Between third and fifth grade, I remember my mother giving me a slew of really good fantasy books to read, Tolkien, CS Lewis, Ursula LeGuin and Madeleine L’Engle. All of which, I’m convinced, molded my developing mind in a very important and positive way. Last night and today, I burned through L’Engle’s “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” which is the third book in the series that starts with “A Wrinkle in Time.” I only just barely remember the other books in the series, but I want to go back and read them again now. (I’d also like to read the Chronicles of Narnia again too, but that will have to wait.)
Anyway, yeah, this book came out in 1978 and features a family of telepaths (she calls it “kything”) travelling through time to avert nuclear war in the present. And the whole thing centers around this verse (she calls it a “rune”) repeated and passed through time and uttered only in dire emergencies with magical effects…
- In this fateful hour
All Heaven with its power
The sun with its brightness
The snow with its whiteness
The fire with all the strength it hath
The lightning with its rapid wrath
The winds with their swiftness
The sea with its deepness
The rocks with their steepness
The earth with its starkness
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness
My copy of the book was snagged out of a friend’s basement from a box of whatnots intended to be gotten rid of at a garage sale. I think it’s of the original printing, and has those yellow dusty pages that make me almost want to sneeze while reading it. The cover art is completely different and better than this stupid one they seem to now have. The cover I have has this cool 70’s fantasy-style painting on it of Charles Wallace riding Gaudior over the clouds, with reptilian Ecthroi clutching at him from below.
I never really was aware of it as a kid, but apparently L’Engle was writing fantasy from a Christian perspective (like most of the fantasy authors my mom gave me, knowingly or not). It’s much more obvious to me now, though. Although, I just read some Christian book review of it where they say otherwise:
- I have heard that L’Engle writes from a Christian viewpoint, but that is not especially apparent in this book. True, it takes place in a moral universe, but the morality of the story seems mostly confined to “nuclear war is bad”. Since this doesn’t seem an especially original insight to me, I was not particularly impressed. The bad guys are also bad, and there are some undefined evil forces floating around in the expanses of space between eras, but that isn’t exactly original either
I don’t know what people are expecting… I mean, in order to write from a Christian viewpoint, do you need to have Jesus prancing around with his disciples in a field of daisies? These people need to stretch their imaginations a little bit. Speaking of which, I also found another annoying review on Amazon, part of which says:
- L’Engle means well, but there are several things about her world that are bogus. First, the protagonists are allowed to go back in time to change the past. Perhaps L’Engle is making a comment about divine providence–but you can’t just go back and change the past, even to avoid global nuclear holocaust. In real life, we have to accept the situation we’re in and clean up the messes we’ve made, and teaching kids otherwise probably isn’t a good idea.
Fucking ludicrous. I suppose we ought not to allow children to dream or use their imaginations at all, since they aren’t really “real”. This kind of backwards thinking really drives up the wall. This isn’t real damned life. It’s a damned fantasy novel. If you unclenched your sphincter a minute, you’d see that the whole point is that through imagination and love, you can accomplish things that may not seem “realistic” from a logical-craptacular standpoint, but are which nonetheless vitally important to the health of us all.
Anyway, Madeleine L’Engle seems like a hilarious old broad. According to this too short interview with her on MSNBC, she’s now 85, lives in Manhattan, and suggests that God is most interesting when he’s being a “shit.” Here’s a couple pieces from it, which I rather like:
- What are you against?
Narrow-mindedness. I’m against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah. You know, the whole story of David is a novel … Faith is best expressed in story.
If the Bible is not literally true, does that mean we don’t need to take it seriously?
Oh no, you do, because it’s truth, not fact, and you have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts.
So when you call the Bible a book of stories, you’re not diminishing it?
Anything but…
I’ll see if I can’t find some more interviews with her and post from them later on.
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