A Wrinkle in Time

I have “known” since elementary school that I read A Wrinkle in Time and “loved it”. I think/thought that I read it at least twice. Then, a couple of weeks ago I had a notion that I could bond with Teresa’s grandson, a fifth grader, by reading AWIT together with him. I figured that the book must still be a good choice if Disney made a movie out of it. But then after I brought it up with the child and experienced his very polite but noncommittal responses to the idea, the reality of the times dawned on me:

• He has no enthusiasm for reading
• He has plenty of other activities to do and relatives to bond with.

Maybe I should just read it to him? So I read a couple pages from the book and wondered if the vocabulary would be too much work. So I decided I’d better read the book first and having done that, here I am writing this screed. First thought: Did I really read this or was it some of post traumatic implanted memory? Literally only one page of the book, very near the end, rang a bell with me.

But now, book completed,I can believe that I read it a couple times if only because of the Charles Wallace character, a genius kindergartner with neither filter nor humility, who I, as another Charles, always the smallest kid in my class, nicknamed “the walking encyclopedia”, could relate to and admire. Another aspect of the book I can imagine loving (at age 10?) is how pedantic it is. How Mrs Who can’t resist dropping literary quotations (on at least six occasions), for example, Spinoza, in the original Spanish then smugly translated. Or how the “tessering” (teleporting/time travelling) plot device has its basis in geometry, that characters are traveling by “wrinkling the time dimension” which is possible because the structure of reality is a tesseract (and there are illustrations that go along with the explanation). That’s the sorta stuff I think would have been catnip to me as a kid, and I probably wandered around explained tesseracts to other kids, or really I just felt smug that I could explain what a tesseract is.

What follows are a bunch of incoherent observations that don’t go anywhere. But I will revisit them.

Wow this book is dated (published 1964; the year I was born): The children live in at idyllic suburban town with creeks and woods where they are free to roam (mostly I assume) when not at school. The serenity of town is disturbed by the women (tramps?) who have squatted in an abandoned house and stolen sheets from a neighbor’s laundry line. And in the first chapter of the story Charles Wallace, because he is a free-range kid with basically no fear, already knows the women, thus he is able to introduce and vouch for Mrs Whatsit, who has arrived on the family’s doorstep in the middle of the night.

Saying the book is dated implies whiteness. The character names: Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, Calvin O’Keefe sooo, sooo white; their special meal at one point: full Thanksgiving dinner, turkey(“white meat please”), gravy, mashed potatoes, white white white.

Also this book is firmly patriarchal in outlook, where angry Meg still needs the protection, comfort and security that only daddy and the older boy, Calvin, can grant her. Or how Mrs Murry is a stay-at-home mom (but has an in-home chemistry lab presumably because she has a PhD) And the town is gossiping about why it is that her husband, the government scientist, has gone off someplace and isn’t writing to her.

The book is corny: “Camazotz” is name of the mysterious world where they have to rescue dad and the minor fortune teller character dubbed “the Happy Medium.” The settings when not on earth are just barely fleshed out to the point where when I tried to imagine them I found myself picturing old television shows from the 60s/70s. For example on Camazotz when they visit Central for the first time and meet “the man with red eyes”, what I imagined was a scene from (original) Star Trek episode “Menagerie”. with the disabled Captain Pike who is speaking through a computer(?). Maybe its just me. And when they visit other planets they just look at things and talk with one another.

And when they are on Camazotz rescuing Mr. Murry and eventually Charles Wallace, they just bumble around and all the “action” is dialog. Literally, the key to the rescue of CW is for Meg to foolishly, incompetently love CW as hard as she can, and having done that, suddenly the whole crew are home again and everything is OK.

Now for the bits I liked. I liked this bit from the first time Meg “tessers”:

“Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.”

I liked the unnamed aliens near the end....

“They had four arms and far more than five fingers to each hand, and the fingers were not fingers, but long waving tentacles. They had heads and they had faces. But where the faces of the creatures on Uriel had seemed far more than human faces, these seemed far less. Where the features would normally be there were several indentations, and in place of ears and hair were more tentacles. They were tall, Meg realized as they came closer, far taller than any man. They had no eyes. Just soft indentations.”

... any yet they provide us with the character, Aunt Beast, the nurturing temporary mother for Meg.

Though what are these characters, Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which supposed to be? They are supposed to have lived for millions of years and they can teleport. Faeries? Goddesses who quote from Corinthians? The Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Ghostess (Mrs Which, who sssspeeeaksss but barely ever appears)?

“If you have some liniment, I'll put it on my dignity," Mrs. Whatsit said, still supine. "I think it's sprained. A little oil of cloves mixed well with garlic is rather good." And she took a large bite of sandwich.”

And what really is this book about? On one level its about how conformity to society oppresses the smart people. (Meg’s conflict with the teachers and other students in the school, the town.) But of course as the story progresses its about Christianity vs Totalitarianism (absolute conformity in Camazotz) because what else would a children’s book written at the height of the Cold War be about? I wonder how or if that comes across in the movie?

Now the book is still in print, and though yes, dated and corny, it still has a great deal of charm. I imagine the film rights had to be pretty cheap for Disney to cast the movie with strong brown women bringing the story to the current generation (maybe). I will have to watch the movie and find out for myself. mes