Reading: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

[white_hart]

This was the book of Madeleine L'Engle's which made the biggest impression on me when I read it as a child. I didn't remember all that much of the story itself, except that it had something to do with Welsh communities in Patagonia, but I remembered the novel tackling the idea of facing up to the possible end of everything, and I particularly remembered a character talking about living through a winter when everyone thought that nuclear armageddon would come before spring, and noticing the pussy willow each spring thereafter, made all the sweeter because once she had thought she'd never see it again. So, at the end of a week when the news has made me feel that the centre is very close to no longer holding, it seemed like a good choice for a comfort re-read.

Sadly, L'Engle doesn't quite retain the magic she had when I was younger. The spiritual aspect of the plot, clearly grounded in Christianity, didn't bother me as a child/young adult in the way that the camouflaged Christianity of the Narnia books did when I worked it out, but as an adult it felt a bit cringeworthy. Especially the sparkly unicorn. I had forgotten that there was a sparkly unicorn. It also seemed slightly implausible that all the key events and choices affecting whether the president of a South American country was a deranged warmonger or a jolly good chap should happen in exactly the same spot in present-day New England, and it wasn't at all clear how Charles Wallace's experience of the lives of the various inter-related young men and boys who had lived in that place over the years actually changed anything (though maybe L'Engle was implying that he changed it just by observing it; perhaps Branzillo is basically Schrödinger's dictator). I don't think the portrayal of Native Americans is one that would be considered in keeping with modern attitudes, and the women are all terribly passive, wives and mothers; even Meg, while still nominally the heroine, is reduced to the role of observer while everyone worries about her taking care in her pregnant condition. And as if all that wasn't bad enough, a reference to a Welsh character not knowing what a snake was left me with a nasty suspicion that L'Engle has got Wales and Ireland mixed up. I think that, basically, some childhood favourites really shouldn't be re-read.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Of course Welsh people know what snakes are. They're dragons, in the larval stage before they develop horns.

[sollers]

Welsh dragons don't have horns! Are you thinking of Chinese dragons?

On a more mundane level, when I was 12 some friends and I were walking around a headland in Gower when an adder crossed the path between my feet.

[sollers]

Or maybe you were thinking of their ears?

Judging from the story of Lludd and Llefelys, the infant stage may be more like piglets (including the curly tail) before the claws and wings grow.

[lilliburlero]

I don't know the book, but the idea of even an Irish person not recognising a snake strikes me as implausible, given their ubiquity in iconography. (Moles, now: I have both explained molehills to Irish people in the English countryside for the first time and been myself conscious of something obscurely missing from the Irish rural landscape.)

[nineveh_uk]

Ireland doesn't have moles? That's my new thing learned today.

[white_hart]

It was a person from the time of myths and legends, but it does seem rather unlikely.

I didn't know about the moles either!

[sollers]

According to legend (even though not in fact) there were originally snakes in Ireland, so the character should have heard of them.

And still according to legend, St Patrick drove them out, so anyone living at the time of later legends would certainly have heard of them!

[white_hart]

Also all true. So basically, if if the person had been Irish it would have been a fairly ridiculous thing to say, never mind that they were actually supposedly Welsh!

(ETA: Just looked up the legend; it was Prince Madoc, who supposedly lived around 1170, so definitely late enough to be aware of St Patrick driving out the snakes from Ireland and therefore of the concept of "snake", even if he had been Irish and never seen a snake. Which he wasn't.)

[sollers]

Oh dear. Just to stir things, at that date throughout Europe the same word was used for "dragon" and "serpent".