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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
My copy was blue. The book was a small Scholastic paperback, and on the cover was a trio of pale-green concentric circles. They looked like radio waves, or the kind of design you could get by fiddling around with a Spirograph set. In one of the circles was the silhouette of a girl, and, in another, a matching image of a little boy.
The book was "A Wrinkle in Time," by Madeleine L'Engle. Published in 1962, it is--depending on how you look at it--science fiction, a warm tale of family life, a response to the Cold War, a book about a search for a father, a feminist tract, a religious fable, a coming-of-age novel, a work of Satanism, or a prescient meditation on the future of the United States after the Kennedy assassination. When I first read it, in 1967, at the age of eight, I was innocent of any of this, and I had no idea that the story was also about the author. The girl in the circle was her childhood self, lostand lonely in space. But for L'Engle, even more than for Meg Murry, who with her brother Charles Wallace is travelling, according to my edition's back-flap copy, "through a wrinkle in time, to the deadly unknown terrors beyond the tesseract!," it had been even more perilous, because she had no grave, precocious little boy to accompany her. I knew even less that those closest to Madeleine L'Engle considered her science fiction to be the least fantastical of her more than fifty books, which, in addition to her novels, include poetry, meditations, and memoirs.
I once asked L'Engle to define "science fiction." She replied, "Isn't everything?" On another occasion, in the vast, sunny apartment in a building on West End Avenue where she has lived since 1960, and where she and her late husband, the actor Hugh Franklin, brought up their three children, she offered an example. "I was standing right there, carrying a plate of cold cuts," she said, pointing at a swinging door between the dining room and the pantry. "And I swooped into the pantry, bang, and got a black eye. It was exactly as if someone pushed me." At eighty-five, L'Engle is a formidable figure. She is five feet nine in her stocking feet, and uses a wheelchair owing to a broken hip. She has a birdlike head, a sharp nose, and an air of helpless innocence that is almost entirely put on. She wore a loose-fitting dress in one of her favorite colors, peacock blue. "Most likely," she continued firmly, "it was a poltergeist. There must have been a teen-age girl in the house. All that energy! They create the best atmosphere for them, you know. We don't know how to catch and harness it." She nodded. "Too true of most things."
"A Wrinkle in Time" is about Meg Murry and her little brother Charles Wallace, and their search for their father, who has disappeared. Meg and Charles Wallace live in a big, drafty New England house on a wooded hill. Meg, at about twelve, is untidy, unattractive, temperamental, and surly at school. She fights with the school bully, who makes rude remarks about Charles Wallace, who, according to the village gossips, "is not quite bright." She bridles at whispers that her father may not come back, even though she knows he will: her mother, a brilliant, beautiful scientist, has told her so. And she knows there's nothing wrong with Charles Wallace. He is a small, blond, preternaturally intelligent four-year-old, who was silent until he began to speak in complete, complicated sentences. He also has second sight.
The book opens on a stormy night. "I knew you'd be down," Charles Wallace says to Meg as midnight nears. There is a strange sound at the kitchen door, and, when Mrs. Murry opens it, in tumbles a very old, cheerful woman who accepts a sandwich, and leaves just as suddenly, in a heave of drenched outer garments, saying in a by-the-by sort of way, "There is such a thing as a tesseract."
Mrs. Murry blanches. Before Mr. Murry disappeared, the two of them had been playing around with a way to square the fourth dimension. Or, as Charles Wallace explains to Meg:
Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.
The next day, Meg and Charles Wallace hike into the woods in search of the woman, and run into an older, popular boy from school named Calvin O'Keefe, who has no idea why he has come to their wood, except that, as he puts it, "When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me." (Calvin is psychic, too. In L'Engle's "The Arm of the Starfish," Meg and Calvin surface again, grown up--Calvin's a biologist, studying regeneration theory; he and Meg are married, and they have a daughter called Polyhymnia.)
The three children are taken in hand by the visitor, Mrs. Whatsit, and her two weird sisters, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, who turn out not to be kind old ladies but, rather, the corporeal emanation of stars who gave up their lives fighting the Dark Thing, which threatens to overcome the universe. Mrs. Whatsit is sensible; Mrs. Who is given to quoting--Cervantes, Goethe, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Jesus; Mrs. Which stammers. They have come to help the children find their father, who, after working in New Mexico and "at Cape Canaveral," is lost in space. Off they go, leapfrogging from one galaxy to another until they land on Camazotz, where life is so regulated that children bounce their balls in unison.
Their father is here. They must descend into the town to find him. Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and...
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