A Wrinkle in Time Summary: Meg Murry, the Tesseract and the Black Thing
What A Wrinkle in Time is about
Madeleine L'Engle's novel was published in 1962 and won the Newbery Medal, the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. It was also runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. It opens in suburban New England with a thirteen-year-old girl called Meg Murry, whose scientist father has vanished years earlier and whose family is the subject of local gossip.
One night Meg meets an odd new neighbour, Mrs Whatsit, who mentions something called a tesseract. Meg recognises the word. It was the scientific concept her father, Dr Alex Murry, was working on before he disappeared. The next day Meg, her younger brother Charles Wallace and a schoolmate called Calvin O'Keefe go to Mrs Whatsit's house. There they meet Mrs Who and hear the voice of the unseen Mrs Which. The three promise to help the children find their father.
The three Mrs W's turn out to be supernatural beings. They move the children across the universe by folding the fabric of space and time, a method the book calls tessering. The journey takes them first to Uriel, a planet of centaur-like beings who live in light and are resisting an encroaching darkness. That darkness is the Black Thing, an evil spreading across worlds. A visit to the Happy Medium, a far-seeing figure with a crystal ball, shows the children that Earth itself is partly covered by it, and that religious figures, philosophers, scientists and artists have long fought back against it.
The search for Dr Murry leads to Camazotz, a planet that has already fallen. Every house looks the same. Every person behaves the same. All of it is run by CENTRAL Central Intelligence, and behind that sits IT, a disembodied brain with enormous telepathic power. The children have to walk into that place with only three parting gifts and an instruction from Mrs Which to stay together and be strong.
The main characters
Meg Murry is the centre of the book. She is stubborn, angry, bad at school and convinced of her own faults. Mrs Whatsit gives her exactly those faults as a gift, which tells you how the novel intends to use them. Charles Wallace is her youngest brother, a child genius with an unusual ability to read other people, and that ability is also his weak point. Calvin O'Keefe is the popular schoolboy who turns out to be lonely at home and who finds in the Murry family something he has been missing.
Around them stand Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who and Mrs Which, who guide but refuse to rescue. Mrs Whatsit is revealed to have once been a star that exploded deliberately to fight the darkness. On the planet Ixchel the children meet beings with featureless faces, tentacles and four arms, one of whom Meg comes to call Aunt Beast. L'Engle modelled the Murry family on her own, and the critic B. E. Cullinan noted that she created characters who "share common joy with a mixed fantasy and science fiction setting".
The themes
The spine of the book is a war between light and darkness, good and evil, played out at a cosmic scale and inside a teenage girl at the same time. Camazotz makes the argument concrete. It is a world where every difference has been stripped out, and the book treats that sameness as the actual face of evil rather than a side effect of it.
Running alongside that is a story about growing up. The three children mature as they travel, and they are pushed into questions about love, spirituality, purpose and goodness that most adventure stories leave alone. L'Engle's own scientific and religious interests are visible throughout, which is part of why the book reads differently from most children's science fiction. Family is the third thread. The quest is a rescue mission for a father, and the resolution depends on a sister.
How it ends
Stop here if you want the ending left alone. On Camazotz, Charles Wallace lets himself be hypnotised by the Man with Red Eyes in order to locate their father. Meg uses Mrs Who's glasses to reach Dr Murry's prison and free him, but he cannot break his son's trance. As IT begins to take hold of the rest of them, Dr Murry tessers Meg, Calvin and himself to the neighbouring planet Ixchel, leaving Charles Wallace behind. Meg is paralysed by contact with the Black Thing on the way, and Aunt Beast heals her.
The three Mrs W's then arrive and give the rescue of Charles Wallace to Meg alone. She returns to IT, focuses all her love on her brother and breaks the hold on him with it. Mrs Which tessers them away, the group lands in the woods near the Murry home, and the three Mrs W's vanish.
Why it still matters
The book has sold more than ten million copies and opens L'Engle's Time Quintet, which follows the Murry and O'Keefe families further. It has been adapted twice by Disney, as a 2003 television film directed by John Kent Harrison and a 2018 theatrical film directed by Ava DuVernay. Its lasting pull comes from giving an awkward, furious girl the job of saving someone, and from insisting that her flaws are the tools she needs.
