![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73When I was a kid, I loved what was then L'Engle's Time Trilogy: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The kids of the Murry family went on wonderful adventures: instant interstellar travel to a brave new world, an attempt to fix a human body from the inside a la Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace, and travels through time to remove a future threat of nuclear war was all great stuff. Several years later, my husband-to-be introduced me to Many Waters, written after the original trilogy but clearly tied to it, in which the two 'normal' siblings of the Murry family spend a year with Noah and his family. While never particularly hidden, L'Engle's connection to the Christian faith came more obviously to the forefront in that fourth book just by nature of the adventure of the twins, but both the grand adventure and the moral choices presented were happily engrossing.
A few months ago when Borders was going out of business, I spotted An Acceptable Time, discovered it was the fifth book in the Time series, and picked it up on the cheap. Sadly, L'Engle is not at her best. Young Polly O'Keefe, one of Meg (Murry) O'Keefe's children, visits her grandparents. She accidentally crosses circles of time 3000 years apart and visits a world of the distant past in which a small handful of druids from Great Britain crossed the sea and joined the American natives. So far, so L'Engle. The problems lie in several aspects ranging from poor science (albeit referred to only indirectly) to character discontinuity from previous books to having characters present that the book would have been better without.
The science problems: Polly's grandmother Mrs. Murry is still a Nobel-winning scientist, studying, well, small things. In 1989 when the book was first published, it appears that L'Engle didn't have a clear concept of the difference in scale between single cells (microbiology, which is what Mrs. Murry studied in the original books) and quantum particles (which she studies in this one) or how completely different the fields are. Furthermore, I have to laugh at Mrs. Murry's lab for one of the same reasons that I had to laugh at the museum sequence in Spider-Man: electron microscopes are simply not instruments that most private individuals would be able to purchase, let alone run properly, and are certainly not things you'd let the public touch if your institution is lucky enough to own one.
Character disconnect: When Polly returns from her first journey into the past, she tells her grandparents about her experience somewhat cautiously, as she is afraid of being disbelieved. Anyone who's read A Wrinkle in Time expects Mr. Murry, having had a mysterious journey all his own, to believe that such a time-traveling event to be possible upon first hearing. He seems, however, to have completely forgotten that he himself wound up on a different planet through unusual means, and initially dismisses Polly's tale. Huh? Who's this doppelganger?
Both the characters that I view as extraneous, Bishop Colubra and Zachary Gray, are featured in other L'Engle books that, to be fair, I haven't read. The bishop is actually a perfectly pleasant fellow, and serves some use, I suppose, in having already been to the ancient time and figured out some of the language spoken back then. But Polly could have gone on her adventure without his help (she mostly does anyway) and made do with the language issues. Bishop Colubra's main purpose, it appears, is to sermonize on a regular basis about how the love of God is timeless and how, while the person of Jesus won't be born for another thousand years, the spirit of Christ is timeless too. Oh, and that the Earth Mother deity that the ancients worship is the same Presence as that of the Christian God. While I’m generally in agreement with him (particularly on that last point), having him go on about it at length on such a regular basis is tiresome at best. I honestly don’t think the book would have suffered had he been absent from it; Polly could have connected the religious dots herself perfectly well, and likely been briefer about it.
And then there’s Zachary. Zachary is about Polly’s age (late teens/early twenties) and has some sort of totally unfixable heart defect that’s likely to do him in within the next year or two. The possibility of a heart transplant, which was certainly being done by 1989, is conveniently never mentioned. Zachary’s narcissism regarding his heart condition is surprisingly immature, and the lengths to which he’s willing to let others go in order to get himself a chance at a cure is, plainly put, simply unbelievable. Surely other sources for generating scenes of conflict and redemption could have been used.
Were these issues complete deal-breakers? Well, no. The story is still a page-turner, and I did generally enjoy it. But be warned that An Acceptable Time is far from L’Engle’s best work.
A few months ago when Borders was going out of business, I spotted An Acceptable Time, discovered it was the fifth book in the Time series, and picked it up on the cheap. Sadly, L'Engle is not at her best. Young Polly O'Keefe, one of Meg (Murry) O'Keefe's children, visits her grandparents. She accidentally crosses circles of time 3000 years apart and visits a world of the distant past in which a small handful of druids from Great Britain crossed the sea and joined the American natives. So far, so L'Engle. The problems lie in several aspects ranging from poor science (albeit referred to only indirectly) to character discontinuity from previous books to having characters present that the book would have been better without.
The science problems: Polly's grandmother Mrs. Murry is still a Nobel-winning scientist, studying, well, small things. In 1989 when the book was first published, it appears that L'Engle didn't have a clear concept of the difference in scale between single cells (microbiology, which is what Mrs. Murry studied in the original books) and quantum particles (which she studies in this one) or how completely different the fields are. Furthermore, I have to laugh at Mrs. Murry's lab for one of the same reasons that I had to laugh at the museum sequence in Spider-Man: electron microscopes are simply not instruments that most private individuals would be able to purchase, let alone run properly, and are certainly not things you'd let the public touch if your institution is lucky enough to own one.
Character disconnect: When Polly returns from her first journey into the past, she tells her grandparents about her experience somewhat cautiously, as she is afraid of being disbelieved. Anyone who's read A Wrinkle in Time expects Mr. Murry, having had a mysterious journey all his own, to believe that such a time-traveling event to be possible upon first hearing. He seems, however, to have completely forgotten that he himself wound up on a different planet through unusual means, and initially dismisses Polly's tale. Huh? Who's this doppelganger?
Both the characters that I view as extraneous, Bishop Colubra and Zachary Gray, are featured in other L'Engle books that, to be fair, I haven't read. The bishop is actually a perfectly pleasant fellow, and serves some use, I suppose, in having already been to the ancient time and figured out some of the language spoken back then. But Polly could have gone on her adventure without his help (she mostly does anyway) and made do with the language issues. Bishop Colubra's main purpose, it appears, is to sermonize on a regular basis about how the love of God is timeless and how, while the person of Jesus won't be born for another thousand years, the spirit of Christ is timeless too. Oh, and that the Earth Mother deity that the ancients worship is the same Presence as that of the Christian God. While I’m generally in agreement with him (particularly on that last point), having him go on about it at length on such a regular basis is tiresome at best. I honestly don’t think the book would have suffered had he been absent from it; Polly could have connected the religious dots herself perfectly well, and likely been briefer about it.
And then there’s Zachary. Zachary is about Polly’s age (late teens/early twenties) and has some sort of totally unfixable heart defect that’s likely to do him in within the next year or two. The possibility of a heart transplant, which was certainly being done by 1989, is conveniently never mentioned. Zachary’s narcissism regarding his heart condition is surprisingly immature, and the lengths to which he’s willing to let others go in order to get himself a chance at a cure is, plainly put, simply unbelievable. Surely other sources for generating scenes of conflict and redemption could have been used.
Were these issues complete deal-breakers? Well, no. The story is still a page-turner, and I did generally enjoy it. But be warned that An Acceptable Time is far from L’Engle’s best work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-02-01 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 05:41 am (UTC)