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"Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.״ So says author Madeleine L'Engle, describing something she has always done in her writing—espe-cially in her children's books.
She made her big splash in 1962 with A Wrinkle in Time, a science fiction book that won the prestigious Newbery Award for children's fiction. That one book soon became four (her "Time Quartet" also includes A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters), with the same characters moving through time and space. Later books followed the same families, and later generations of those families, into new adventures. The loyal readers of Wrinkle lapped up each new volume. L'Engle has also published fiction for adults (notably A Severed Wasp), plays, poems, and books of essays and theological musings (A Circle of Quiet).
But her children's books remain her chief claim to fame. She has the touch, challenging young readers with some heady content, but maintaining a child's point of view. Meg, the preteen girl at the center of the "Time Quartet," is intelligent but selfdoubting, sometimes loving, sometimes crabby—the kind of ordinary person most readers can identify with. She is thrown into otherworldly adventures with her precocious little brother (Charles Wallace) and her incipient boyfriend (Calvin). Along the way they all discover their world-saving powers—and they learn valuable lessons about good, evil, and love.
Reading A Wrinkle in Time, one thinks of C. S. Lewis's fiction— both his Chronicles of Narnia and his space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength). It's as if L'Engle took the best of both and then carried it all to a new level. As in the space trilogy, her characters hop through space to encounter primeval forces of good and evil. As in Narnia, her characters
challenge the powers of evil with divine aid. But Lewis was always a theologian, using his fictional worlds to teach truth and explore his theories. L'Engie traffics in pure imagination.
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As a result, these works are less overtly "Christian״ than Lewis's. She's not retelling the Christ story in allegory, as Lewis did. She's telling new stories. If Lewis was Gospel, L'Engie is the book of Acts. She follows divinely guided people as they fight against fear, pride, and selfishness. You might say that she "teaches" the power of love and sacrifice, but there are no clear Christ-figures here. The lessons are not verbal but visual. We see Meg standing before the captive Charles Wallace. She says, "I love you. I love you."—using the only weapon she has against the evil that holds him. "I love you, Charles Wallace. I love you." And her brother comes out of his catatonic shell like Lazarus from the tomb.
Some of L'Engle's scientific imaginings are quite stunning, considering this was 1962 and she was writing for kids. She has a kind of "beaming" of molecules that predates Star Trek by several years. Her portrait of the town of Camazotz, in the grip of the evil It, is dowmright Orwellian in its eerie automation. And her explanations of time travel, dying stars, and the nature of light are cutting edge.
But the power of L'Engle's writing has always been in the deeply Christian nature of her imagination. Her nonfiction has made her Christian commitment explicit, but her fiction is deeply rooted in that commitment. Children and adults of all religions have tasted the love of God in the literary banquets she has served up. And as a Christian who writes for the world, she has inspired many other Christian writers and artists to break out of their pious constraints, to "be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised."