Favorite Banned Books – A Wrinkle In Time

This is “Banned Book Week”, an annual campaign by the American Library Association and Amnesty International to increase awareness around banned and challenged books, celebrate the freedom to read and highlight persecuted individuals.  This year I am doing a little highlighting of my own, with a favorite banned book each day.  The list of books that have been banned in our own country both fascinates and appalls me.  I encourage you to read widely and outside your usual comfort zone at least occasionally.  Each of the books this week are well worn favorites that I have read over and over.

To start the week off, a book (part of a larger series) that I have loved since I was a kid.  As I’ve grown older, my appreciation for Madeleine L’Engle’s work has grown.  In “A Wrinkle In Time” we meet some of her best known and beloved characters, Meg Murry, her younger brother Charles and a friend from school, Calvin O’Keefe.  Meg and Charles’s father has disappeared, and the children begin a search for him that will span both time and space.  Charles is highly intelligent and possesses other abilities that they will explore as their adventure continues.  Along the way they will meet three unusual ladies, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit.  Through them the children will learn to travel through wrinkles (called “tessering”) and be given clues so they can fight the evil that has captured their father and trying to destroy our world.

The original book, published in 1962, has won the Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.  It is a brilliant book that combines a story that a pre-teen can connect with (as I did) but still offer deep places for adult readers as well.  Here L’Engle studies the conflict between Good and Evil, and the weapons we have to hold back the darkness.

So at first blush, it may seem surprising that it was #22 on the ALA’s list of most banned books between 1990 and 2000.  The issues seem to revolve around the three “witches”, in that the book promotes witchcraft and demons.  It’s also been challenged because some folks didn’t like the way it referred to Jesus in connection with a variety of other artists and thinkers.  He is placed along with Gandhi, the Buddha and Albert Einstein as humans who are fighting to hold back the evil that is attempting to take over the Universe.  L’Engle was a woman of deep faith (and an Episcopalian), and the criticism strikes me as more of the unfortunate vein of “my way or the highway” theology that has flooded into American culture in the last 40 years.  If you believe there is only one possible representation of Jesus possible, then you’re probably not going to like these books.

As for the “witchcraft”, that’s just an astounding piece of refusing to read what’s actually there.  They are “witches” because we don’t really have a proper term for beings like the three Mrs. Ws.  Strange old women have been routinely stigmatized as witches for centuries.  In the context of the story the three admit to difficulty in communicating on our level.  Of necessity they use images we understand.  As readers we are supposed to understand that they are just substitutions for what is actually happening.

“A Wrinkle In Time” has not gone out of print since first published.  It remains what is has ever been, a wonderful story that will appeal to audiences from pre-teen on.  Filled with challenging theological and scientific ideas, the story combines fantasy into the mix, creating a classic story that I highly recommend.