A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle

Rereading these books has been a bizarre experience. I have such a firm memory of having read them, but no specifics. I don't remember a single thing about A Swiftly Tilting Planet. As a result, my reread was slower.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet takes place almost 10 years after the previous book. Charles Wallace is 15. Meg is an adult, married to Calvin, and expecting her first child. Sandy and Denny are training to be a doctor and a lawyer. It's all a very different feel to the previous novels.

The family, minus Calvin but plus his mother, are about to sit down to Thanksgiving supper when the president calls up Mr Murry to let him know that Mad Dog Branzillo, leader of Vespugia, has threatened nuclear war with the U.S. Of course, this dampens the mood. Soon Mrs. O'Keefe, Calvin's mother, busts out with a poem/prayer she calls Patrick's Rune and charges Charles Wallace with the task of averting disaster.

While thinking what to do at the star-gazing rock, Charles Wallace meets a winged unicorn named Gaudior who can transport them through time. It's a good thing to because it turns out that to avert disaster Charles Wallace must travel into the past to change the "might have beens" that led to the conflict.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet, like the first two books in the series, is heavy in Christian allegory which I was slow to identify. Thanks to a long talk with my friend Nathan, I figured out that this is an adaptation of the story of Cain and Abel filtered through the lens of Welsh folklore. It's a complicated plot that moves back in forth in time  and spans several generations.

It was a good book, and one of the better time travel novels I've read.

While I don't generally seek out Christian allegory, I have to admit that I was disturbed when I thought it was absent in this novel. The layering of meaning that allegory provides adds a richness to these books that is at least half of what makes them satisfying.