The Kairos Novels by Madeleine L'Engle
The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters
The Polly O'Keefe Quartet: The Arm of the Starfish / Dragons in the Waters / A House Like a Lotus / An Acceptable Time
As a child, I was a big fan of Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time trilogy, as I thought of it. I didn't learn about the existence of the fourth book of the so-called "Time Quartet" until high school, and I had a dim awareness that there were books about Meg and Calvin's children (I think I had a cousin who owned Arm of the Starfish), but never read them. At some point as an adult, I became aware that L'Engle actually wrote a massive amount of interconnected fiction, and I even wrote out a chronology, but I have never gotten around to reading them.
I've become a bit obsessed with Library of America editions of classic science fiction and fantasy. I got into them with Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, but now I get basically every one that comes out; when I realized there was a Library of America box set that contained all four Meg novels and all four novels about her daughter, Polly, I put it on my birthday list, and my wife was kind enough to buy it for me. (I assume this was put out to capitalize on the Disney film, which I've never seen. It would be nice if LOA put out another volume with the Austin family novels, but I assume that will never come to pass at this point.)
Something I hadn't realized until I sat down to read these was that L'Engle actually wrote the Polly books concurrently with the Meg one, essentially alternating, even though the Polly ones take place a generation later. Thus, I decided to read through the series in (mostly) publication order, so I could see how L'Engle developed her ideas over time; that would also break up the novels I'd already read. Here on the blog, I'm going to review them in two chunks.
A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
The original novel seems to be most people's favorite, and certainly I had fond memories of it from when I was a kid. It's filled with great concepts: Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit; the Happy Medium; the tesseract; the dystopia of Camazotz including IT the giant brain and the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building. Meg is a great character, and Calvin is basically the best boyfriend in all literature as far as I'm concerned.
I found myself somewhat unmoved this time. I liked the early stuff in the book, about Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, the family in general. Meg's a great character for capturing what it is to feel weird and alone and unaccomplished. (That said, one scene I remembered really liking turned out to actually be from A Wind in the Door.) Once the characters move into traveling through space/time, though, it felt like a succession of events more than a story: oh now they're here, oh now they're here. And I don't think it's a fault of L'Engle, but Camazotz was frightening and fascinating to me as a kid, but a lifetime of reading dystopian fiction later, and I felt like I'd seen it before, even if L'Engle was one of the first. I like that Meg saves the day by embracing her own faults, but eh, I dunno. When I got to the end, my reaction was, "I can see why I liked this as a kid, and I can definitely imagine giving it to my own kid, but I didn't find much to get out of this as an adult."
The notes here by editor Leonard S. Marcus are interesting: he has a lot to say about the varied manuscripts of Wrinkle, and also there are some good cultural insights. In particular, the fact that the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building is a comment on the CIA had never occurred to me. Clearly it would be easy to read Camazotz as a Cold War–era commentary on communism, but L'Engle was also criticizing her own country's actions.
The Arm of the Starfish (1965)
Though I never would have read it otherwise, I think packing this novel as part of "The Polly O'Keefe Quartet" does it a disservice, because it is not remotely a Polly O'Keefe novel. This was clearly not intended as the start of a series about Polly, nor even really thought of as a continuation of a series about Meg and Calvin.
Rather, I feel like L'Engle wanted to write about book about a boy named Adam Eddington and needed a marine biologist character, and thought to herself, "What if the marine biologist was Calvin from my other book? It would be neat to see what Calvin and Meg were up to." So it's more like a fun cameo for people who read A Wrinkle in Time than anything else. (I can't find it now, but while reading these books I came across a tweet that went something like, "Forget the MCU, I only want the MLCU: The Madeleine L'Engle Cinematic Universe." Her books really do use that modern comic book–style of storytelling where it's like, why invent a new character when you can cross things over by including an old one?)
If you approach Arm of the Starfish that way, it's a fine book if not a great one. I really like the beginning, actually. Adam is a young man discovering himself and the world when he's thrust into a complicated situation beyond his control. While Wrinkle in Time is science fantasy, Arm of the Starfish is sf thriller: the maguffin is the idea that human could regenerate limbs akin to starfish, but that's not directly relevant to the story. The story, rather, is about learning how to do the right thing even when the right thing is difficult and dangerous. L'Engle keeps you on your toes at first, but I did find that as the novel went out, it slowed down for me. The thriller elements begin to feel a bit contrived, and Adam's uncertainty becomes harder to believe in.
As I read these novels, I read Mari Ness's thoughts at the Madeleine L'Engle Reread over on Tor.com; she was particularly helpful for discussing the many other L'Engle novels that connect to the so-called "Kairos" ones. I really enjoy Ness's thoughts on the Oz novels (that I am reading with my son), but found her thoughts on Arm of the Starfish a bit frustrating. I can see that Arm would be an annoying book if you read it as the next novel after A Swiftly Tilting Planet: Polly isn't really a focal character, Meg isn't even directly called "Meg." But in its original context, that's clearly just not what it's trying to be. Ness even acknowledges this, but it still seems to taint her reading of the book. She complains that Polly is not a good protagonist character... but Polly clearly was not designed to be a protagonist character. Despite the collection I read this in, it's not a Polly O'Keefe novel, it's an Adam Eddington novel with a supporting character named Polly O'Keefe.
Similarly, Ness complains, "This book contains no hint that two of its major adult characters traveled through time and space." But this is typical for L'Engle, and for the era—we're long, long before YA series become de rigeur, and each of L'Engle's Murray/O'Keefe books, especially the earlier ones, is clearly designed to work as a standalone, to the extent that they are all possible to read and not know that other books about these characters even exist. Yes, there's no hint of what Meg and Calvin did here... but there's also no hint that they previously traveled through time and space in A Wind in the Door, the second book in their actual series!
Something that came to fascinate me about these books is the (very wonky) chronology. I think A Wrinkle in Time has nothing that would lead us to believe it's not set when it was written, in the 1960s. Arm of the Starfish must be set a generation later, and indeed, there's a small comment from Calvin (highlighted by editor Leonard Marcus) about how back in the 1960s scientists created human fetuses in a test tube, but "their development went awry" and they became deformed monstrosities. Marcus points out that there were no "test tube babies" when this book was published; IVF first succeeded in 1978. Other than that, there's no attempt at futurism from L'Engle here, but the book must take place sometime after the 1960s.
A Wind in the Door (1973)
Something I hadn't realized reading these books as a kid is the long time period they were released over. This came out over a decade after A Wrinkle in Time. No wonder there are no direct references to Wrinkle in it, not even very obvious ones (surely the Echthroi are somehow related to the Black Thing?); anyone who had read Wrinkle in Time as a kid when it was released would have been an adult by the time of A Wind in the Door. She would have been chasing a whole new audience!
As a kid, this was always my least favorite of the original three novels. Other than the story about Calvin's plant and his home life, it did nothing for me at all; in particular, I found all the stuff about the farandolae inside Charles Wallace's mitochondrion tedious in the extreme.
To my surprise, this was my favorite of all eight Kairos novels. As an adult, the challenge of Meg figuring out who was the real version of her obnoxious high school principal, and who was the Echthroi impersonator, resonated much more with me. I really liked the idea of Naming, that to Name someone is to love someone, and therefore in order to Name Mr. Jenkins, Meg needed to figure out a way to love him. I liked the way this headed in the climax of the story, which features a particular audacious act of Naming—and thus of loving—from Meg. As someone who takes his responsibilities seriously (I hope, anyway), I liked that the villains were merely beings who wanted to avoid theirs. It was a natural but tragic path.
Above all else, I liked this conversation between Meg's parents. Mrs. Murry is despairing about both the state of her son Charles Wallace and the state of American society in general:
[H]er father reach[ed] across the table for her mother's hand. “My dear, this is not like you. With my intellect, I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can’t settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it.”
“What else is there?” Mrs. Murry’s voice was low and anguished.
“There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises. Even little ones, like your cooking stew over your Bunsen burner. You may be in the middle of an experiment, but you still remember to feed your family. That's enough to keep my heart optimistic, no matter how pessimistic my mind. And you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”
In a time where it feels very easy to give into despair, I found here a little bit of hope to cling onto, and that's the real power of this book—for all her fault, Meg can save the world through love.
This is the first book to indicate that the Murray novels take place sometime in the future. Meg's mother is old enough to remember the moon landing... but young enough that another character thinks she might not remember the moon landing. So born in the early 1960s? (My parents were born in 1963 and '64, and my father remembers the moon landing but my mother does not.) I don't think we ever get a specific age for Dr. Kate Murry, but given she's old enough to have a teenage daughter, that would seem to put these novels in the late 1990s at the earliest, probably the early 2000s. (If the Murrays are about the same age as my own parents, it makes me want to think of Meg as the same age as me, which would put this book in the year 2000. If the Murrays waited longer to have children, then it takes place even later.) There's also a reference to humans landing on Mars. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal article that teaches Calvin about the emotional lives of plants is said to be very old (it's wrapping up china in the O'Keefe attic), but it's a real article that actually came out in 1972, the year before the novel.
Dragons in the Waters (1976)
Like Arm of the Starfish, this is not a Polly O'Keefe book, just a book that has Polly O'Keefe in it, even if she does get some viewpoint scenes, and we also learn a bit about her little brother Charles, too.
It's a Simon Renier novel. Simon is, like Adam, a young man on the cusp of adulthood trying to figure out his place in the world. The novel has a somewhat complicated plot; it takes place on a freighter heading to Venezuela, which has taken on passengers that include Simon, his cousin, Calvin and his two oldest kids, a pair older women academics, and some others besides. There are shenanigans on board (a missing portrait, an attempted murder, and eventually an actual murder), and we follow mostly Simon.
What I liked was the tone. Simon is young but has lived a melancholy life; he's an orphan who grew up with an elderly great-aunt in a decaying house. That sense of melancholy pervades the novel. We occasionally cut to the other characters, and they all have their reasons to feel melancholy.
On the other hand, though, the novel eventually begins to enter a holding pattern. The cuts to those characters start to feel repetitive. Yes, they all feel sad about their lives, I get it. The plot on the ship seems to move as slowly as the ship itself. Eventually, it gets where they are going, and things heat up again, but as Simon embraces his destiny among the natives of Venezuela, it gets a bit wacky. Yes, it's a book about dealing with and accounting for past mistakes, but I'm not persuaded that this needed to happen generationally. This is a theme L'Engle will come back to in her next book, though. More on that when I get around to covering the last four Kairos novels...
