Book review: “Many Waters” by Madeleine L’Engle  

Sandy and Dennys know they aren’t in Kansas anymore — well, Connecticut.

The tall, fifteen-year-old twins had just come in from playing hockey in the New England winter, chilled to the bone, and made the mistake of inadvertently messing with an experiment their father was conducting in the family laboratory. And suddenly…

They were standing on sand, burning white sand. Above them, the sun was in a sky so hot that it was no longer blue but had a bronze cast. There was nothing but sand and sky from horizon to horizon.

It’s so hot that the boys nearly die of sunstroke but are saved by Japheth, a young man, four-feet-tall, heavily muscled, darkly tanned, wearing only a loincloth. In the journey to Japheth’s oasis, Dennys gets lost, but Sandy, greatly weakened by the sun, gets care quickly in the tent of Japheth’s grandfather Lamech.

That’s when Yalith, Japheth’s sister, arrives:

Sandy could see that the girl, who wore only a loincloth…was gently curved, with small rosy breasts. Her skin was the color of a ripe apricot. Her softly curling hair was a deep bronze, which glimmered in the lamplight and fell against her shoulders.

And Sandy is smitten.

 

Who’s your daddy?

Sandy and Denny Murry are the central characters in Many Waters, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1986 young adult novel.

Romance is a staple of such books, so the immediate attraction of Sandy and Yalith is no surprise. Neither is it surprising that Dennys, when he meets the girl, is similarly enamored and something of a love triangle develops.

What is surprising is what the twins find out — and readers learn — about sixty pages later: That the father of Japheth and Yalith is Noah.

Yes, that Noah.

The Noah of the Bible, the Noah from the time before the Flood when human beings shared the earth with strange animals and supernatural beings.

The twins really aren’t in Kansas anymore.

 

The “ordinary” ones

The opening of Many Waters makes it clear that Sandy and Dannys feel a bit lost in a family of overachievers. Indeed, the boys describe themselves as “the ordinary, run-of-the-mill ones” and “the pragmatists of the family.”

Their mother Katherine is a Nobel Prize winning microbiologist. Their father Alexander is a government astrophysicist.

Five years ago, their older sister Meg, then 13, went on an adventure through space and time with their genius five-year-old brother Charles Wallace and Meg’s schoolmate Calvin O’Keefe.

This is an exploit chronicled in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the classic young adult science-fiction novel that has sold some ten million copies since first being published in 1962.

Many Waters is the chance for the twins to shine. It’s the fourth installment in L’Engle’s Time Quintet which started with A Wrinkle in Time. The others are A Wind in the Door (1973), A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), and An Acceptable Time (1989).

 

Wishing for a Bible

Like Christian fantasy writer C.S. Lewis, L’Engle uses science fiction and biblical elements in her quintet, as she examines questions of spirituality, morality, God and love.

Many Waters, however, is the only book that drops her characters into an actual scripture story.

“Sorry. Your name is—what?”

“Noah. How many times do I have to tell you?”

Noah. Noah and the flood. So, they were on their own earth after all, and not in some far-flung galaxy…..

“I wish I had a Bible,” [Dennys] said.

At this point in the book, Dennys and Sanday are better able to accept the reality of living in the same oasis as Noah because they’ve seen a great deal of remarkable things already.

Such as Higgaion, a mammoth the size of a small dog and similarly pet-like. And more than one screeching manticore with horns and boar’s teeth. And unicorns who appear and disappear on the basis of whether anyone is believing in them and who can’t be touched by anyone but a virgin.

 

Straight out of heaven

Stuff straight out of mythology! But then there are the seraphim who are straight out of God’s heaven. (God, in Noah’s time, is called El.)

“Who are the seraphim?” Denny asked….

“They are sons of El. We do not know where they came from, or why they are here.”

“Are they angels?”

“You have angels where you come from?”

“No…but we don’t have mammoths or virtual unicorns, either.”

Each seraph spends some time as a creature. Adnarel, for instance, is a scarab beetle until he’s called forth.

Then came a vivid flash of light…and a tall presence stood in the tent, smiling at the old man, then looking quietly at Sandy. The personage had skin the same glowing apricot color as Yalith’s. Hair the color of wheat with the sun on it, brightly gold, long, and tied back, falling so that it almost concealed tightly furled wings, the light-filled gold of the hair.

 

Angels and former angels?

The seraphim show up in the Book of Isaiah, and they’re more than a little scary as they’re ranked at God’s throne:

Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”

The seraphim that Sandy and Dennys meet aren’t frightening at all. They do what they can to help the humans but keep their distance.

Much different are the nephilim who are mentioned in the Book of Genesis. In Many Waters, they seem to have been angels like seraphim but lost their connection to heaven. They’re stuck on earth but know the pleasures of humanity. Indeed, they have sex with human women and father children.

In L’Engle’s telling, they come across as devious and maybe nefarious.

 

A biblical travelogue

The fun part of L’Engle’s story is how the adventures of Sandy and Dennys give the reader an idea of what it would be like for a modern person to be transported to the middle of a scriptural story like Noah’s.

There’s a built-in tension for the twins because they know that, sooner or later, the rains will come and then the flood.

And also they know that, as visitors from the future, they’re not supposed to change anything lest it ripple down the coming centuries to result in, well, maybe their not being born.

An added level of suspense comes from questions about Yalith’s fate.  As far as the boys recall their Bible classes, no one with her name survives the catastrophe.

After the flood, the mythological creatures and heavenly (and ex-heavenly) beings in Noah’s world aren’t anywhere to be found which suggests that, in L’Engle’s fictional universe, they were wiped out by the catastrophe.

But the flood itself doesn’t happen before the end of Many Waters.

Instead, the twins get home in time, employing a twist akin to Dorothy clicking her ruby red slippers in The Wizard of Oz. And Yalith is saved through something very much like a deus ex machina.

I’m not sure how much L’Engle’s novel really grapples with faith and spirituality. The boys find the Bible world and aren’t much changed after they leave.

It serves best as a kind of travelogue in the Bible of Noah’s time.

It doesn’t, however, come to grips with why there were the odd creatures and beings before the flood and why there weren’t afterward.

Or, for that matter, why the flood?

 

Patrick T. Reardon

5.21.26