read by Jennifer Ehle
Here’s another book review that has to start with a
confession: I was never especially fond of A Wrinkle In Time. It was a good
book, in my opinion, just scary enough and with some interesting science-fictiony concepts
and scenes in it. I get why people love it so much. But it never really did it
for me. I only ever read it once, until I had a kid of my own and read it to
them. And I only read it even that one time, as a kid, because it was by the
same author as A Wind in the Door.
I *loved* A Wind in the Door. I lived it, over and over and
over again. I absorbed it. It became part of me in a way that books just don’t
do anymore once you’re past your formative years. Reading it again, now, for
the first time in decades, I was struck by how certain scenes and even certain
phrases, though I didn’t consciously remember them, struck such a chord of
familiarity and happiness that it was almost like reuniting with a long-lost
and much beloved grandparent. The characters felt like long-lost family.
Rereading this book was an intensely emotional experience—surprisingly so.
Meg Murry is our protagonist; she’s a bright, argumentative,
and complaint-prone high-schooler who lacks confidence in her looks and is
intensely loyal to friends and family (though she constantly questions
everything they say). She’s the oldest Murry child; the middle kids are a pair
of socially well-adapted twins, Sandy and Dennys, who play fairly minor roles
in this book, and her baby brother, Charles Wallace, around whom the plot
revolves.
Charles Wallace is a genius, the brightest of a very bright
family. At age 6, he has a better vocabulary than most adults. He gets beaten
up regularly at school because he’s so different—and it turns out he’s also
seriously ill, with a disease that, coincidentally, his microbiologist mother
happens to be studying.
Proginoskes is a singular cherubim, a creature not of
this plane who materializes, when he does, as a great ball of hundreds of wings
with winking eyes set amongst them, emitting the occasional spurt of flame or
puff of smoke. He's haughty and pedantic—but so would you be, probably, if it were your job to know the name of every star in the universe. His unbelievable appearance on the Murry property (they seem to
live on a tremendous plot of rural land, though in other parts of the country their acreage is probably pretty standard) is what sets events in motion.
Meg, Charles Wallace, Proginoskes, and Meg’s personable and protective friend, Calvin O’Keefe, are soon united as students of a Teacher, an enormous and
all-knowing humanoid being named Blajeny. For me, the biggest surprise
of this reading was that I’d completely forgotten about Blajeny, as he
directs the kids and sets them their tests and basically moves them all like
somewhat-willful chess pieces. He’s hugely important to the plot—and yet he’d
gone completely out of my mind.
My theory is that this is because he isn’t really a
character—he’s more of a god-like force. He doesn’t seem to have much
personality, other than an idealized-but-dim fatherliness. He matters tremendously, but he doesn't really feel real.
In any case, our intrepid protagonists discover the nature
of Charles Wallace’s illness, and that it threatens not only him but, somehow,
the entire universe. So of course they set out to save the world. Hijinks
ensue.
I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the plot for you. I will
say that this is metaphysical fiction on par, for its intended audience of
tweens, with the Narnia books and with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
trilogy. The nature of free will, the meaning and importance of love, the
unimportance of time and distance—all that is discussed, at length, in terms
any 5th-grader could understand. There’s a lot more religious content here than
I realized when I was the target audience, but it’s thoughtful and
life-affirming.
If you’ve never read this book, you should. Either to your
kids, if you have them, or to yourself. It’s definitely aimed at a young
audience, but it’s magical and scientific and universe-spanning enough to
enchant almost anyone.
