Review: A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Phoebe 6799 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2011%2F07%2F29%2Freview-a-swiftly-tilting-planet-by-madeleine-lengle%2FReview%3A+A+Swiftly+Tilting+Planet+by+Madeleine+L%27Engle2011-07-29+19%3A35%3A39Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D679

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
Um. Duh. Recommended.

I can’t really claim that this will be a “review,” not really. Reviews require a certain degree of (admittedly sometimes false) objectivity, and I suspect that I’m physically incapable of being objective in regards to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet and my favorite book ever. I’ve read it at least a dozen times in the past decade and a half. I own multiple copies (all with the same cover, with Charles Wallace in bell bottomed jeans with feathered hair). In middle school, when I played Japanese RPGs on my Super Nintendo, I always named my characters Gaudi and Anand, because Gaudior and Ananda would not fit. In fact, were I to ever have a daughter, I would name her Ananda, except my husband says that you can’t name a girl after a dog, even a fictional dog. Fine then. But, you know, I love this book—it’s an integral part of my internal narrative, my history. So keep in mind that any analysis or criticism you find here is forced. I just really adore it. I keep expecting to reread it and suddenly find it less magical, to finally be totally over unicorns and witch hunts and Chuck, old dear Chuck. But that never happens. I hope it never will.

Last night’s spontaneous rereading—in the face of all these ARCs—was inspired by a conversation with Sean, who asked me yesterday to tell him what my favorite book was at age fourteen. Then I saw this post from Sam at parenthetical.net asking which authors are best remembered for the wrong book. The answer, to me, is one and the same, and had me reaching for my bookshelf, for that old well-worn paperback with the green-edged pages. Madeleine L’Engle is best known for her first volume in the series, A Wrinkle in Time. While I appreciate many things about that book, it’s slight, both in terms of length and concept. Sure, I adore awkward Meg, Fortinbras, spooky little Charles Wallace Murry and redheaded genius hottie Calvin O’Keefe. But that novel only hints at the complexity you’ll find here, the atmospheric depth, the danger and the magic. By the time it all wraps up—too quickly, I think—with a floating, talking brain and the power of love, my interest totally wanes. No matter how many peaceable singing aliens L’Engle crams into the denouement.

In fact, my feelings range from lukewarm to pretty awful about the other three books in the Murry saga. A Wind in the Door has never managed to rouse any emotion in me at all. I’ve never done more than skim Many Waters (I’m really not a fan of the twins). And when I finally got around to reading An Acceptable Time during an independent study in graduate school, both my professor and I agreed that it was entirely too focused on what made the other books in the series bad—stereotyped portrayal of native “pagan” populations, and ham-fisted conversations about the applicability of Christianity in a pre-Christ era.

But this book. Oh, this book.

I guess it has its flaws. There’s that embarrassing scene where an American Indian rides a dolphin. L’Engle’s language, though generally beautiful, can be a bit driving and repetitive. And this is the book where Meg starts to suck—she spends most of it beslippered and pregnant, at home while Charles Wallace goes on adventures. In fact, both Murry kids are fairly passive vessels for a more interesting plot, though I’ll discuss why that’s not precisely problematic shortly.

I think the way that this book first won me over as a teen was via its language. I was a sucker for setting even then, and the Murry homestead is an absolutely gorgeous, perfectly realized place, the kind of house I still seek out now (hmm . . . I currently live in a house built in 1780. I wonder if the Murrys have something to do with that). Their warm, ramshackle home is filled with musty smells and dusty descriptions: threadbare curtains in Meg’s attic bedroom, the scents of a Thanksgiving feast cooked over a Bunsen burner.

And the Murry family is really quite perfect—the twins, irritating though they are, are perfectly brotherly, teasing and yammering and brilliant. Charles Wallace and his father sit on the sidelines putting together a model of a tesseract. And Meg frets over the presence of her mother-in-law, who was introduced in the first novel as an abusive, hideous wretch. The woman is silent through most of the meal, right up until Meg’s father receives a phone call from the president, warning him of impending nuclear war.

Suddenly, something changes in Mrs. O’Keefe. She recites a rune, a poetic incantation meant to ward off evil spirits. As the house is wracked by winds, and as the electricity goes out, the scientifically-minded Murry clan regards her with skepticism. But not Charles Wallace.

Charles was mostly a cipher in earlier books, a bit creepy, somewhat otherworldly. His fatal flaw is his pride, and we still see hints of that here, though he’s grown to be a touch more grounded in his adolescence. Still, he’s more open to the forces of the unknown than his siblings. He and Meg share a psychic link, for one thing. And he’s seen so many unusual things in his fifteen years. He hardly seems to blink when, later that night, he goes outside, recites the rune, and a unicorn appears to help him travel through time.

Oh, I know. A unicorn But Gaudior isn’t like that. Though he’s beautiful, and magical, this isn’t a wishy washy Lisa Frank kind of creature. This is a guardian of the light—he’s stoic, sarcastic, wise. Unicorns are serious business in L’Engle’s universe. And this book takes them seriously even when they’re drinking moonlight and hatching out of enormous eggs.

This gravity is there at the outset, clearly transmitted through L’Engle’s stunning prose. Like here, when Charles Wallace first summons the creature:

There was no moon, but starlight touched the winter grasses with silver. The woods behind the rock were a dark shadow. Charles Wallace looked across the valley, across the dark ridge of pines, to the shadows of the hills beyond. Then he threw back his head and called,
“In this fateful hour
I call on all Heaven with its power!”

The book proceeds from there, taking the same epic, mythical, and utterly poetic tone as the premise is established: Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior travel through time. Gaudior helps Charles Wallace go “Within,” jumping into the bodies of various members of one genetic line to help gently nudge the timeline away from nuclear destruction on a global scale.

These stories initially build slowly. The first two really just establish place, and premise. Charles Wallace goes Within, and Meg stays at home, psychically linked with her brother in her attic bedroom. But then Charles Wallace enters the body of Brandon Llawcae, and the story suddenly grows in both scope and depth. Each of the three tales that follow could almost stand on their own—the story of a Pilgrim family and a witch hunt; the tale of Mrs. O’Keefe and her mid-century family broken by poverty; and the saga of Matthew Maddox and his twin brother Bran, whose actions will ultimately decide the fate of the world.

These tales are short, but deep—rich with emotional intensity, darkness, and stirring thematics. None of them are particularly YA, though some feature an adolescent character. Characters are stunningly well-defined, despite their great number and often-similar names. The story of Mrs. O’Keefe—Beezie, as she’s known as a girl—and her brother Chuck is particularly tragic and, despite shades of psychic ability (all of the magic here is obscure in origin and precise detail; for a story with a unicorn, it’s really more of a surreal mix of magical realism and sci-fi than fantasy), it’s really very grounded in real life. And it’s heartbreaking. Whereas in the early books in the Time Quintet, Mrs. O’Keefe is really only present to provide a convenient tragedy to prove Calvin’s depth, A Swiftly Tilting Planet forces us to empathize with her, to see her heroism and tragedy despite the fact that she’s also later an old hag who beats her kids.

And she’s really, truly our hero, as clearly explained by the novel’s conclusion. It would be easy to cite this volume as the beginning of L’Engle’s failure as a feminist writer. This is where Meg buckles down, becomes domesticated. Later, we’ll learn that she’s given up a career entirely for fear of making her daughters jealous as her own beautiful, successful mother did to her. But Meg’s still vital in this book, and, more, the entire thesis of the novel seems to be that no matter the tragedy or pain or ordinariness that defines the bulk of your life, it’s really the small acts of heroism which define you. And in that light, I don’t doubt for a second that L’Engle thought Meg—and even Mrs. O’Keefe—truly heroic.

Moreover, Charles Wallace finally truly grows in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. His character and flaws are fairly static in the earlier books in this series. He’s spooky, prescient, precocious, and entirely too proud. He begins the novel this way, too, but his relationship with Gaudior, and the trials they face, teach him to be humble. It’s a very Taoist book in this way—Charles Wallace’s journey is all about learning to be passive, to accept the whims of the forces of good, to resist acting out of pride. I can understand how this message might frustrate modern readers of YA, who are more accustomed to heroes spurred to action, but I can’t deny that I feel there’s a valuable lesson about a different type of heroism here—or deny that I pretty much adore Charles Wallace as a character.

Which is one of the reasons I’ll never forgive Madeleine L’Engle. Charles is absent from subsequent novels. He’s gone off to work for the government, as his father once did—by An Acceptable Time, he seems to be gone for good, which once seemed true for her father, too. Before her death, L’Engle implied that he was alive somewhere–she just didn’t know where. I’m not surprised in that. One of the features I most love about the Time Quintet generally is that they’re from disparate points in the family’s narrative. This makes them feel a little bit more like slices out of someone’s real life than preconceived stories. But that makes me worried, in a very real, childish way. L’Engle didn’t write about Charles Wallace’s fate before she died. Does that mean he was lost the the Echthroi? I sure hope not. Instead, I’d like to imagine—and hope—that he’s still out there somewhere, fighting the darkness.

View all my reviews