.

Though Meg’s issues didn’t seem as universal as I’d remembered, last time I looked. Comfortably middle-class girls with near-genius abilities in math who fail their math courses because the work is too easy, and who get into fistfights, reflects the way some girls think about their lives, but paints them as worse than the reality.

L’Engle was my first author that I tired to read everything she ever wrote — once I figured out that all her characters fit into one related universe (helpfully schematically laid out in the 1st edition hardback of _Many Waters_) I was hooked. Female protagonists who were sort of outcasts and had an active fantasy life — these were the things that were magical for the 10-year-old me ever so long ago.

There’s a thread of whifty mysticism through American Christianity, which I think L’Engle is part of. I read a bunch of it when I was an omnivorous-reading teenager. There is such a neat quality to a universe with an easily-legible moral order.

dexitroboper, #4: Duane acknowledges L’Engle as an influence, especially on So You Want to Be a Wizard. See here.

I think actually hippies were a bunch of loser acid freaks with painted faces from San Francisco in 1967. (Quite unrelatedly :) Now I want to read A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but I must say I have zero idea what it was about. And I refuse to listen to an audiobook. Too sloww needs moar wordz!!! Really. One of these days I’ll come around, and John and I can laugh and look back on it, hey, remember all those years you refused to listen to audiobooks, even when you had a migraine and the alternative was noise from the nursery schools across the back alley? Hahaha, I remember that too you big silly. It’s like when I was so sick I liked the new Bon Iver album (February or something).

We haven’t gotten into Enid Blyton, despite now living in India where every bookstore has essentially an entire wall of her books; maybe we chose the wrong ones to start with, as the kids were unimpressed (and growing up in the middle south of the US, I was entirely unaware of her until I moved to Asia). However, I want to put in a pitch for E. (for Edith) Nesbit. We have read a lot of her stuff together out loud at bedtime (The Enchanted Castle, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet) and the gender and racial anachronisms notwithstanding (really no worse than the Narnia books, and doesn’t encountering that sort of thing lead to the most interesting conversations with one’s kids, anyway?), there is an Edwardian briskness to her story-telling that makes it a great pleasure to read aloud, especially if you like doing voices, and some great set pieces. Belle and John–I recommend them highly for the girls.

I got Felix Wrinkle in Time last year, and he was curiously resistant to it, but recently said that he’d gotten around to reading it and really liked it. Now I want to reread it, since I have an almost hallucinatory memory of reading all of her books, one after the other, barely surfacing for air, and feeling at the time (was I 9, 10, 12? can’t remember….) that they were the best thing I’d ever read.

What’s with the gratuitous hippie bashing? 1965 through the early 70’s would be a more accurate time frame for those worthless hippies in any case.

Has anyone read The Diary of A Welsh Swagman? He built lots of the gutters for the town where Henry Handel Richardson used to live at the Post Office for some time. He was a good Welshman I believe.

And thanks to bianca & hob for the link to Mari Hess’s writing about rereading L’Engle. The Wrinkle piece was a good read and I’m looking forward to the others.

Lee Ann — E. Nesbit stories are wonderful. In a similar vein are the Edward Eager books — Half Magic, Time Garden, Knight’s Castle. They’re not religious — at least I don’t remember that at all — but wonderful stories with strange and magical happenings. Wiki calls them “contemporary fantasy” but that doesn’t capture the pure sense of fun and possibility that his books have, at least for me.

Edward Eager always struck me as someone who’d set out to ‘do’ E. Nesbit in modern (and American) dress; I went off him in a big way after The Time Garden (not recognising half the historical references didn’t help).

I believe you need to read some E. Nesbit – at least the Phoenix and the Carpet and the Treasure Seekers – if you’re going to have an imaginatively fulfilling childhood. Or adulthood – that works too.

I went on an Amazon binge in my 20s and bought all of the books in the Wrinkle series (even the later ones, which were just about the family and not really as good). A Swiftly Tilting Planet was always my favorite, though frankly the book was a probably not the best of the first series (Wrinkle, Wind, Planet, Many Waters).

Also have long wanted to write fan fiction in which Charles Wallace is actually the back story to the life of Charles Murray (Bell Curve). The spelling is different, but he’d be about the same age.

Tom T.: My immediate reaction to the hated “midichlorian” dialogue in The Phantom Menace was to assume that George Lucas was ripping off Madeleine L’Engle’s farandolae. The word even sounded like “mitochondrion”.

I think L’Engle’s fantasy, with its science-fictional and anti-authoritarian elements, was probably a part of what prompted me to dabble in exceedingly vague religious belief for a short time in my preteen/early-teen years.

Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca books.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder–the children in her fantasy books are more realistic than in L’Engle’s, who I slowly found annoying as I grew older and tired of her beautiful, gifted, special children. They are spooky.
Mary Norton’s books–Bedknob and Broomstick, and The Borrowers
I second Eager and Nesbit
Maybe Ruth Arthur later; her books can be very scary but are beautifully sensitive
Alexander Key

Regarding books for smart kids anyone want to talk about Harriet the Spy?

‘I want to know everything, everything,’ screeched Harriet suddenly, lying back and bouncing up and down on the bed. ‘Everything in the world, everything, everything. I will be a spy and know everything.’
…
‘What do you do, child? Listen at doors?’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet.
‘Well, I never,’ said the cook. ‘I think that’s bad manners.’
‘Ole Golly doesn’t. Ole Golly says find out everything you can cause life is hard enough even if you know a lot.’

s.b. 110th St.

No, no, no. “Psychopalian” is a state of mind that results from listening to an Alaskan form of political speech.

I did read a Swiftly Tilting Planet and was a bit irritated by the power of the right ancestry. I liked A Wind in the Door, especially the original idea to venture inside mitrochondria. Generally speaking I liekd and cuold even identify with Meg.

That said, did anybody else found child prodigy Charles Wallace super-annoying?

A sort of pre Wesley Crusher, only worse.

I think this is a good juvenile that is almost religious SF, as it has creatures that are almost god-like:

James Blish’s The Star Dwellers (1961) is a quality sci-fi novel (for younger readers) easily comparable to some of Heinlein’s juveniles. The plot is straightforward/predictable yet still engaging. Of course, Jack, our seventeen year old hero, saves the day! Unlike the best “alien encounter” sci-fi novels which convey a certain sense of convincing “reality,” The Star Dwellers demands the suspension of disbelief — but that’s not an issue since the short novel is clearly for younger readers.