A Wrinkle in Time | SJ O'Hart

The other day, my agent (Polly Nolan, for those who are new to the party – hello! Welcome!) posted an interesting Tweet. Here it is:

Hmm. An astounding number of subs start either with a protagonist caught in a rainstorm or being woken by their alarm clock. Why, I wonder?

— Polly Nolan (@NolanPolly) September 25, 2014

Why, indeed.

The opening of your novel is so important. It’s the bit that will draw in not only agents and publishers, but also readers. It should be true to your ‘voice’, open a window into your fictional world, give a clear impression of your protagonist and a hint about what’s facing them as your story unfolds, and – if possible – it should avoid a few classic mistakes.

As Polly says, ideally a strong opening to a novel shouldn’t feature weather or a character waking up from sleep, particularly if it’s due to an alarm clock ringing or because of a nightmare frightening them into wakefulness. In my opinion, a novel also shouldn’t open with a character describing themselves, either, particularly if it’s achieved by having them look into a mirror.

Photo Credit: Camil Tulcan via Compfight cc

Not that I’m anyone to judge.

My first ‘novel’ – completed, but never shown to anyone – began with a little girl looking out her aunt’s window watching the rain fall outside and wondering how she was going to pass the time until it stopped. Also, I once wrote half a novel which opened with a girl waking up from a recurring dream which had been bothering her for months. She returns to sleep and when she wakes up again – properly, this time – she and her sister help one another to dress, enabling me (the extremely novice writer) to describe what my protagonist looked like through her self-deprecating self-comparisons to the other girl. I then go on to describe the day outside and what the weather was doing, for no real reason.

All in the space of the first four pages. Yeah. Clever, huh?

It’s no surprise that neither of these stories went anywhere. The first was just nonsense, and I felt the second was too similar to every other YA-kidlit dystopian narrative out there. Parts of its story world did end up resembling another novel (in one of those weird ‘My-idea-has-been-STOLEN-from-my-very-BRAIN moments which happen to everyone at some stage), and I felt the other book had handled it much better than I ever would. So, I chucked my own story. But I thought of these books with a certain fondness when I read Polly’s Tweet. Everyone has to make the same mistakes when they’re starting out. It’s a rule. Or maybe a law. I was (and am, because I’m still learning) no exception.

The strange thing is that even though nobody ever read these proto-books of mine, and I had no feedback on my writing at that point in my life, I somehow picked up, probably from reading other books, that these methods of kicking off a story weren’t good ones. It’s important to say that this isn’t because they’re not good places to start off a story, per se; it’s more to do with the fact that everyone does them. These methods of beginning a story have been used so often that they’ve become almost instinctive (which is why so many beginning writers default to them), and they’ve become so clichéd that Madeleine l’Engle parodied them in the opening to her most famous novel A Wrinkle in Time. I’m sure agents see them in their hundreds, week after week – and that’s what you want to avoid, if you want to get their attention. (Other things to avoid: bribes, ‘presents’, scented paper, threats to burn their offices down unless they take you on, pleading, personal photographs of you, and general weirdness. Word to the wise. You’ll get their attention that way, too, but for all the wrong reasons).

However, I do have to admit that thinking about this issue got me wondering whether it’s ever a good idea to begin a story with an alarm clock ringing or the weather or your protagonist looking at themselves in a mirror. Just for fun, then, I put this together:

Katie woke from a deep sleep to the sound of an alarm. Half-conscious, she wriggled her arm free and slapped at her bedside table, searching for the clock as its relentless brrrrrrring burrowed into her brain. Her knuckles knocked against something cold and unfamiliar, something which clanged like hollow metal, and it jerked her more fully awake. What on earth had that been?

Consciousness crept over her, confusion coming with it. The mattress felt weird; harder than usual. The air smelled cloying, with a tang like blood. Her breath caught in her neck as she opened her eyes, feeling the sharp pull as a layer of encrusted… something broke apart, tugging at her eyelashes.

Everything was dark.

She blinked, but the darkness stayed absolute.

Then, like she was inside an egg being cracked with a silver spoon, light burst across her vision, slashing her retinas. She recoiled from it, hissing, as she raised her hand to shade her watering eyes. All she could see was light, like a scalding yellow sun. Gradually, it began to show her the smooth, domed ceiling above her, the featureless walls. This is a dream, she told herself.

The alarm never stopped its ringing.

’99-097-31!’ shouted a voice, clanging inside Katie’s skull. She rolled her gaze around, wondering what she was enclosed in. A capsule? A cell? ‘On your feet!’ Like the words had triggered her muscles, Katie swung her legs out of bed. The floor was cool on her bare soles, but the light-filled gap was widening, permitting the brightness of a desert day to pierce Katie’s world. The heat was rising with every breath. The snow and ice that had been there, outside her window on the street where her house was, where she’d grown up, where her parents were in the next room and where she’d gone to sleep just a few hours before, had been replaced by unrelenting sun and cracked earth. A broken ruin lay somewhere on the horizon. As she struggled to stand, her feet slid across the metal floor in pools of sweat, throwing her back against her thin mattress. Her heart thumped painfully beneath her collarbone.

‘What’s happening?’ Katie called. ‘Where am I?’ But there was no reply.

As she gazed around, desperately searching for answers, a telephone, a door, she was transfixed by an image in the metal wall opposite. Her reflection. She saw a skinny dark-haired woman sitting on a sleep-tossed bed, bright blue eyes staring out of a hollow face, stick-like arms clutching the thin blankets. A scattering of dark moles pocked her face like ash on milk. The reflection’s thin, chapped lips stretched as Katie gasped, raising a bird-boned hand to her face. She felt rough fingertips touch her blistered mouth, and the movement was echoed by the mirrored woman.

But the reflection showed someone Katie had never seen before in her life.

So, there you have it. Maybe starting with an alarm, the weather and a character’s self-description isn’t always a bad idea.*

*Just kidding. It is. Don’t ever do this, kiddos.

Okay, so. Yes, I’m aware this book is now over fifty years old. I’m aware that, probably, everyone in the world has read it. I’m aware it’s a deserved classic.

Image: en.wikipedia.org

I’m aware – you may not be aware of this, though – that I own no fewer than three different editions of this book, such is the overwhelming love I have for it.

So, the question you’re no doubt asking is: Why, o Why, are you doing a review of this book today?

Well, this is the reason.

I learned during the week that this book has been turned into a graphic novel – an award-winning graphic novel, at that – and my book antennae immediately twinged into action. Another volume to track down and add to my collection (or assimilate into my book-Borg, if you like), and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since. So, this week it is on the review hotseat, for which I make no apologies. I’d like to think that someone, somewhere – perhaps even a reader of this very blog! – has never come across this book, and maybe my words will convince them of their folly.

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ tells the story of Meg Murry, a girl who is the child of gifted scientists but who feels, in her own heart, that she is inadequate. She is the oldest in her family, and the only girl – her twin brothers (Sandy and Dennys) are athletic and confident and her adored ‘baby’ brother (Charles Wallace) is supremely gifted, but appears ‘weird’ to the rest of the world because he speaks in full sentences, like an adult. Meg, however, knows that he can read her mind, and they have a deep and inexplicable connection – and, also, the most moving and believable love I’ve ever read between siblings, which becomes the driving narrative in the novel. One ‘dark and stormy night’ (the clichéd opening line is deliberate) Meg discovers Charles Wallace having milk and bread-and-jam with Mrs Whatsit, a strange old lady who is, she says, their new neighbour. In the course of conversation, she says: There is such a thing as a tesseract.

Mrs. Murry, the children’s mother, immediately starts to worry. Her husband has disappeared as the story opens, and the last thing he was working on before he vanished was – the tesseract. A complex scientific/mathematical concept (and one I fully admit I didn’t understand at all as a child reader, not that it mattered in the slightest), the tesseract is used in this book to mean something which allowed people to move through space and time, much as one can fold several layers of cloth over one another and pass a needle through them all simultaneously. Mr. Murry was employed by the government to do research into the tesseract, and has not been seen since.

Meg, Charles Wallace and Meg’s schoolfriend Calvin O’Keefe then set off on a quest to find Meg’s father. They enlist the help of Mrs Whatsit, and her two mysterious ‘friends’, Mrs Who and Mrs Which. In the course of their quest they are transported to other planets (including the home planet of the three ‘Mrs W’s’, where they meet them in their natural shape, and not the human forms they take while on earth), and they are shown a huge, universe-devouring blackness, which is threatening the future of the earth and all the other worlds.

They end up on Camazotz, a planet which has many earthlike features, but which has fallen completely under the power of this nihilistic darkness, and is ruled by a gigantic disembodied brain known as IT. This brain pulses to a particular beat, and the entire planet operates to this same beat – people’s footsteps, the rhythm with which children throw balls during playtime, the opening and closing of doors – and, as a child, the concept terrified me. It’s a clever way of using the ‘unheimlich’ – that which is familiar, and yet unfamiliar, and hence terrifying – to excellent effect. Mr Murry is being held captive on this planet, and Charles Wallace – due to his brilliance, and his telepathic abilities – is able to find him, but by doing so he puts himself at enormous risk. Mr Murry tries to tesser away from the planet with Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace – but Charles Wallace gets left behind. The only person who can go back to save him is Meg, because she has the one thing IT does not have, the one weapon which can overpower it and reclaim her brother, and so she sets off alone to bring him home.

Image: garrettsbookblog.wordpress.com

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ fascinated me as a child. I loved the familial connections, the bravery of Calvin O’Keefe, the complex portrayal of Meg’s parents, particularly her father – it was the first time I’d ever read about a parent who ‘fails’, and who doesn’t know the answers to everything – and, of course, I loved Meg herself, a girl who puts her brother above everything else. I loved the three Mrs Ws, and their clear, easy ways of explaining huge concepts, and the horror of the world-ending nothingness that threatened the existence of the universe was extremely real, to me. That concept has also been used in ‘The Never-Ending Story,’ of course, but I think it’s even more emotive in this story than in that other towering classic of children’s literature.

Madeleine l’Engle went on to write four other books in this same fictive universe, featuring the Murry and O’Keefe families, and I have also read those – but, sadly, not with the same pure and unsullied love as I have for ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ The later books grow a little too obsessed with religion and morality – there are tones of this in ‘Wrinkle’, too, but they are so quietly present that they’re hard to spot – and I found the sequels overly preachy and not at all in the same league as the earlier book. However, ‘Wrinkle’ stands alone as a prime example of everything that is brilliant in literature, let alone children’s literature, and should be read by all people, everywhere.

It’s just that good.

If you haven’t read it, sort it out. If you have, re-read it. I know I’m about to.