Book Review: Dragons in the Waters

Title: Dragons in the Waters

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux

Date: 1976

ISBN: 0-374-31868-9

Length: 293 pages

Quote: “The Quiztano gift for healing was widely known throughout the peninsula. Indians…brought their injured or desperately ill people to Dragonlake.”

This is one of the sequels to A Wrinkle in Time in which Meg and Calvin appear in the background, as parents, but the story is mostly about their children. It’s not about time travel; it’s another of the offbeat murder mysteries L’Engle was writing at this period, with teenaged characters in the foreground and adults as helpers, victims, and murderers.

The O’Keefes are going to Dragonlake, a fictional historic lake in Venezuela, to study the effects pollution is having on its renowned healing waters. So is Simon Renier, who’s been invited to travel with his Cousin Forsyth Phair as Cousin Forsyth goes to restore one of Simon’s ancestors’ portrait of Simon Bolivar to a museum in Caracas. Polyhymnia and Charles O’Keefe are about the same age as Simon, and the three teenagers quickly become friends after two of them are accidentally knocked off the dock by a speeding forklift as they wait to board the freighter on which they’ll be sailing through the Caribbean.

The adults’ relationships are more complex. The other adults are older than the O’Keefes and the ship’s crew; the story is imagined as taking place in a fictional future time that was close to 1976, and sea travel is still a luxury usually indulged in by retirees. These retirees have not, however, outgrown their sinful passions. One nice grandpa type is a thief. One nice retired teacher used to think she was in love with a smuggler and went to jail to protect him. Forsyth Phair seems oddly attached to the painting and, as they get further from Simon’s family, oddly un-attached to his young cousin. Some people on the ship are smugglers. Someone keeps trying to push Simon overboard, and when the ship gets to Caracas one of the adults has been found in a shipped car—a hearse—with a knife in his back.

The mystery of who killed him has a logical solution. The mystery of why Simon needed to go to Venezuela has a more spiritual solution. L’Engle was a Christian, though in this book she was trying not to be narrow-minded about it. The Quiztanos have their own religion; a fictional religion for a fictional tribe. A minority of the Quiztanos belong to a religious community who still live in huts on stilts around Lago de los Dragones, study modern and traditional medicine, and help sick people. A majority, we’re told, engage in criminal activity in the city. Simon, White though he is, inherited a certain connection to this tribe that causes some of the violent ones to want to kill him even before the nice ones can decide whether they want to adopt him.

Since it’s a mystery I should probably not explain how Simon’s favorite great-aunt, who refused to travel with him at the beginning of the book, comes to join him beside the lake at the end. I will say that the conversations between Aunt Leonis Phair and the tribal elders expressed an aspect of L’Engle’s faith that was important to her, though fashionable in 1976 and decried as “New Age” syncretism later. Most Christians, I think, will agree that a certain sense of morality and spirituality is hard-wired into humanity and can even be mapped on the brain. All religions agree on the basics. The Quiztano healers cherish an old “goddess” image—an idol!—and pray in words that don’t mention Christ or Christianity. Simon, whose idea of prayer at his current age is still “God, I wish I believed in You,” and Aunt Leonis, who is a devout Christian (probably Episcopalian, like L’Engle), endorse this non-Christian religion and say, on their second day in the religious community, that they’ve heard nothing incompatible with their beliefs. Some Christians love these scenes. L’Engle reprinted them in nonfiction books where she wrote more directly about what she believed. Some people hate them, whether because they feature two wise, good, older people who are Christians or because they feature two wise, good, older people who are not Christians. As a result some public libraries have refused to add this volume to the other Wrinkle in Time books; it didn’t sell well, and can be hard to find. 

I think it's helpful to know that even the original Bible writers couldn't always draw a clear line between the truth and the sinful idolatry in non-Abrahamic religion. English translations of stories that distinguished between "the Lord" and "Baal" blur the historical fact that baal meant "lord" in Hebrew and the original texts used it to refer to both the One God and the fragmented, often destructive, lesser male-gods of the other Semitic tribes who practiced sinful idolatry. The prayers and songs in the Old Testament were also similar to those of the idolatrous Baal cults. To the careless observer most Semitic religious ceremonies must have looked very much alike. Only God could judge people's faith.