Bill McKibben A Very Hot Year
This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra’s air into the dirtiest on the planet. The temperatures across the continent broke records—one day, the average high was above 107 degrees, and the humidity so low that forests simply exploded into flames. The photos of the disaster were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, with crowds gathered on beaches under blood-red skies, wading into the water as their only refuge from the flames licking nearby. But such scenes are only a chaotic reminder of what is now happening every hour of every day. This year wouldn’t have begun in such a conflagration if 2019 hadn’t been an extremely hot year on our planet—the second-hottest on record, and the hottest without a big El Niño event to help boost temperatures. And we can expect those numbers to be eclipsed as the decade goes on. Indeed, in mid-February the temperature at the Argentine research station on the Antarctic Peninsula hit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing the old record for the entire continent. It is far too late to stop global warming, but these next ten years seem as if they may be our last chance to limit the chaos. If there’s good news, it’s that 2019 was also a hot year politically, with the largest mass demonstrations about climate change taking place around the world.
We learned a great deal about the current state of the climate system in December, thanks to the annual confluence of the two most important events in the climate calendar: the UN Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which met for the twenty-fifth time, this year in Madrid (it ended in a dispiriting semi-collapse), and the American Geophysical Union conference, which convened in San Francisco to listen to the newest data from researchers around the world. That latest news should help ground us as we enter this next, critical phase of the crisis.
The first piece of information emerged from a backward look at the accuracy of the models that scientists have been using to predict the warming of the earth. I wrote the Review’s first article about climate change in 1988, some months after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that what we then called the “greenhouse effect” was both real and underway. Even then, the basic mechanics of the problem were indisputable: burn coal and oil and gas and you emit carbon dioxide, whose molecular structure traps heat in the atmosphere.
Human activity was also spewing other gases with the same effect (methane, most importantly); it seemed clear the temperature would go up. But how much and how fast this would occur was a bewildering problem, involving calculations of myriad interactions across land and sea; we came to fear climate change in the 1980s largely because we finally had the computing power to model it. Critics—many of them mobilized by the fossil fuel industry—attacked those models as crude approximations of nature, and insisted they’d missed some negative feedback loop (the effect of clouds was a common candidate) that would surely moderate the warming.
These climate models got their first real chance to shine in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, injecting known amounts of various chemicals into the atmosphere, and the models passed with flying colors, accurately predicting the short-term cooling those chemicals produced. But the critique never completely died away, and remains a staple of the shrinking band of climate deniers. In December Zeke Hausfather, a UC Berkeley climate researcher, published a paper showing that the models that guided the early years of the climate debate were surprisingly accurate. “The warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago,” he said. “This really gives us more confidence that today’s models are getting things largely right as well.”1 We now know that government and university labs were not the only ones predicting the climatic future: over the last five years, great investigative reporting by, among others, the Pulitzerwinning website InsideClimate News unearthed the large-scale investigations carried out in the 1980s by oil companies. Exxon, for instance, got the problem right: one of the graphs their researchers produced predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration would be in 2019. That this knowledge did not stop the industry from its allout decades-long war to prevent change is a fact to which we will return.
The rise in temperature should convince any fair-minded critic of the peril we face, and it is worth noting that in
1Zeke Hausfather et al.,“Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections,” Geophysical Research Letters, December 4, 2019.
December one longtime skeptic, the libertarian writer Ronald Bailey, published a sort of mea culpa in Reason magazine. In 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio, he’d mourned that the United States government was “officially buying into the notion that ‘global warming’ is a serious environmental problem,” even as “more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown.” Over the years, Bailey had promoted many possible challenges to scientific orthodoxy—for example, the claim of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen that, as mentioned, clouds would prevent any dangerous rise in temperature—but, to his credit, in his new article he writes:
I have unhappily concluded, based on the balance of the evidence, that climate change is proceeding faster and is worse than I had earlier judged it to be .... Most of the evidence points toward a significantly warmer world by the end of the century.2
If scientists correctly judged the magnitude of the warming—about one degree Celsius, globally averaged, thus far—they were less perceptive about the magnitude of the impact. Given that this infusion of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a large-scale experiment never carried out before during human history, or indeed primate evolution, it’s not really fair to complain, but many scientists, conservative by nature, did underestimate the rate and severity of the consequences that would come with the early stages of warming. As a result, the motto for those studying the real-world effects of the heating is probably “Faster Than Expected.”
The warmth we’ve added to the atmosphere—the heat equivalent, each day, of 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs—is already producing truly dire effects, decades or even centuries ahead of schedule. We’ve lost more than half the
2Ronald Bailey, “Climate Change: How Lucky Do You Feel?,” Reason, January 2020. summer sea ice in the Arctic; coral reefs have begun to collapse, convincing researchers that we’re likely to lose virtually all of them by mid-century; sea-level rise is accelerating; and the planet’s hydrologic cycle—the way water moves around the planet—has been seriously disrupted. Warmer air increases evaporation, thus drought in arid areas and as a side effect the fires raging in places like California and Australia. The air also holds more water vapor, which tends to drop back to earth in wet places, increasing the risk of flooding: America has recently experienced the rainiest twelve months in its recorded history.
In late November a European-led team analyzed what they described as nine major tipping points— involving the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the boreal forests and permafrost layer of the north, and the Amazon rainforest and corals of the tropical latitudes. What they found was that the risk of “abrupt and irreversible changes” was much higher than previous researchers had believed, and that exceeding critical points in one system increases the risk of speeding past others—for instance, melting of Arctic sea ice increases the chance of seriously slowing the ocean currents that transport heat north from the equator, which in turn disrupt monsoons. “What we’re talking about is a point of no return,” Will Steffen, one of the researchers, told reporters. Earth won’t be the same old world “with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It’s a cascading process that gets out of control.”
That all of this has happened with one degree of warming makes clear that the targets set in the Paris climate accords—to try to hold temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and no more than 2 degrees—are not “safe” in any usual sense of the word. Already, according to an Oxfam report released in December,3 people are three times more likely to be displaced from their homes by cyclones, floods, or fires than by wars. Most of those people, of course, did nothing to cause the crisis from which they suffer; the same is true for those feeling the health effects of climate change, which a December report from the World Health Organization said was “potentially the greatest health threat of the 21st century.” What’s worse, we’re nowhere close to meeting even those modest goals we set in Paris. Indeed, the most depressing news from December is that the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases rose yet again. Coal use has declined dramatically, especially in the developed world—the US has closed hundreds of coal-burning plants since 2010 and halved the amount of power generated by coal. But it’s mostly been replaced by natural gas, which produces not only carbon dioxide but also methane, so our emissions are barely budging; in
3Oxfam International, “Forced from Home: Climate-Fuelled Displacement,” December 2, 2019.
Asia, continued fast-paced economic growth is outstripping even the accelerating deployment of renewable energy. The United Nations Environment Programme released its latest annual report on the so-called emissions gap in December, and it was remarkably dire. To meet the Paris goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to cut its emissions by 7.6 percent annually for the next decade.4 Stop and read that number again—it’s almost incomprehensibly large. No individual country, not to mention the planet, has ever cut emissions at that rate for a single year, much less a continuous decade. And yet that’s the inexorable mathematics of climate change. Had we started cutting when scientists set off the alarm, in the mid-1990s, the necessary cuts would have been a percent or two each year. A modest tax on carbon might well have sufficed to achieve that kind of reduction. But—thanks in no small part to the obstruction of the fossil fuel industry, which, as we have seen above, knew exactly what havoc it was courting—we didn’t start correcting the course of the supertanker that is our global economy. Instead, we went dead ahead: humans have released more carbon dioxide since Hansen’s congressional testimony than in all of history before.
That we have any chance at all of achieving any of these targets rests on the progress made by engineers in recent years—they’ve cut the price of renewable energy so decisively that the basic course is pretty clear. Essentially, we need to electrify everything we do, and produce that electricity from the sun and wind, which are now the cheapest ways to produce power around the world.5 Happily, storage batteries for the power thus generated are also dropping quickly in cost, and electric cars grow both more useful and more popular by the month—Tesla is the brand name we know, but the Chinese are already rolling out electric cars in large numbers, and, better yet, electric buses, which could lead to dramatically cleaner and quieter cities. In his State of the City address in early February, New York mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that every vehicle in the city fleet would be electrified in the years ahead. Despite such dramatic announcements, we’re adopting none of these technologies fast enough. In
4WHO Health and Climate Change Survey Report, 2019.
5We’d probably be well advised to keep current nuclear power plants operating where it’s relatively safe to do so until they can be replaced with renewables instead of natural gas—though at the moment new nuclear power is ruinously expensive in most places, existing plants are an important part of the low-carbon power supply. A good summary of the problem came in 2018 from the Union of Concerned Scientists. We definitely need to avoid not only natural gas, which as I have explained previously in these pages is not the “bridge fuel” its proponents contended, but also the burning of trees to generate electricity—the latest science is showing this so-called biomass energy to be more of a problem than a solution, and that by contrast letting mature trees continue to grow allows them to soak up large amounts of carbon. seventy-five years the world will probably run on sun and wind because they are so cheap, but if we wait for economics alone to do the job, it will be a broken world.
Radically speeding up that transition is the goal of the various Green New Deal policies that have emerged over the last year, beginning in the US, where the youthful Sunrise Movement recruited Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an early supporter and used a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to draw attention to the legislation. Negotiations have been underway ever since about the exact shape of such a program, but its outlines are clear: extensive support for renewables, with an aim of making America’s electricity supply carbonneutral by 2030, and a program to make homes and buildings far more efficient, coupled with large-scale social plans like universal health care and free college tuition. At first glance, combining all these goals may seem to make the task harder, but advocates like Naomi Klein have argued persuasively that the opposite is true.
The wide scope of the proposed Green New Deal may make it sound utopian—but it may be better to think of it as anti-dystopian, an alternative to the libertarian hyper-individualism that has left us with economically insecure communities whose divisions will be easy for the powerful to exploit on a degrading planet, where the UN expects as many as a billion climate refugees by 2050. A million Syrian refugees to Europe (driven in part by the deep drought that helped spark the civil war) and a million Central American refugees to our southern border (driven in part by relentless drought in Honduras and Guatemala) have unhinged the politics of both continents; imagine multiplying that by five hundred. On the campaign trail, the Democratic nominees have mostly embraced the Green New Deal. Its sweeping economic and social ambition fits easily with the other campaign promises of Senators Sanders and Warren, but most of the rest of the field has also backed its promises of dramatic reductions in carbon emissions. For instance, Joe Biden’s climate plan says that “the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths”—first, that “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition...to meet the scope of this challenge,” and second, that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.” Biden has waffled and wavered on the practicalities, at times endorsing a continued reliance on natural gas, but it’s pretty clear that, whoever the eventual nominee, the party will be at least somewhat more progressive on climate issues than in the past. And in one way the nominee will be more progressive even than the Green New Deal legislation. Sanders, Warren, Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and others have all called for an end to oil, gas, and coal production on public lands—something a new president could do by executive action. Some have gone farther, calling for an end to fracking across the nation.
These so-called Keep It in the Ground policies are less popular with labor unions that want to keep building pipelines, and therefore those writing the Green New Deal legislation have not yet included them in their bill, wary of losing congressional support. But the mathematical case for such action was greatly strengthened in November with the publication of the first production gap report, intended as a counterpart to the emissions gap research I described above. For almost thirty years, global warming efforts have focused on controlling and reducing the use of fossil fuel—which is hard, because there are billions of users. But in recent years activists and academics have looked harder at trying to regulate the production of coal, gas, and oil in the first place, reasoning that if it stayed beneath the soil, it would ipso facto not be warming the planet.
The first edition of this new report, issued by a consortium of researchers led by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the UN Environment Programme, makes for startling reading: between now and 2030 the world’s nations plan on producing 120 percent more coal, gas, and oil than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and 50 percent more than would let us meet even the 2 degree goal.6 That’s more coal and oil and gas than the world’s nations have told the UN they plan to burn: “As a consequence, the production gap is wider than the emissions gap.” “Indeed,” the authors write, “though many governments plan to decrease their emissions, they are signalling the opposite when it comes to fossil fuel production, with plans and projections for expansion.” Another way to look at it, as the Financial Times calculated in February, is that to meet the 1.5 degree target, the fossil fuel industry would have to leave 84 percent of its known reserves in the ground, writing off their value.
You would think that, compared with the billions of users, it would be easier to take on the handful of petro-states and oil companies that produce fossil fuel; after all, more than half of global emissions since 1988 “can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities,” according to the Climate Accountability Institute. By definition, those are among the most powerful players in our economic and political systems, and so far they’ve been able to escape any effective regulation. At the very top of the list is the United States, which, according to a December report from the Global Gas and Oil Network, is on track to produce four-fifths of the new supply of oil and gas over the next half decade.
Partly, this is the result of President Trump’s fanatical effort to eliminate any obstacles to new oil and gas production, including recently opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—the nation’s largest wildlife preserve—to drilling. But there’s a fairly long lag time in building the necessary infrastructure—the fracking boom really had its roots in the Obama administration, as the former president boasted in a 2018 speech at Rice University in Texas. “I know we’re in oil country,” he told the cheering crowd. “You wouldn’t always know it, but [production] went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly, America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the
6Stockholm Environment Institute et al., The Production Gap, 2019. biggest gas . . . that was me, people,” he said. “Just say thank you please.”
The one cheerful development of the past year has been the continuing rise of a global climate movement, exemplified by the young activists who brought seven million people into the streets for global climate strikes in September. (Greta Thunberg is the best known, and rightly celebrated for her poise, but fortunately there are thousands of Gretas across the planet offering provocative challenges to their local officials.) The question is where to aim all that activism. The natural impulse is to direct it at our political leaders, because in a rational world they would be the ones making decisions and shaping change. This is part of the answer—it’s crucial that this year’s election in the US has the climate crisis at its center, and thanks to the Green New Deal that’s a real possibility.
But political change is uncertain— despite the remarkable activism of Extinction Rebellion across the UK, December’s elections there seemed little affected by the issue—and even when it comes it is slow. A new president and a new Senate would still mean a Washington rusted by influence and inertia. And winning this battle one national capitol at a time is a daunting challenge given the short time physics is allowing us.
A small but growing number of activists are also looking at a second set of targets—not Washington, but Wall Street. Over the past few years a mammoth divestment campaign has persuaded endowments and portfolios worth $12 trillion to sell their stocks in coal, oil, or gas companies, and now that effort is expanding to include the financial institutions (mostly banks, asset managers, and insurance companies) that provide the money that keeps those companies growing. A handful of American banks—Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—are the biggest culprits, and incredibly they have increased their lending to fossil fuel companies in the years since the Paris accords. Take Chase Bank, which is the champion in this respect: in the last three years it has provided $196 billion to the fossil fuel industry. If Exxon is a carbon heavy, in other words, Chase is too (and in many ways they’re joined at the hip; Standard Oil heir David Rockefeller led Chase to its current prominence, and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond is its lead independent director).
This financing—which has included supporting the most extreme oil and gas projects, like the huge pipelines planned in Canada’s uniquely filthy tar sands complex—is perhaps the single least defensible part of the fossil fuel enterprise. You can almost understand the refusal of oil companies to shift their business plans: they really only know how to do one thing. But banks can lend their money in a thousand different directions; they don’t need to fund the apocalypse. Given the trouble banks have already caused, it’s no wonder that environmentalists have begun using the phrase “Make Them Pay”— or at the very least make them invest in the renewables and conservation measures desperately needed to get us on the right track. My colleague at the grassroots campaign 350.org Tamara Toles O’Laughlin has compared this
kind of funding to nineteenth-century support by financial institutions of slavery—it’s not the same crime, of course, but “the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds.” It’s no surprise that the same demand for reparations—compensation for all those whose lives and communities are being wrecked—is being raised. There’s no question that taking on one of the biggest parts of the planet’s economy is a daunting task. It’s possible that the Chases of the world can go on lending money to their friends in the oil industry without suffering any consequences. On the other hand, in the same way that the electoral map favors Republicans, the money map favors those who care about the climate. Chase branches, for instance, are concentrated in those small pockets of blue around our big cities (I was arrested in a protest in one of them, in Washington, D.C., in early January). And perhaps these institutions are beginning to bend: in mid-January the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock, announced that it was taking broad, if still tentative, steps to include climate change in its analyses of potential investments. “Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” its CEO, Larry Fink, wrote in a letter to CEOs of the world’s largest corporations. That’s perhaps the most encouraging news about climate change since the signing of the Paris climate accords, because if these pillars of global capital could somehow be persuaded to act, that action could conceivably be both swift and global.
Anything is worth a try at this point, because we’re very nearly out of time. n
Time (1989).) In contrast to chronos, or “clock time,” kairos is “real time,” although “what that is, nobody is quite sure,” L’Engle writes in a previously unpublished essay included in the first Library of America volume. “We experience glimpses of kairos,” she continues, “in moments of intense joy, when everything is more beautiful, clear, wondrous, than in ordinary every day experience.”
Young readers of the books, especially Wrinkle, are drawn to them by the way L’Engle combines her own rather fantastic version of science fiction with an emotionally accessible story: a girl’s fight to save her father, and later her brother, from the forces of evil. But those who return to the novels as adults, as many of us do after having children of our own, may be surprised to find them not exactly as we remembered. “Aare yyou llosingg ffaith?” the stuttering Mrs Which asks Meg at one point. Even more than the many theological memoirs L’Engle wrote later in life, in which she vigorously asserted her identity as a Christian artist, Wrinkle and its successors represent her spiritual autobiography. “I was trying first and foremost to tell a good story, because that is my business; I am a story teller and nothing else,” she later said. “But like it or not, I was also writing about a universe governed by the kind of loving God in which I hoped to believe.”
Children seem to have little trouble accepting A Wrinkle in Time as a science fiction novel, albeit an unconventional one featuring a prickly, plain teenage girl and a five-year-old boy who snacks on liverwurst-and-creamcheese sandwiches. But adults attuned even remotely to religion will discover Christian symbolism on nearly every page. Even so, they may be taken aback by the revelation, in Leonard Marcus’s generous notes to the Library of America edition, of just how integral L’Engle’s religious references are to the novel. The first planet the children visit is called Uriel, which means “God is my light” in Hebrew and is the name of one of the four archangels recognized by the Episcopal Church. It orbits the imaginary star Malak, a version of the Hebrew word for angel. The creatures who live there sing a hymn based on a passage from Isaiah. And so on. The Mrs Ws, as Calvin will later try to explain to Meg’s surprised father, are “guardian angels” or even “Messengers of God...beyond human understanding.”
These religious trappings are pressed, sometimes awkwardly, into the service of L’Engle’s idiosyncratic brand of spirituality, which is layered with science and secular humanism and incorporates many personal quirks, including her use of the Hebrew-derived “El” as a name for God. At the root of all her writing is her vision of Christianity as a religion of love. Her God is not the fearsome (in her interpretation) God of the Old Testament but the forgiving, welcoming Jesus. “What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension,” she writes in Penguins and Golden Calves, a book inspired by her journey, at age seventy-four, to Antarctica, where the purity of the landscape leads her to fulminate against the degradations she perceives in American culture—casual sex, pornography—and to reassert her credo:
To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because a tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God’s love, a love we don’t even have to earn.
It is through harnessing her own power to love that Meg must fight evil: love of her father (which needs only the slightest shift to be read as love of the Father) and love of her brother Charles Wallace, who is named for L’Engle’s own father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, and her father-in-law, Wallace Collin Franklin, to whom Wrinkle is jointly dedicated. The book is, essentially, a paean to fathers and children.
Wrinkle has been embraced by evangelical Christians as “a book written about a universe created by a power of love, and entered into by Very God Elself,” L’Engle writes in The Rock That Is Higher, in which she credits her recovery from a nearly fatal car accident in 1991 to her faith. But what famously got her in trouble with some fundamentalist Christians was not her unconventional terminology—the name “El,” she explains, comes from the Hebrew word “Elohim”—but her inclusion of secular heroes alongside religious figures in her personal pantheon. In a notorious passage, Mrs Whatsit asks the children to list some of the “fighters against evil” throughout history: Jesus naturally comes first, but they quickly add Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Gandhi, Buddha, Euclid, Copernicus, and Schweitzer. At an event in 1990 at Wheaton College in Illinois, an evangelical school to which L’Engle would donate all her papers and which she regarded as a spiritual home, she was heckled by visiting protesters who accused her of incorporating witchcraft into the book (it includes a character called the Happy Medium) and putting Jesus on the same level with Einstein and Buddha. L’Engle professed herself bewildered by the criticism. “I wrote A Wrinkle in Time as a hymn of praise to God, so I must let it stand as it is and not be fearful when it is misunderstood,” she wrote.
The sequels to Wrinkle are all essentially variations on its themes. In A Wind in the Door, the fight against evil takes place microscopically, within the cells of Charles Wallace, whose mitochondria (one of the building blocks of cells) are under attack. But the science fiction elements quickly fade into the background as religion dominates. Blajeny, Meg’s new guide on her quest to heal Charles Wallace, arrives with the traditional announcement of an angel—“Do not be afraid!”—and is accompanied by a creature he calls a cherubim. (Yes, it’s singular.) Marcus notes that the character could be named for “the Russian saint Basil the Blessed, also called Vassily Blajenny, or Basil ‘the fool for Christ.’”
The evil that must be fought here is nihilism, represented by the Echthroi, a word for enemy that comes from Greek versions of the Bible. They seek to “X,” or turn to nothingness, whatever they come into contact with; for reasons we aren’t told, they have chosen Charles Wallace as their target. The book is heavily influenced by L’Engle’s reading about the “butterfly effect,” the term coined by the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz to describe the potential impact of small weather-related changes in one area on conditions elsewhere. It is often understood more generally, in Marcus’s words, “as a metaphor for affirming the significance of seemingly inconsequential events”—such as the fluttering of a butterfly—“in the grand scheme of the cosmos.” Here and elsewhere, L’Engle invests the metaphor with a profound moral significance. “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends,” Blajeny says. Later, another character elaborates: “It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance.” This lesson feels very powerful to children, who are often told by the adults around them, either explicitly or implicitly, that their thoughts and actions aren’t important. In L’Engle’s world, even something as microscopic as a mitochondrion can have cosmic significance, and a child can save the universe.
L’Engle takes these ideas further in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, in which the Murry family’s Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by a call from the White House to inform Mr. Murry that the South American dictator Mad Dog Branzillo is about to launch nuclear weapons: “One madman...can push a button and it will destroy civilization, and everything Mother and Father have worked for will go up in a mushroom cloud.” Calvin’s mother—now Meg’s disagreeable mother-in-law—recalls lines from “The Rune of St. Patrick,” an ancient prayer that she learned as a child, and teaches them to Charles Wallace, who summons a unicorn that allows him to mentally travel through time seeking the roots of fratricide in an effort to prevent the nuclear attack. (Lest the word “rune” raise suspicions of paganism, Marcus assures us that the prayer was composed “in preparation for converting the Irish High King Lóegaire and his subjects” to Christianity.) Charles Wallace’s challenge is to intervene as a particular pair of brothers and their descendants quarrel throughout history, transforming the fate of the world by disrupting the dictator’s lineage. These clashes, again and again, have to do with encounters between Native Americans and European Christians, specifically two Welsh princes who arrive in what is now America and fight over the native woman they both want to marry. The result is a family line of blue-eyed natives, some of whom will ultimately sail to South America, becoming the dictator’s ancestors.
Rereading Planet as an adult, I was surprised by the detail with which I was able to recall much of its intricate plot and the profound emotions it evoked. As L’Engle works her way further and further into the family saga, parts of Planet are deeply moving, especially a later section in which Charles Wallace vicariously experiences the sordid family life that helped transform Meg’s mother-in-law from a spirited teenager into a ruined, bitter old woman.
More difficult to accept, however, are the implications of the book’s moral lessons, which are likely to be a stumbling block for an adult who overlooked them as a child. Granted, this is a novel that appeared just over forty years ago, and it is unfair to apply today’s politics to a text that is anachronistic in many ways, not only politically. Still, even then it was preposterous to suggest that blue eyes, especially in a Native American person, are a sign of innate goodness. This idea was not an anomaly in L’Engle. In Dragons in the Waters, the second in the Polly O’Keefe series, a tribe of Indians in Venezuela have for centuries been waiting patiently for the return of “the Phair,” a white man who impregnated a native girl and abandoned her.
One could argue that it is not racial prejudice, precisely, that underlies these books, but Eurocentrism, which, at the time they were written, was experiencing its last gasp of social acceptability. I imagine L’Engle would have happily owned up to this charge. In A House Like a Lotus, the third of the Polly O’Keefe books, a group of characters attending an international literary retreat bond by singing “Silent Night” in their native languages. Even
the twins Sandy and Dennys, the least intellectual members of the Murry family, think first of “Euclid and Pasteur and Tycho Brahe” when attempting to come up with examples of historical heroes. This takes place in Many Waters, the weirdest and least successful of Wrinkle’s sequels, in which the twins find themselves accidentally transported to the world just before the Flood, where they wrestle with both their knowledge that the earth is about to be destroyed and their joint attraction to a girl they meet there while trying to figure out how to get back home. (In a nicely turned pun that works even better now than it did thirty-five years ago, one of the biblical figures hears “United States” as “Nighted Place.”) There’s a quality of snobbery to all this that L’Engle also would likely have acknowledged. “Being a snob isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” Polly’s friend Max, a wealthy widow who lives on a southern plantation, tells her in Lotus. “It can mean being unwilling to walk blindly through life instead of living it fully .... Being alive is a marvelous, precarious mystery, and few people appreciate it.” L’Engle’s fiction constitutes an education in a culture that she obviously loved deeply, a culture in which children can quote Robert Burns in the original Scots, in which spontaneously arriving guests already know their parts in madrigals and Bach chorales, in which people drink “consommé with a good dollop of sherry.” The pedagogy comes with its own good dollop of condescension—L’Engle’s implicit assumption that her readers will appreciate, and benefit from, her instruction. But there’s a moral dimension as well: good people have good taste, bad people do not. In The Arm of the Starfish, a luxury hotel owned by a villainous capitalist features garish murals of native people and a giant TV; the O’Keefe house, by contrast, is filled with books and shabby-chic furniture. As a child whose parents didn’t sing in four-part harmony with weekend guests or name pets after Shakespeare characters, I gobbled all this up as if it were one of the family dinners that Meg’s mother manages to whip up over her Bunsen burner while working in her home laboratory. But looking back on it as an adult, I find L’Engle’s vision of the good life less aspirational than blatantly elitist and exclusionary. Those who appreciate and conform to American and European Christian culture are allowed into the inner circle; those who don’t—because they are working class, like Calvin’s mother, or because they are superficially concerned with money and appearance, like a whole host of other characters—are cast out. On some level I must have always been aware of the overwhelmingly WASP tinge to L’Engle’s world, but the more troubling aspects of it eluded me as a child. It is painful now to read the scene in A House Like a Lotus in which Polly, stranded in Athens, condemns the “junky gift shops” filled with “phony icons” and “sleazy clothes” clearly intended to attract tourists: “One souvenir shop had a sign reading, ‘Welcome, Hadassah,’ and was recommended by some Jewish Association.” In a book where Greek and Sanskrit words are didactically explained within the text, the reference, as well as the vagueness of its phrasing, feels gratuitous.
An equally discomfiting element of the later books is what happens to Meg.
In Wrinkle she is a force of nature: a math genius, fierce in her love for her little brother, stubborn and uncompromising. “Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit urges her. “You will need all your anger now.” So it is a shock to discover, in the Second Kairos Quartet, that Meg has disappeared, replaced by Mrs. O’Keefe: a devoted wife who spends her days raising the couple’s seven (seven!) children, mending, and cooking, while Dr. O’Keefe, the man formerly known as Calvin, runs his own lab. “Mother’s a whiz at math; Daddy says she could get a doctorate with both hands tied behind her back, but she just laughs and says she can’t be bothered, it’s only a piece of paper,” Polly says at one point. “Mrs. O’Keefe knew a great deal about her husband’s work and had often assisted him,” one visitor assures us. L’Engle responded to her readers’ accusations of sexism by asserting that
if women are to be free to choose to pursue a career as well as marriage, they must also be free to choose the making of a home and the nurture of a family as their vocation; that was Meg’s choice, and a free one, and it was as creative a choice as if she had gone on to get a Ph.D. in quantum mechanics.
That is, indeed, a choice. But it couldn’t possibly be the choice of the Meg to whom we were introduced in Wrinkle, not unless she had a lobotomy. It’s utterly inconsistent with what we know of her character.
Did L’Engle have Meg choose family over career because of her guilt over having prioritized her own writing? As yet there exists no comprehensive biography of L’Engle, although a book by Abigail Santamaria is in the works.* Still, journalistic portrayals of her, as well as Listening for Madeleine, a book of interviews conducted with various people who knew her that came out a few years ago, have suggested that L’Engle’s depictions of motherhood in her novels were highly idealized, evoking the mother she wished she could be. And the knowledge that L’Engle’s husband, Hugh Franklin, was often rumored to have been unfaithful makes some of Calvin’s and Meg’s dialogue in Wrinkle more comprehensible. “You know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t true,” Calvin says to Meg about gossip that her father has abandoned her mother. “How anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go.” It’s impossible to imagine a teenage boy talking like this. It seems more likely that L’Engle is talking to herself.
The problems with the books occur when L’Engle allows her agenda—religious, social, or personal—to displace her role as storyteller. One of her editors once said that her books reflected “her very deep faith . . . embedded in a great story with great characters.” But the reverse can also be true: the characters are embedded in the faith, which is the motor that drives Wrinkle’s less successful sequels. L’Engle
*The Moment of Tenderness, a new collection of L’Engle’s never-beforepublished stories, many of them juvenilia, will be issued by Grand Central in April. herself rejected the idea that the two were separable. “Christian art?” she asks rhetorically in Walking on Water. “Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.” But Christianity, as L’Engle readily asserted, is at the heart of the way she thought of herself as an artist. These lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which are quoted frequently in The Arm of the Starfish, could be her artistic credo:
My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation . . . . Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
L’Engle was writing, always, for “Heaven and the future’s sakes.” In her acceptance speech when Wrinkle won the Newbery medal, she argued that fantasy and myth are a “universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.” But while the battle of good against evil is indeed a universal trope, the way L’Engle formulates it is decidedly specific. “To be truly Christian,” she wrote, “means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all.” Among other things, it means reading the Old Testament as a springboard to the New. “If the Flood had drowned everybody, if the earth hadn’t been repopulated, then Jesus would never have been born,” Dennys realizes in Many Waters, in which the purpose of the twins’ adventure seems to be shoring up their belief in the truth of the Bible. And it means continuously asserting that the Christian way is the truest way. While characters may profess admiration for Buddha or Einstein, there’s no question of where such figures rank in the moral hierarchy.
In “How Long Is a Book?,” her lecture about the genesis of Wrinkle, L’Engle said that she was “struggling through a period of agnosticism” when she conceived the novel. The greatest Christian memoirs, dating back to Augustine’s Confessions, all acknowledge doubt and wrestle with it. Strikingly, L’Engle’s books—fiction or nonfiction—do not. One would imagine that their author’s faith had never wavered. In fact, the only place in all L’Engle’s work that I found such an acknowledgment was in that same never-before-published lecture, in which she also expressed a poignant wish for “the kind of loving God in which I hoped to believe.”
Perhaps one reason why the later books are less successful as fiction is that L’Engle overcame her agnosticism; once her faith was stronger, she felt freer to indulge it. But I can’t help wondering if the opposite is in fact true, and the later books fail precisely because she didn’t convince herself. As she works harder and harder to fortify her own belief, the novels devolve into the same preachiness that characterizes her spiritual memoirs. The author of Wrinkle appears to have been fighting a battle that was to her just as dire as the struggle between good and evil she so obsessively depicts: the struggle for her own soul. It’s a pity she didn’t put more of that into her books. n