MANY WATERS

This was published later than the rest of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet (in 1986), and I always think of it as the last book, but it actually takes place between A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, so I’m reading it in that sequence.

I ain’t gonna lie: it’s kind of weird. Weirder than the previous book’s mitochondrial adventures, you ask? In this one, twins Sandy and Dennys, the “ordinary” members of the Murry family, are transported back to the time of Noah and the flood (presupposing that story literally happened), when people’s lives span hundreds of years and shapeshifting angels (seraphim) and fallen angels (nephilim), not to mention unicorns and manticores, walk the earth. It’s the Bible as sci-fi. I was fascinated by this book as a child, but at the same time it creeped me out, and it turns out I still feel pretty much the same way. On the one hand, it’s fun to see the practical twins dealing with a decidedly bizarre situation, and L’Engle’s rendering of her imagined world is detailed and interesting—particularly the fact that people keep adorable terrier-sized mammoths as pets! But on the other hand, it’s dark, and there are a lot of sexual undertones going on, which I guess is in keeping with the tone of the Bible but pretty unsettling for a kid, like nephilim impregnating human women and an unfortunately over-the-top virgin/whore dichotomy between the two female characters the twins both fall for: Yalith, Noah’s superpure daughter, and the megasexy (and therefore, of course, in league with the bad guys) Tiglah. I can’t get too down on the book’s feminist cred, though, because L’Engle also makes some sharp commentary on the original story through the existence of Yalith, who’s left out in the cold when God commands Noah to bring only his three sons and their wives aboard the ark. I also liked the subtle way in which the characters of Ham, Shem, and Japheth, the supposed fathers of the modern-day human race, are portrayed as kind of a dickwad, a middlingly OK guy, and a standup dude, respectively (and their wives handily correspond to the same traits, with Ham’s wife a sister of the evil Tiglah and Japheth’s wife part angel), which is about the same mix of good and bad people you probably find in society today. Well played, L’Engle. Now where’s my mini mammoth?