Many Waters

Many Waters Review

Many Waters, published in 1986, is the most formally unusual of the Time Quintet novels. The time travel is accidental — Sandy and Dennys Murry, the family’s “ordinary” twins who have consistently appeared as background figures in the previous three books, accidentally type a set of coordinates into their father’s computer and are transported to the antediluvian world, the time just before Noah’s flood. L’Engle’s choice to centre the most consistently minor characters in the series is its most inspired structural decision.

Sandy and Dennys arrive in a world unlike any they have imagined: a desert landscape inhabited by small humans, giant mammoths, and miniature unicorns, where nephilim — the fallen sons of God — walk alongside seraphim in a community on the edge of the catastrophe the flood will bring. They are taken in by Noah’s family and gradually drawn into the dynamics of a world that L’Engle has constructed with careful attention to the moral complexity the source text only implies.

The nephilim and seraphim are not simply good and evil beings in opposition. L’Engle imagines them as creatures of mixed nature — the nephilim capable of genuine beauty and genuine cruelty, the seraphim more aligned with goodness but not without their own limitations. This moral complexity extends to Noah’s family, who are neither saints nor villains but people attempting to live decently in a world that is about to end. Sandy and Dennys, stripped of their ordinary context, discover qualities in themselves they had no occasion to notice.

The novel is the longest in the series and the most quietly paced. The choice of the pre-flood world means the stakes are always known — the catastrophe is coming, and its shape is fixed — which shifts attention from plot to character in ways that the more adventure-driven earlier books could avoid. This is, arguably, L’Engle’s point: the moral life is lived in the time before catastrophe, not in the survival of it.

Our rating: 4.0/5

The Ordinary Twins

Sandy and Dennys Murry have appeared throughout the first three Time Quintet novels as background figures — the normal ones, the twins who play sports and get decent grades and represent the family’s connection to ordinary human life. Placing them at the center of Many Waters is L’Engle’s most inspired structural decision in the series: the story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, stripped of the special gifts that make Meg and Charles Wallace exceptional, asks what anyone would do if they found themselves in a world about to end.

L’Engle, born in 1918 and the winner of the Newbery Medal for A Wrinkle in Time in 1963, published Many Waters in 1986, eight years after A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The long gap between volumes allowed her to approach the series from a different angle, and she took the opportunity to explore territory — the biblical antediluvian world, the nature of good and evil in beings who are neither purely one nor the other — that the earlier books’ pace had not permitted.

The Pre-Flood World

L’Engle’s reconstruction of the world before Noah’s flood is neither literal Bible narrative nor dismissive secular reinterpretation. She imagines a world of moral complexity: the nephilim — the fallen sons of God — are capable of both genuine beauty and genuine cruelty, and the seraphim are aligned with goodness without being infallible. The mammoths and unicorns that inhabit the landscape are rendered as simply natural in this older world, a detail that locates the novel in the tradition of mythological imagination rather than strict theology.

The choice to keep Noah’s family morally credible rather than saintly is the novel’s most careful historical act. They are people trying to live decently in the time before catastrophe, making choices under conditions they cannot fully understand, and their ordinariness is what makes their story meaningful rather than merely legendary.

The Known Catastrophe

Many Waters is unique among the Time Quintet novels in that its destination is fixed and known: the flood is coming, and no action by Sandy, Dennys, or anyone else will prevent it. This structural constraint shifts the novel’s moral attention from whether catastrophe can be averted to how people live in the time before it arrives. L’Engle’s point, understated but consistent, is that the moral life is always the life lived before the catastrophe, not the heroism of surviving it.

Before the Flood

Many Waters (1986) sends the most ordinary Murry children, the twins Sandy and Dennys, tumbling accidentally into the desert world of Noah before the Flood, among seraphim, nephilim and the looming deluge. The most grounded and sensuous of the quintet, it gives the overlooked twins their own coming-of-age against the backdrop of an approaching apocalypse.

Where the other Time books send the precocious Charles Wallace or Meg into cosmic danger, Many Waters deliberately chooses the ordinary, sensible twins, granting them a coming-of-age that the family’s prodigies never needed. Stranded in a sun-scorched oasis among Noah’s people, seraphim and the menacing nephilim, Sandy and Dennys each fall in love with the same girl, Yalith, and must reckon with the knowledge that the Flood they have read about as a story is about to become, for these people they have come to love, an annihilating fact.

Critics have singled the book out for the warmth of its desert world and its unusually tender central romance, a reminder that L’Engle’s cosmos always turned, finally, on individual acts of love rather than on the scale of the catastrophe being averted.