A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Madeleine L’Engle

I re-read A Wrinkle in Time and didn’t think it was as good as I remembered. And I re-read A Wind in the Door and thought it was completely awful. Now I am on to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I was predisposed to hate after the previous two. I write that to warn you that, while I often nit-pick my reading to death, I probably noticed far more things that irritated me than even my normal. That being written, the third installment of the Time Quintet is not as bad as the second.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet starts off perhaps ten years after the events of the previous book. Meg Murry is now a young woman married to Calvin O’Keefe, but she’s home for the holidays, as are her brothers Sandy and Dennys. The President calls Mr. Murry while the family chats in the kitchen (or perhaps dining room, I’ve forgotten which) to tell him that Maddog Branzillo, dictator of small South American Vespugia, will start nuclear war within 24 hours as retribution for the U.S. using more than it’s fair share of the world’s resources.

Mrs. O’Keefe, Calvin’s mother, dinner guest, and local crotchety old lady, charges Charles Wallace with averting the coming nuclear Holocaust. So he charges out to his and Meg’s favorite star watching rock in the garden where the unicorn Gaudior takes him on a Quantum Leap journey through time to fix the Might-Have-Beens that will stop Branzillo.

So, where to start. I know, let’s have a list.

• I can’t believe the characters. A mid-20s Meg acts like and is treated like a child, for instance. Her family keeps telling her to go to bed, or to stay inside because she’s going to get a cold from night air. (And note, one does not catch colds from cold air. I wish authors would refrain from passing on folk wisdom altogether.) And she blithely accepts this treatment! Oh, I guess it’s past my bedtime. Or the town that gets whipped into witch-burning frenzy because a Llawcae family (a family that Charles Wallace visits in several different times) member married an Indian. Supposedly someone saw a cat and then someone else died and it’s the fault of the heathen witch the Indian. Fine, I can go with that. The town then sets up to hang the witch on the word of a well-known witch-hunter. At the gallows, a younger brother Llawcae chants a Welsh rune (Boil boil toil and trouble!), lightning strikes the nearby church and a second bolt zaps one of the men who raises his gun. Calling down lightning with a chant is apparently not what witches do because the townspeople change their mind and start apologizing to god for their effrontery.
• I’m getting really tired of the straight black/white dichotomy in the series. There’s no shades of gray. Good people don’t even gradually slide into evil. Give in to temptation and Bam! the character is now Hitler’s brother.
• Speaking of Hitler’s brother, let’s talk a bit about evil and genetics. Underlying the whole moral tale throughout L’Engle’s story is the curious theory that a family can be bad. As in, if you have the family’s blood in you, you are evil. Mortmain’s are always evil. Llawcae’s are always good. Descendants of Welsh legend Gwydyr will start nuclear war. The Maddoxes (descendents of Gwydyr’s brother Madoc) will not because they have peace-loving blood. The whole point of the time traveling is for Charles Wallace to engineer which the bloodline to which Mad Dog Branzillo belongs. Seriously? What a moral to teach young people! Let’s be glad L’Engle didn’t harbor animosity toward African-Americans or we’d be reading about how black blood is evil.
• Plot-wise, characters constantly show up or do things because they just know they are supposed to. It’s part of a broader trend where the author can’t seem to have understandable reasons for a whole lot of things. The President decides to call the Murry house from the situation room because Mr. Murry occasionally advises him on science matters. Not for advice. Just to let them know. And promises to call back with any developments. How about the arbitraryness of the people that Charles Wallace Quantum Leaps into? It seems to provide little point other than to allow L’Engle to write about the families in different times from a first person point of view. All but the last Might-Have-Been do nothing to change Branzillo’s bloodline. Though perhaps she saw how without reason these Leaps were, because the final piece of the story (of Gedder and Bran Maddox in founding Vespugia) is told through letters rather than first-person.
• And lastly (of the list at least), almost every freaking scene goes on longer than needed. Don’t belabor it!

It’s not all bad though. Previous books in the series featured climaxes and conflicts where nothing happened except in characters heads. Meg had to decide to love in the first. And then in the second book, she had to talk little farandolae creatures she could only see in her head of the righteousness of growing up. Here there’s murder and confrontation between Indians and whites. People dig through attics to find letters and history. And while exceedingly contrived, the family through the ages intertwinedness at least gave the story some of a framework.

So I rate it higher than A Wind in the Door, but that’s damning with faint praise.

Other blogged reviews, all positive. Though there is some negative sentiment in comments and other spots, I’m in the minority on this one.

• Book Bindings
• Pre-AP English
• The Mad Tea Party

Title: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Author: Madeleine L’Engle
Cover creator: Cliff Nielsen
Series: Time Quintet; 3
Imprint / publisher: Laurel Leaf / Bantam Doubleday Dell
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 256 p.
Publication date: 1998
ISBN-10: 0-440-90158-8
LC classification: PZ7.L5385 Sw 1978