As dearly as I held A Wrinkle in Time as a child, I had always liked its follow-up, A Wind in the Door, a bit more. And having read Wrinkle again and found it often unsatisfying, the higher quality of Wind is thrown into even sharper contrast. It turns the plot skeleton of Wrinkle, in which a young protagonist is pulled from the troubles of ordinary life into a battle with cosmic forces that reflects those ordinary troubles, into a formula; and it elevates that formula.
The story picks up with Meg and Charles Wallace some time after Wrinkle, and the events of the first book seem to have been forgotten, since they’re never mentioned again. But their father is around, though he spends most of the book on call in Washington and out of the way. Charles Wallace has started school and is bullied by his classmates. Meg, in distress, appeals to the principal, Mr. Jenkins, her old foe, to no effect.
Charles Wallace is also coming down with a mysterious disease related to his mitochondria and their tiny inhabitants, farandolae. (Mitochondria are real; farandolae are an invention.) Mrs. Murry is doing research in this area and trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. One night, the Murry children and Calvin, who’s back and just as irrelevant as ever, are visited by Blajeny, a Teacher, and their fellow student Proginoskes, a cherubim. In the world of Wind, practically everyone is a Teacher and cherubim are a horrific agglomeration of eyes, wings, and claws that can dematerialize or turn into a wind or a flame. (The characters point out that “cherubim” is a plural word but Progo responds “I am practically plural.”) Meg and Progo team up to complete three trials in a battle against the Echthroi, the vaguely menacing creatures alluded to in the first book, whose nature and purpose is made more clear here. Meg and Progo become Namers; when Progo talks about an earlier assignment to Name all the stars, he says that “part of the purpose was to help them each be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That’s basically a Namer’s job.” Later he says, more plainly, “A Namer has to know who people are, and who they are meant to be.” The Echthroi, then, are un-Namers; they induce their victims to abnegate their own identities, losing their place in creation and dissolving into nothingness, a process known as Xing.
Meg and Progo first Name Mr. Jenkins, picking the true Mr. Jenkins from a pair of Echthros impostors. Then they and Calvin, who randomly appears at this point, meet Sporos, one of Charles Wallace’s farandolae. We find out that farandolae are weird mouse shrimp creatures who take root and become tree-like farae in a process called Deepening. The second trial is to Name Sporos, and convince him to give up his callow youth and Deepen into a fara. Sporos and a group of young farandolae have decided to kill off the farae and their song, a mystical song that rings throughout the universe and is also sung by the stars. Meg, Calvin, Progo, and Mr. Jenkins succeed, but the Echthroi attack and Mr. Jenkins jumps in to rescue Meg. In the third trial, Progo Xes himself to save Meg and Mr. Jenkins from the Echthroi. Charles Wallace is saved from his mysterious disease, and Meg and Calvin are left with the power to kythe, taught to them by Progo, which is basically Windows shared directories but between your minds. Meg and Calvin redeclare their love and decide they aren’t really that torn up over Progo after all.
A Stronger Sense of Conflict
Wind has elements which are poorly developed or abrupt, like Calvin’s sudden and unceremonious appearance in Metron Ariston alongside Meg prior to the descent into Charles’s mitochondria, or really everything to do with Calvin in this book. I think I would have preferred if Calvin never appeared, or only appeared in the opening scene, but made his presence felt through Meg’s thoughts and memories.
Nevertheless, A Wind in the Door arranges its strange cosmic battles of emotion and morality to much greater impact than its predecessor. As I mentioned in my review of Wrinkle, Meg’s first trial, in which she must find it in herself to love Mr. Jenkins, leads to much more growth in Meg than her sudden, easy victory over IT due to her love for Charles Wallace in the first book. Progo even says during the trial “Oh—you love your family. That’s easy.” Most of the “action” is a dialogue between Meg and Progo where Meg insists that she can’t love Mr. Jenkins, and Progo, using the mind-sharing powers of kything, digs into her subconscious memory and finds examples of good things she knows about Mr. Jenkins. This lets her understand him, and choose him from among the two Echthroi.
In the second trial, instead of arguing for good against the immovable evil of IT, Meg, Calvin, Mr. Jenkins, and Progo find themselves arguing with the arrogant and wayward Sporos, who intends to abdicate his place in the universe in order to hang on to the pleasure of his youth. The Echthroi stand against them and encourage Sporos to give in to those urges. If Sporos doesn’t Deepen, Charles Wallac dies. Instead of the aimless debate across a moral and cultural gulf that we saw between IT and the children in Wrinkle, there are actual stakes and an actual win condition to this argument. It’s a central part of the action, instead of a long digression purely to make a point.
A Curious Contradiction
Interconnectedness is a major theme of A Wind in the Door. Stars, among the very largest objects in creation, sing the same universal harmony as the tiny farae that live inside human mitochondria. Every being has a place in creation. To abdicate that place is to abdicate creation, to yield to the nothingness of the Echthroi. But this is the opposite of the message we got in Wrinkle, that conformity was evil, that to struggle against society was noble.
On its face this might seem like a contradiction: why is it evil to conform to the society of Camazotz, and yet also evil for the farandolae not to conform to the inevitabilities of their strange life cycle? But it seems likely that this apparent contradiction is symbolic of Meg growing older, maturing, and grappling with the complexity of the world. In Wrinkle, Meg was a misfit who felt misunderstood and hated by the world, and her adventure on Camazotz reflected that, telling her that it was noble to struggle against an unjust order. But in Wind, Meg has grown up a little. She’s fallen in love with Calvin, and from him has learned to fit in better at school, the society where she currently resides. She’s trying to help Charles Wallace do the same. It takes strength and maturity for Meg to go visit her old enemy, Mr. Jenkins, and humbly ask him to help Charles Wallace, a strength and maturity that Wrinkle Meg didn’t have but that Wind Meg has gained. Charles also accepts rather than rebels; he talks about his struggle as a need to adapt, in a Darwinian sense, and fit in better with his environment, one where first-graders don’t talk about cutting edge biological research or quote Shakespeare.
Camazotz, the cruel society of enforced conformity where the unconventional are tortured and killed, was the world as Meg saw it during her early high school years. The world we see in Wind, of farae and stars, the tiniest things and the largest, singing a song of harmony in a world where everything has its place, is society as Meg sees it now in her later teenage years: still full of mysteries, still uncertain, but a place where she is now able to fit in and has people precious to her, such as Charles Wallace and Calvin, who help define her place in it. Unlike Camazotz, where everyone did the same things in the same way to the horrid rhythm of IT, in this new world, everything is interconnected and all beings have a duty to take up their unique places in creation and serve the greater order, and to do that they must grow, mature, and realize that everything is interwoven. To do otherwise, to refuse to grow up and take one’s place, is to throw off the order of creation; as Progo puts it, “The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker. When we seek our own pleasure as the ultimate good we place ourselves as the center of the universe. A fara or a man or a star has his place in the universe, but nothing created is the center.” But later Proginoskes mentions that one individual, no matter how small, can still be important in the vastness of creation. On two occasions, Mr. Jenkins asks why Charles is so important. The first time, Progo replies, “It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.” The second time, he answers, “It is the pattern throughout Creation. One child, one man, can swing the balance of the universe.”
(Digression: I really don’t like the example Proginoskes brings up here, of Charlemagne falling at Roncevaux being an Echthroi victory. I assume this as a reference to the popular belief that Charlemagne was the West’s bulwark against Muslim takeover and without him the Moors would have made further inroads into Europe and possibly wiped out Christianity. Not only is this historically naive, it’s also ethnocentric to assume that all good in the world came from Christian Western Europe and the world would have fallen into darkness otherwise. History would certainly have been very different if the Muslims had had a larger presence in Western Europe, but I have a hard time believing it would have been worse; Christians at the time were hardly spreading peace, love, and enlightenment either. Many profound advancements are credited to the weakening of Christianity with the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment; if anything, these advancements might have come sooner if a stronger Islamic presence meant the Catholic Church had less of a stranglehold on Western Europe. Digression over.)
Creation without a Creator
Wind uses the concept of “Creation” liberally, and speaks of an order to it. When Meg, Calvin, Proginoskes, and Mr. Jenkins first enter the mitochondrion Yadah, the tree-like farae proclaim themselves and the stars the singers, and say, “Our song orders the rhythm of creation.” The rhythm of creation, like the rhythm of IT in Wrinkle, sets the beat for all those who dwell in the universe, from farandolae to stars, cherubim to humans. But unlike the rhythm of IT, to move with the rhythm of creation is to take one’s rightful place in the universe, a beautiful act and a painful duty imposed on all beings. The place of the farandolae is to Deepen into farae and sing with the stars.
But like Wrinkle, Wind stops short of implying a Creator. Even Proginoskes, an “angel”, a singular cherubim based more on the weird creatures of the Old Testament than on the winged men that adorn Christmas decorations, is called “nothing but a deformed emanation of energy” by the Echthroi. If his existence is based on natural laws, he’s less a divine being and more like the powerful energy creatures in Star Trek. We’re left to infer that the Creator is the source of the rhythm of creation that the song of the stars and farae shapes. But the Creator, if one exists, cannot have the same central place in the universe as the Christian god, because “nothing created is the center”, unless L’Engle was using “nothing created” as a loophole, signifying that the Creator was never created and simply was.
The Christian influence instead comes through in the book’s approach to good and evil, and its deterministic view of the universe. The Echthroi, “fallen angels”, are creatures of pure evil who attempt to destroy creation by stopping beings from taking their rightful place in it. Each being has one single rightful place in creation. To accept that place is good, is affirming of creation. To abdicate it is evil, is to deny creation.
Wrinkle, as I pointed out in the previous review, had obvious similarities with C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, but these end with Wind. While there are some similarities between Wind and Perelandra, L’Engle’s book makes its points more subtly, and its ideas are complex and beautiful enough that even an unbeliever can find pleasure in them, whereas Perelandra, to me as a non-Christian reader, felt very caught up in particular moral and doctrinal questions, to an extent where story and action suffered compared to Out of the Silent Planet.
But is it good?
Even terrible books can have lots of ideas, but as I alluded to earlier, when it comes to literary construction, Wind is a better book than Wrinkle. The plot is better put together and the characters are more interesting this time around (even Calvin), but Wind also improves on Wrinkle in smaller ways. The incessant quotes are replaced with meaningful references to literature and history, such as Mr. Jenkins’s comparison of the rebelling farandolae to the power hungry Hitler and Napoleon.
The dialogue, which makes up the majority of the “action” in the book, is kept from getting too heavy with clever puns and double meanings. When the Echthroi invite Sporos to give up creation, they say, “Come with us to naught, to nought.” Proginoskes uses the word “matter” as a verb to mean “assume a material form made of matter”, since he has the ability to be pure energy. Later, when debating with Sporos, Progo tells him that all farandolae are princes, to which Sporos replies contemptuously, “In Name only.” Progo says, “The Name matters”, and Sporos counters, “Only to matter.” And early in the book, when Progo tells Meg there’s a word for what she needs to have to name Mr. Jenkins and gets cagey about saying the word, afraid she’ll misunderstand it, he tells her, “It’s a four-letter word. Aren’t four-letter words considered the bad ones on your planet?” Although the ideas and outward trappings couldn’t be more different, the narrative technique of advancing plot and character through punny dialogue reminds me of Nisio Isin’s Zaregoto and Monogatari books.
Wind came out in 1973, eleven years after Wrinkle. Like its heroine Meg, it’s matured over its predecessor. The story it presents is more nuanced; the ideas it conveys are subtler and harder to grasp; and the way it tells its story is challenging, possibly even too challenging for many adults. It still has flaws, but I enjoyed its plot and characters, especially the sarcastic whinger Proginoskes, and found its message about finding your place in a complicated universe powerful and beautiful. I’m glad I moved on to read it again even after Wrinkle didn’t quite live up to my nostalgic memories, and because I enjoyed Wind, I’ve now moved on to read the third book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I never did finish as a teenager.
