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 stated in this earlier post, I spent some time last fall reading Madeleine L'Engle's so-called "Kairos novels." For the Murray novels, they were all rereads, but all the O'Keefe novels were new to me. I was reading them in publication order, so that I could get a sense of L'Engle's development, and so that I could intersperse familiar books with unfamiliar; the Murray and O'Keefe novels alternate in publication, even if all the O'Keefe ones take place a generation after the Murray ones.
That said, I decided to make an exception, and I swapped Many Waters with A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I had a couple reasons for this. For one, I read the original three Meg books many times as a kid and only discovered Many Waters much later, so having read them in publication order to begin with, I was curious how they would work in chronological order. Second, I remember not liking Many Waters very much, while Swiftly Tilting Planet was my favorite as a kid, and I preferred that my reading of the Murray novels would end on a high note.
Many Waters (1986)
Meg and/or Charles Wallace are the protagonists of the three original Murray novels; Many Waters focuses on Sandy and Dennys, the "ordinary" twins between Meg and Charles Wallace in age. They accidentally travel back in time to the age of Noah's Ark...
...and it is so so boring. Like, inexplicably so. Unlike all the other books, there's nothing at stake. There's no reason for Sandy and Dennys to travel back in time, either from a narrative standpoint (there's no threat they're alleviating) or a personal one (all the Meg/Charles Wallace novels have her learning and growing through her actions, but the twins are just there). You could write a book about them coming to terms with their (supposed) ordinariness, or about them coming of age sexually, but this book doesn't really give you those things, it just hints at them.
I also agree with Mari Ness that the book's past era just doesn't convince: "somehow, perhaps because of the language, or because this culture does
not fit in with either the Bible or archaeological evidence of any early
society (and not just because of the unicorns), it never manages to
feel quite real. [...] [I]t
[...] serve[s] to reduce any suspense the novel might have had. It’s not
just that I know the flood is coming anyway, but that I can’t bring
myself to care about the complete destruction of a place that never
feels quite real."
Bizarrely, even though it has the least going on of any of the Murray novels, it's also the longest. So it just keeps on going and going and geeze louise was I bored.
A House Like a Lotus (1984)
In my last post, I talked about how the first two "Polly O'Keefe novels" are anything but; A House Like a Lotus is the real first Polly O'Keefe novel. Narrated in the first person, it tells two parallel stories, one about Polly's friendship with an older woman, and one set later in Greece, as Polly enters into a romance and tries to come to terms with what happened to her. I've seen some complaints that this isn't the same Polly that we got in earlier novels... but, you know, she was a preteen in those, and here she's in high school, with all the changes in confidence that can bring. (Especially when, like Polly, you've gone from being part of your weird family's homeschool enclave to American public high school.) Unlike all these other novels, it basically has no sfnal elements: it's a pretty realist coming-of-age story.
I enjoyed it. As she was with Meg in A Wind in the Door, L'Engle is good at capturing the difficulties of growing up. The use of the first person is effective. I think as a teenager, especially if I was a girl, I might have found this captivating, but it works well enough—probably my favorite of the four Polly novels.
I felt validated by my reading order when reading this, as Sandy and Dennys have decent roles here, in a way that picks up on what we learned about them in Many Waters. In that book, they wanted to be a doctor and a lawyer; here, they're successfully engaged in those careers.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978)
The last Meg novel was my favorite as a kid. I guess I was a weird kid, because this is a weird book. Nuclear war is seemingly imminent on Christmas Eve, and Meg and Charles Wallace must stop it by using a unicorn to travel across time, untangling a family lineage that goes from Wales to Connecticut to South America with the help of a mystical Irish poem. While Meg remains in the present day, telepathically communicating with Charles Wallace, he subsumes his personality into historical figures to better understand what's going on and give the occasional nudge.
Rereading it as an adult, I was less into the time travel shenanigans—much more familiar to me as someone who has watched too much Steven Moffat Doctor Who—and a bit metaphysically bothered by the novel's idea that families could be doomed across time. But the book has some captivating chapters, in its vignettes across the years. The story of Calvin's mother is darkly tragic stuff.
The poem L'Engle uses to unify the narrative isn't her own composition, but is used in an utterly captivating way. Rereading it all these years later, I found it still contained the power I first found in it as a child. On the whole, I liked Wind in the Door more this time through, but I still found a lot to like here. Like L'Engle's best work, it hints at a strange cosmology beyond our comprehension, but also a universe where the most powerful force is ultimately our ability to listen to one another.
Also it's interesting to note that a big part of this book is a legend about a Welsh prince who came to North America before Columbus, and a year before this book came out, there was a historical novel about that same topic: Madoc, Prince of America by Bernard Knight. Now seemingly forgotten, but did L'Engle read it and get inspired?
An Acceptable Time (1989)
In some editions, An Acceptable Time is published as the fifth "Time Quintet" novel. This is clearly a bogus attempt to market the book by tying it into the more popular Meg novels;* though it returns to their setting and includes some of their features and characters, it's a Polly novel through and through, following up on the events of House Like a Lotus. Why would anyone care about this book without that one? I have read a lot of reviews from people who bounced off it, and definitely part of the reason is that the publishers try to get you to read it without the three books that come before it!
Anyway, this is a lot like Many Waters in that it's slow and dull and nothing much seems to be at stake for Polly. I feel like the return of Polly to the location of the Meg novels ought to feel significant, but it doesn't really. The "series," such as it was, ends with a fizzle.
Also note that the book refers to the present day of Polly as the twentieth century, but as I discussed in my last post, the evidence would seem to indicate that A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet are set in the twenty-first century, much less this book a generation later!
* That said, my wife's edition of An Acceptable Time (Laurel-Leaf, with a Cliff Nielsen cover) has a 1997 introduction by L'Engle where she calls it part of the "Time Quartet." Was she counting Acceptable Time but not counting Many Waters? I've never seen that particular configuration anywhere else. It does seem so, because when she lists the characters, she focuses on Meg, Charles Wallace, Polly, and Zachary, but doesn't mention Sandy and Dennys.
