I somehow escaped reading Madeline L'Engle's Time Trilogy as my children were growing up. We certainly did read Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. This one escaped me, though one of my sons read it on his own and said he enjoyed doing so. Recently I read the Time Trilogy: A Wrinkle in Time (1962), A Wind in the Door (1973), and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978). These books concern the Murry family--four children and their scientist parents who live somewhere in the United States at the time of the Cold War. In each of the three books the family confronts some sort of crisis involving a threat to the earth.
A key figure in the novels is Meg Murry, who in the first book is a gangly 12-year-old girl self-conscious of her appearance and convinced that she isn't very good at anything. Also important is her 5-year-old brother Charles Wallace, who is exceedingly bright for his age and who seems to have psychic powers. In the second novel these two are two years older, while in the third one Meg is married and pregnant and Charles Wallace is fifteen.
In A Wrinkle in Time dark, evil cloud is enveloping the universe, sapping life and free will from all living things. The threat manifests itself in both a political and covertly theological. Characters travel through the universe by a process called "tesseracting," which seems more a matter of magic than of science, real or theoretical. In A Wind in the Door a dark force called the Ecthroi is consuming the universe and threatening to consume and nullify the earth. It has sickened small particles called "farondolae" that live in the mitochondria of every living being: and all life is threatened. Charles Wallace, who himself is ill from this threat. has to confront the forces that are causing the menace. And in the third novel Mad Dog Branzillo, the dictator of a small South American nation, is on the verge of starting a nuclear way. (Time travel plays a major role in this novel, as Charles Wallace and his sister try to avert the crisis by altering events over the course of human history).
All three novels have a strong Christian understructure, though the resulting allegory and symbolism is more fractured and arbitrary than in the C. S. Lewis books.
All sorts of mythic creatures appear in these novels—flying horses, angels, sentient snakes, witches (who are really ancient alien beings), and so on. Characters teleport and time travel all over the universe, face various threats and challenges, almost suffer defeat at the hands of a dark enemy, and ultimately prevail. In the first novel, Meg manages to defeat the enemy by repeatedly professing her love for Charles Wallace. I could almost hear the Beatles singing their song.
At the same time, in all three novels science and cosmology play a significant role. This is often more evident as an awareness of science and cosmology than as a real use of science. These books may acknowledge and pay homage to science, but they are basically about the struggle of good against evil. For all their high reputation, these novels are really children's books, and not especially good ones. The writing is dull and the narrative is crudely rendered. Characters are basically flat, and the only really interesting one is Charles Wallace, whose special nature and abilities are never really explained. Events sometimes happen almost by caprice. The symbolism and allegorical elements are contrived, forced, and arbitrary. L'Engle seems to feel free to manipulate the laws of the world she writes about to suit her needs. Compared to Tolkien, Lewis (whom I do not like), or Phillip Pullman, Madeline L'Engle seems to be in a different and less distinguished league.
There are actually two additional books about the Murrys, and the Trilogy is actually a Quintet, but the books my children owned were in a slip case labeled the Time Trilogy. The remaining two Murry books are focused on other members of the family.
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