A love letter to A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle (1978)
Kronos Quartet, Book 3

Length: 304 pages
Genre: Young Adult; Fantasy

Although I very rarely write about books I’m re-reading, and particularly books I’m re-reading for the bazillionth time, it has happened once before (for Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer), and I thought I’d do another entry in the series – well, if two posts nine months apart are enough to constitute a series. What the hell, it’s my blog, I’ll make it a series if I want to. Let’s call it “A Love Letter to Lit”, shall we?

A Swiftly Tilting Planet deserves its own love letter. I don’t go in for lists of lifetime favorites, because it’s too hard to narrow down my lifetime of books into five, or ten, and to tell whether I love a book because of nostalgia, or on its own merits. Regardless, if someone was standing with a pair of scissors to my library card and forcing me to to pick my all-time favorite books, A Swiftly Tilting Planet would almost certainly be #2 on the list. (#1 is Francis Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, but we’ll save that for another entry in the series. :) I can’t count the number of times I read this book as a child, and I recently re-listened to it, and it turns out I love it just as much at twenty eight as I did at eight.

Summary: Charles Wallace Murry is now fifteen, although he’s just as quiet and serious as he was when he was younger. On one fateful Thanksgiving night, Mr. Murry receives a call from the President, informing the family that Mad Dog Branzillo, the dictator of a small South American country, has threatened the world with nuclear war. With a charge laid on him by Mrs. O’Keefe, his sister’s normally taciturn mother-in-law, to avert the disaster, he heads out to the starwatching rock, where he speaks the rune she taught him. The universe sends him help in the form of the unicorn Gaudior, who will take Charles Wallace back in time. In each time, he must go Within a host, seeking to find the Might-Have-Been, the one choice that can change the course of history, and forestall nuclear war.

Review: Okay, so, why do I love this book? First and foremost, I love how neatly, and how beautifully everything fits together. As Charles Wallace goes Within a different host in each period of history, the book almost reads like a collection of short stories – like Cloud Atlas, although much more intertwined. I love how tiny details, names, histories, places, and words of power reappear, slightly modified, in each time, and I love that the book is structured with each line of Patrick’s Rune becoming a chapter title. It’s a book concerned with genealogies, and the historical legacies of our choices, and while these concepts may be somewhat contrived and somewhat simplified (it is a kids’ book, after all), the way L’Engle weaves together past and present is much more intricate and complex than it initially appears.

At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness,
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

Oooh, that still gives me shivers.

I’ve said before that Charles Wallace in this book is one of my Book Boyfriends, but that’s not really true. Rather, I’ve got a crush on every character that Charles goes Within – who are really all different aspects of Charles himself. I can’t put my finger on why exactly I love them so much, other than that they’re all kind, honest people, and, as the book says, all filled with the Old Music. I actually decided, as a child of maybe ten or eleven, that if I ever had a son, I was going to name him Bran – one of the names that features heavily in this book – despite anything even vaguely resembling a Welsh heritage of my own.

Much has been made of L’Engle’s Christian slant to her writing, but I never noticed any such slant as a child, and even though I can kind of see it as an adult, it’s not nearly so obvious as in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Most of her characters are Christians (although not “obviously” so), and words like God and Heaven are capitalized throughout, but when Charles Wallace calls on “all Heaven” for help, he’s sent a flying, time-traveling unicorn. Christian values like love and self-sacrifice are emphasized, but I don’t find it to be proselytizing in the slightest.

I think, at heart, what makes A Swiftly Tilting Planet my favorite out of the Kronos Quartet is that 1) it focuses on Charles Wallace, so there’s much less of Meg’s whining, which got old rather quickly in A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door; and 2) there is, in general, a lot less talking and a lot more doing, and the plot moves much more rapidly through a variety of scenes and stories, all of which interconnect to form one wonderful whole. 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: While readers of Madeleine L’Engle’s earlier books are going to be the most likely to pick this one up on the basis of name-recognition, I don’t think either of the previous books are required to understand and enjoy A Swiftly Tilting Planet. It’s also got a very different feel than her earlier books, so I really think everyone should give this childhood favorite a chance.

This Review on LibraryThing | This Book on LibraryThing | This Book on Amazon

Other Reviews: Inkweaver Review
Is that really it? Did I miss your review? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: The big kitchen of the Murrys’ house was bright and warm, curtains drawn against the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast.