A Swiftly Tilting Planet

A Swiftly Tilting Planet Review

Published in 1978, A Swiftly Tilting Planet won the American Book Award for Children’s Books and represents L’Engle’s most structurally complex work in the Time Quintet. The familiar Murry family Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by news that a South American dictator, Mad Dog Branzillo, is poised to start a nuclear war. Charles Wallace, now fifteen, is sent by the creature Mrs. Whatsit into time travel on the back of Gaudior, a unicorn of another order of being, to find the moment where Branzillo’s fate diverged toward violence — and change it.

The mechanism of the novel — Charles Wallace “going Within” historical figures across multiple time periods, experiencing their lives from inside, looking for the critical moment — is L’Engle’s most inventive structural device. The time periods range from pre-colonial America through the Welsh settlement of the continent, and each period contains a version of the same family, with the same faces recurring across centuries as different people make different choices. The argument embedded in this structure is one of L’Engle’s most sustained: that what we are is partially what our ancestors chose to be, and that one person’s decision for good or ill creates a world.

Gaudior is among the Time Quintet’s finest creations — emphatically not a fairy-tale unicorn but a creature of another kind of existence entirely, communicating in a language that is itself a form of music, bearing Charles Wallace through time on breath that is not human breath. The unicorn’s combination of great power and genuine vulnerability gives the relationship between them unexpected emotional weight.

Meg participates through kything — telepathic presence across the distance — which reduces her to an observer rather than an actor. This is the novel’s most significant limitation: the character who carried the first two books is largely passive here. But Charles Wallace, who had always been the more mysterious of the siblings, comes fully into his own, and the novel’s meditation on how the past shapes the future has a gravity that earns the book’s ambitions.

Our rating: 4.1/5

The National Book Award

A Swiftly Tilting Planet won the American Book Award for Children’s Books in 1979, the year after its publication. This recognition was notable: L’Engle’s previous Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time had come in 1963, and the award for the third Time Quintet volume confirmed her as a writer who had sustained quality and ambition across a long career rather than producing a single exceptional early work.

Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) lived and worked between New York — the apartment at The Beresford on the Upper West Side that she shared with her husband — and the rural Connecticut farm that appears throughout the Murry family novels as the Murrys’ home. This bicoastal domestic arrangement, combining urban intellectual life with rural space, is visible in the texture of her fiction: the worlds she creates are always both cosmic in scope and intimately domestic in their emotional register.

Gaudior and the Mechanics of Time Travel

The unicorn Gaudior is not a fairy-tale unicorn but a creature of a different ontological order — communicating through music rather than language, moving through time on breath that is not human breath, bearing Charles Wallace not as a rider but as a companion in a shared journey. L’Engle distinguishes Gaudior carefully from the unicorns of conventional fantasy, and the distinction matters: Gaudior is meant to be genuinely alien, genuinely other, genuinely powerful in ways that exceed easy understanding.

The mechanism of “going Within” — Charles Wallace entering historical figures to experience their lives from the inside and look for the moment where the crucial choice was made — is technically ingenious because it allows L’Engle to access multiple historical periods while maintaining a single narrative consciousness. Charles Wallace experiences each era from inside a human being who is living it, which avoids the distancing effect of the omniscient observer and makes the historical material immediately personal.

The Rune of St. Patrick

The rune that runs through the novel — an adaptation of St. Patrick’s Breastplate — encodes L’Engle’s theological vision in poetic form: creation as community, the individual protected by being part of a larger whole, the forces of light present in every aspect of the natural world. The rune functions as both plot device and statement of faith, and its repetition across multiple historical periods is the novel’s most explicit acknowledgment that the same truths apply everywhere and always.

Riding Time to Avert the End

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), the third Time book, opens on the brink of nuclear war. Charles Wallace, now fifteen, rides the time-travelling unicorn Gaudior through “might-have-been” moments of history, entering people across centuries to nudge a single fatal lineage off its course, armed with an ancient rune of St. Patrick. It won the American Book Award and is the most intricately plotted entry in the sequence.

The rune of St. Patrick that Charles Wallace invokes — “I bind unto myself today / The power of Heaven, the light of the sun” — recurs through the novel as a charm against despair, and L’Engle weaves a single Welsh-American bloodline across centuries of “might-have-beens” so that a small kindness in one era can avert a nuclear catastrophe in another.

Reviewers have long praised the novel’s intricate construction, in which each visit to the past must be made to rhyme with the others, and L’Engle’s conviction that a single changed heart can ripple across centuries gives the book its enduring moral force.