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A Wrinkle in Time, well worth two Newbery medals | Books | guardian.co.uk

A Wrinkle in Time, well worth two Newbery medals

The inspiration Madeleine L'Engle's book provided for this year's winner, added to her own, makes a fitting tribute to a true children's classic

Madeleine L'Engle in 1946

Madeleine L'Engle in 1946

Writing yesterday about Rebecca Stead's Newbery medal win for When You Reach Me I was catapulted back to my 11-year-old self and my total adoration for Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Stead's heroine is engrossed in L'Engle's book, itself a Newbery winner published almost 50 years earlier, and according to reviews A Wrinkle in Time plays a large part in Stead's novel (I haven't read the Stead yet but it sounds fun and is on my ever-expanding list).

  1. A Wrinkle in Time (Puffin Modern Classics)
  2. by Madeleine L'Engle
  3. 208pp,
  4. Puffin Classics,
  5. £6.99
  1. Buy A Wrinkle in Time (Puffin Modern Classics) at the Guardian bookshop

Strangely, I'd reread A Wrinkle in Time only a couple of weeks ago, after spotting it in a secondhand bookshop complete with one of its follow-ups, A Wind in the Door, which I'd never read before. Having written previously about children's books that don't live up to an adult reread, I was slightly nervous about tackling such a favourite, but it was just as wonderful 19 years on and I can't believe I'd forgotten about it for so long.

Starting, Bulwer Lytton-esque, with "it was a dark and stormy night", L'Engle pitches us immediately into the world of Meg Murry, a bright, geeky, independent misfit who desperately misses her absent father, adores her "dumb" baby brother Charles Wallace and "hate[s] being an oddball". Meg is deliciously grumpy as a heroine, and Charles Wallace sweetly precocious and bossy – he's not actually stupid, he just didn't speak until he could do so in full sentences, and he's also psychic.

The stormy night whisks a strange old tramp, Mrs Whatsit, into the midnight kitchen where Meg, Charles and their mother are sipping cocoa, leaving them with the enigmatic statement that "there is such a thing as a tesseract". Their mother goes white: it turns out their father is missing because he's travelled through a wrinkle in time – a tesseract – to fight the evil dark Thing which is taking over the universe. "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," says Charles Wallace (told you he was precocious).

The children are quickly spirited away from the adults (essential to remove grown-ups from children's fiction as quickly as possible) by Mrs Who, Which and Whatsit, who actually turn out to be stars who gave up the fight against the dark Thing. After leaping around the universe a bit they end up at Camazotz, a terrifying planet where everything is regulated and regimented and the same, all controlled by IT, a disembodied brain which has Mr Murry in its power and quickly takes over Charles Wallace. The scene where he's in IT's control, his eyes twirling, a "revolting twitch" in his forehead, brought tears to my eyes just as it did as a child. "Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home," thinks Meg, disorganised, unruly, rude and called on to save the day. "Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you."

I hadn't realised A Wrinkle in Time was one of the most frequently banned/challenged books in the US (apparently a parent thinks it "undermines religious beliefs [by promoting] witchcraft, crystal balls, and demons", according to this report).

The Guardian's children's books editor Julia Eccleshare, in her obituary of L'Engle, tells us that L'Engle – an Episcopalian - was also attacked "for being too religious by the most secular of critics while ... being one of the authors most banned from Christian schools and libraries that regarded her brand of religion as deeply suspect".

Well, it's their loss – A Wrinkle in Time is, I think, one of the truly great children's books, and fully deserving both of its eight-million-and-counting sales, and its role in Stead's own win. The scope of the book feels so much larger than the 200-odd (fairly large-type) pages it encompasses:. "I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't,'" writes Cynthia Zarin in her New Yorker profile of L'Engle. I'm happy to say I'm one of them.

alison

Posted by Alison Flood Tuesday 19 January 2010 15.07 GMT guardian.co.uk

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A Wrinkle in Time, well worth two Newbery medals

This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 15.07 GMT on Tuesday 19 January 2010. It was last modified at 15.07 GMT on Tuesday 19 January 2010.

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ImogenRW

ImogenRW

19 Jan 2010, 3:31PM

Contributor

Contributor

Hot dog! I look forward to reading When You Reach Me. LOVE the Newbery!

It's very annoying that I read A Wrinkle In Time too late, and was torn between love of Charles Wallace, the tesseracts and ball-bouncing in perfect unison (which I thought was a fantastic visual metaphor for totalitarianism) and the religious bits, which made me feel slightly queasy. A bit like reading Narnia as an adult when you already know that all the naughty animals are going to Hell in Aslan's shadow, whereas as a child you're swept away by imaginative writing and don't have a throat-clearing commentator on your shoulder .

Alas. I am the second type of girl!

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    spore

    spore

    19 Jan 2010, 5:24PM

    Frankly I always thought A Wrinkle in Time was hideously overrated. Good YA books explore their themes thoughtfully instead of offering crappy soundbites ('Free will good! Conformity bad! Baaa! Baaa!'). And as for the settings, well - crossing dimensions and galaxies to find an 'alien' world where everyone speaks English and things look suspiciously like 60's suburban America takes the Anglocentric cake.

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    spauff

    spauff

    19 Jan 2010, 5:59PM

    Madeleine L'Engle is one of my favorite YA authors -- I read A Wind in the Door to pieces when I was 12. I also like A Ring of Endless Light and Camilla. I like how she writes about science, fantasy and religion in her books. I think sometimes characters with strong faith in God/a higher power can be portrayed as less than intelligent, but all of her characters are both spiritual and bright.
    I'm going to have to check out When You Reach Me!

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    AlisonFlood

    AlisonFlood

    20 Jan 2010, 11:02AM

    Staff

    Staff

    Really spore? I'm surprised...I didn't find the free will/conformity battle to be a crappy soundbite at all, although I see what you mean about crossing galaxies to a world where everyone speaks English etc. What are your recommendations for good YA books, in that case?

    spauff, yes, I'm going to order When You Reach Me this week, and I really hadn't realised how much else L'Engle wrote, I'm going to have to catch up on it all.

    Imogen - sad that you are the second type!

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    outofideas

    outofideas

    25 Jan 2010, 2:28PM

    Really spore? I'm surprised...I didn't find the free will/conformity battle to be a crappy soundbite at all, although I see what you mean about crossing galaxies to a world where everyone speaks English etc. What are your recommendations for good YA books, in that case?

    I can't speak for spore, but I do completely share his/her opinions, and my answer to that question is The Once and Future King. I didn't hate A Wrinkle in Time, but The Once and Future King, for me, was a defining book. It tackled the big things without giving any easy answers, but saying that was okay. Not that I've reread it recently, I'll be honest).

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