Book Review: A Wrinkle in Time

Title: A Wrinkle in Time

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Date: 1963

Publisher: (for the reprint shown) Square Fish

ISBN (for the reprint): 978-1250004673

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “IT sometimes calls ITself The Happiest Sadist.”

As with so many other books, the question becomes: Is the book really like the million-seller Disney movie? And the answer is, “Much better.”

At least Madeleine L’Engle, during her lifetime, had given permission to a screenwriter to make a movie based on Wrinkle. (The fact that Disney finally sank a tentacle into Narnia, after Walter Hooper’s death, continues to be an irony overload for those who remember Lewis’s comments on Sleeping Beauty.)

There are some aspects of Wrinkle that worked all right in the book, but could profitably be changed for the movie. In the book there’s a smell-dominant planet where the native creatures don’t see much, and what the human visitors see is boring. How would that work in a movie?

In the book, not only the Murrys and O’Keefes, but their whole school and town, are relentlessly White. Middle-class and rich families have English or Scottish names, like Murry and Jenkins. Poorer families have Irish names, like O’Keefe. Madeleine L’Engle had lived in Europe and gone to enough international gatherings to be able to write stories that revel in multicultural richness, but the New England village where Meg and Calvin live is, like one where L’Engle used to live, too far inland even to have attracted Portuguese fishermen. There’s no particular reason for a movie version to keep that detail. Movies, especially the ones that star child actors, need to be able to use whatever physical type the most suitable actor of the season happens to be. A biracial Black-looking Meg Murry is a switch for book readers who remember that the Murrys and O’Keefes have either red or brown hair, but it does the story no harm.

Other changes go deeper and work to the movie’s detriment. I remember discovering A Wrinkle in Time pretty well. It’s not just another story about the kind of ordinary social bullying that goes on in all middle schools.

What Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace (middle school girl, high school boy, and primary school boy) have in common is genius-level I.Q.’s. What L’Engle made clear in the follow-up volumes is that all of them become real geniuses whose adult lives are full of impossible adventures in hypothetical spiritual “dimensions” of the universe. The three space aliens who introduce them to that realm, and some other aliens they meet in other stories, are what L’Engle thought angels might be, if angels are: creatures from other worlds who are involved in the same cosmic conflict that dominates Wrinkle. This made the original Wrinkle in Time a work of Christian Mythology, like Tolkien’s or C.S. Lewis’s science-fiction-fantasy stories. Exactly what the Bible meant by telling Christians “Ye are gods” is a matter of debate, but seeing their mutual mental/emotional/spiritual challenge played out in multidimensional space makes the Murry and O’Keefe children mythological “gods,” apprentice angels, beings who sail in and rescue entire alien worlds in times of spiritual crisis. The three alien “ladies” who guide the children through this initiatory adventure are mature angels.

So Meg is not an ordinary middle school girl having ordinary middle school social problems. She doesn’t relate to her classmates at all. Boys brawl, girls snub; girls like Meg don’t have school friends, or even individual school enemies. Normal children who were born in the same year Meg was are not her “peers,” and never will be. Kids like Meg and Charles Wallace, who don’t have outstanding looks, athletic talent, or musical talent to deflect attention from how different they are in other ways, stick out like sore thumbs in the public school system. They accept this. It takes its toll: the series that grows out of Wrinkle follows Meg Murry up to young-grandmother age and never mentions her having a close female friend. But it means that the school problems that concern Meg and Charles Wallace involve adults who don’t understand them. Other kids they can ignore, unless the hostility becomes physical. Teachers (or, for some kids who are even less lucky, parents) who want them to fit in with a group of no-talents are the real hazards to their sanity—and to their spirituality. In the book the children’s crisis is spiritual.

In the books Meg is a lot smarter and more mature than Principal Jenkins; in the second volume, A Wind in the Door, her task is to rescue him from the Evil Principle Itself. He’s older than her parents but still a paltry soul, a no-talent loser, not only unfit to make decisions for the Murry children but barely competent to make them for himself.

This may not be the way the N.E.A. wants children’s books to characterize school employees but it was not unlike the way my generation of his relatives saw the principal at my school—a party boss and school principal but never an elected official, not a perfect school administrator either, a heavy drinker, teetering on the edge of being worse than a no-talent, a Failure. There were, and there still are, children who appreciate having their relationships with school employees validated by reading about Meg’s unnatural relationship to Principal Jenkins. Children like Meg and Charles Wallace are a distinct minority in real life but they're much more numerous there than they there are in children’s literature, and they need the Murrys the way L’Engle wrote the Murrys.

Other children may not get the point of Meg’s strangely frequent, and strangely collegial, encounters with the principal at the school where she’s a student; this is not the way even graduate students normally relate to college deans. Other kids may find it easier to relate to a story about a normal ordinary girl who looks up to adults and reacts to all the little social drama about which other children are “friends.” Gifted children can relate to a story about a gifted girl who probably doesn’t even see one classmate as different from another one, half the time, and whose school anxiety is all about whether school employees’ efforts to “normalize” her and her brother’s school experience will do them real damage. Gifted children understand why neither Meg nor Charles Wallace, nor even their more athletic and popular brothers, even mentions a school friend or enemy by name. In real life girls like Meg probably do know their classmates’ names, may even claim a “friend” to sit beside when they have to sit beside somebody, but when they walk out of the classroom, no thought of their classmates crosses their minds.

A Wrinkle in Time was written in the mid-twentieth century. School personnel generally were trying to believe that peace would be achieved through conformity, mental health through “normality.” Children like Meg and Charles Wallace, and their parents, were being told that growing up as “loners” would probably mean growing up insane, that even destroying their talents in hope of “fitting in” might be preferable to...what, in fact, mid-twentieth-century psychiatry really did lead to. The people who popped tranquillizers to relieve anxiety in the 1950s became the twitching psychotic homeless population of the 1980s. The “loners” can still point out our emotional scars but we are, by and large, alive and sane...But let’s just say that if L’Engle had written A Wrinkle in Time as just another story where Meg is an ordinary little girl who cares what’s wrong with a bully who has a name and was probably claiming to be Meg’s friend last week, I wouldn’t have read all of the follow-up stories as they came out.

A Wrinkle in Time is not about conflict between Meg and Jenkins. It starts out that way, but that conflict resolves when the alien visitors take Meg and the boys into space and show them the Dark Shadows taking over planets. It’s not about whether Meg and wossname can be friends, it’s not even about whether Meg and Principal Jenkins liiike each other; it’s about a cosmic Good Principle, which, for L’Engle, recognized individual creatures by name, and a cosmic Evil Principle, which, for L’Engle, began with conformity. For L’Engle, spiritual evil began with the regimentation by numbering students that she described in And Both Were Young, and culminated with goose-stepping Youth Soldiers shoving dissidents into prison camps. That’s the point of the children seeing Earth in the Dark Shadow and listing Jesus, followed by a longish list of genius humans, as keeping the light burning on Earth. They’re being shown that it’s not about whether people “like” each other, but whether they can reject Jenkins’ bad ideas, as bad ideas, without necessarily having to reject Jenkins as a person.

Disney obviously wanted to dumb Wrinkle back down to an ordinary school social drama. This could have been plausibly done by cutting out Meg’s and Charles Wallace’s special problem-student relationship with Jenkins, but apparently it’s been done by trying to recast Jenkins as some sort of father-substitute in whom Meg is specially interested because her own father is a Missing Person. Apparently in the movie Principal Jenkins is wiser and nicer, as well as younger and better looking, than he is in the books. (The books frequently mention how weary and worried he is.) This is undoubtedly good for the actor involved, and probably good for child viewers who might have needed to see that The Principal Can Be Your Best Pal...but it’s a loss for those child viewers who needed to read that You Must Ignore False Teachers In Order To Help Them, which is what L’Engle wrote.

What I learned from my real-world experience as a Problem Student who knew the principal far too well is different from what Meg learns, and, again, arguably a more valuable lesson for more children. I wasn’t a blazing genius like Meg and didn’t grow up to be an angel (in the L’Engle sense—Meg has a long, apparently healthy mortal life along with her spiritual adventures). I grew up to be an adult, to see the principal not only as other relatives of his vintage saw him but as other people in the community saw him. I came to realize that although I remembered the principal as a Rotten Nut on a Distant Limb of the Family Tree, as someone who scolded my brother and me just as bitterly and whacked us just as hard as anyone else and then called us by our given names in front of people he’d paddled more recently, in some ways he had been an admirable principal. He’d rallied the team to win all those competitions against bigger and richer schools, defended old teachers for whom “real” retirement meant death, championed brain-damaged students’ right to be educated at all. If he could have done more with what he was given in life, he could certainly have done less. That’s not the story L’Engle had to tell, either.

So, leaving Jenkins aside for the moment, the children whirl off into space to rescue Meg’s father. Meg’s immediate task is to forget Jenkins, which is easy, and focus on loving her own men, which is harder as Charles Wallace almost succumbs to the evil compulsion of IT.

A side plot, which Disney probably can’t resist giving too much attention but which L’Engle played down admirably in the book, is the question of whether girls like Meg can expect to find boyfriends. This is not a concern for Meg in the book but it was a concern for some middle school readers, who were being told, at the time, that their vocation was to have babies and their primary task was to find mates. In the 1960s girls were still being told, “If you are undeniably ‘smart,’ at least hide it, because men want to be ‘smarter’ than the women they marry.” Relatively few girls had the fortitude to reply to that with “Whatever made you think I wanted to marry anyone?” Who, after all, wanted to do a pink-collar job forever when she could stay home and live on her husband’s income?

Once again, L’Engle had a good, true answer. L’Engle was not considered a great beauty, yet she had a long-term satisfactory marriage (the Two-Part Invention) to a handsome TV star. Shared adventures, more mundane than those in Wrinkle, drew them together the way time travel draws Meg and Calvin together in the books. L’Engle never wrote about their romance. She gave them one more apprentice-angel adventure, then skipped forward, in the third story, to the adventures their family have after Meg and Calvin are married. In real life introverts who bond by sharing their passions aren’t often so sure at such an early age as Meg and Calvin, but Hollywood movie buffs would be surprised how much height, glasses, money, etc., don’t matter.

The third and worst piece of damage Disney did to the book was changing Camazotz, the fully shadowed planet where Mr. Murry has been trapped. Camazotz is so fully controlled by the Evil Principle that all its inhabitants’ minds are psychically enslaved to IT, which L’Engle elsewhere explained as “intellectual thought” as opposed to spirituality, the sort of intellectualism that thinks spirituality can be ignored. IT reposes in state in a huge laboratory complex from which its pulsating rhythm is broadcast around its planet, causing all the children’s balls to bounce at the same pace. The laboratory is, of course, in a city. The people live in the suburbs. Rural and wild landscapes, like Meg’s rural home, are always good places in L’Engle’s fiction, and there aren’t any noticeable rural or wild landscapes on Camazotz.

The vision of Camazotz centered around a giant psychiatric laboratory was a good metaphor for mid-twentieth-century conformist thinking, the fear of all differences leading to “maladjustment” and thence to insanity. If anything this vision has become more relevant today. Meg and Charles Wallace were socially bullied with “You’ll die alone on psychiatric wards if you don’t learn to fit into a crowd”; today’s children who do well at math but not English or geography, or who aren’t interested in listening to yet another review of what they learned five years ago, are likely to be told outright that they have psychiatric problems, and ordered to take pills that may do real damage to their brains. Today, instead of those nasty conversations with Principal Jenkins, Meg would probably be on drugs for Attention Deficiency Disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome, and if her parents protested that she did very well without medication when working with a few competent adults and no so-called “peer group,” they’d be told that “denying her right to medical care” was abusive. IT is closer to ruling us from the psychiatric institution than it was...

But there are those who want to teach children to fear the great outdoors and imagine that they’re “safe” in windowless cubicles in cities, so in the movie version IT apparently had to be transferred to a beautiful beach scene...bah, humbug. IT would not have been at home, and probably would not have survived, on a beach full of distinct starfish, each one of whom L’Engle’s Good Principle knew by name.

These shortcomings of the movie version form a pattern. L’Engle knew about being a gifted child, and had things to say to other gifted children. Disneyfication, as so many times before, cuts out that special for-readers-from-writer value, dumb down, flattens out, rewrites the story for a lowest-common-denominator audience. Disneyfication makes Meg an ordinary child whose real problem is an ordinary school problem, whose time-travel adventure might be a dream. L’Engle seriously intended Meg to be, if not a literal role model, at least a metaphor for the Christian as spiritual warrior—as apprentice angel.

So, as usual when reviewing books that have been made into Disney movies, I could almost type “Fiftieth verse, same as the first.” Disney makes good family-friendly movies—but the books are always much better than the movies.

Copies of Wrinkle aren't hard to find, and as Madeleine L'Engle is no longer in a dimension that receives payments for the sale of Fair Trade Books, there's no particular reason why you need to buy this book from this web site rather than some other source. It's a Newbery book; it should be in the public library. You can, however, buy a copy here to support this web site, for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. (Paypal buttons will be coming soon.) At least three books of similar size to the hardcover, more if you'll take the paperback edition, will fit into one $5 package. You could order all five of the Time Quintet novels where Meg appears "onstage," or mix Wrinkle in with vintage books by living authors whom we could encourage with Fair Trade Book payments.