After years of relegating them to mere supporting characters, L’Engle finally gave Sandy and Dennys, the Murry twins their own adventure in Many Waters. The book turned out, however, to be quite different than any of the other works in the Murry/O’Keefe books. If L’Engle pushed the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy before, here she tried something else entirely: Biblical fantasy, if you like, complete with unicorns. Drawing from her own earlier work with time travel and a few verses from Genesis, it tries to retell the story of Noah and the flood. I say tries, because to be honest, I really don’t think it works at all.
The odd thing is that I think it might work just fine if Sandy and Dennys weren’t in it.
Unlike their siblings, or, later, their niece, the twins are not called upon to save a person or planet from destruction. Rather, they end up travelling in time by complete accident, after doing the one thing kids never should do but always end up doing: playing on their father’s computer. Since their father has been conducting research on time and space travel, the computer program sends them to almost exactly what they requested: a place with lots of sun and no humidity. They get terribly sunburned. And they run into small humans and mammoths. And they realize that they just happen to have run into Noah and his family and some random angels and sort of angels. Also: unicorns.
The pre-flood society, as envisioned by L’Engle, consists primarily of seraphim (good angels), nephilim (former but still very good looking angels), unicorns, mammoths, and small humans (about four feet tall, or a little over a meter). The small statured humans may be a reference to Homo habilis, who are generally thought to have been about three and a half to four and a half feet tall, or may have just been something L’Engle decided to make up on the spot, to keep Sandy and Dennys taller than the humans they meet. (The book was written and published well before the discovery of Homo floresiensisand that just about exhausts my knowledge of paleoanthropology.) The seraphim are more or less inspired by Christian and Jewish theology. The nephilim are inspired by a single short reference from Genesis, sometimes translated as “the sons of God” or “giants.”
As in Genesis, the nephilim are very interested in mating with human women. As not in Genesis, this desire, along with other matters, is slowly tainting this pre-flood world, bringing, as some of Noah’s family realizes, unwanted changes. As in Genesis, Noah talks with God—here called El. (I am mildly puzzled why, with all of these angels walking around and regular conversations with God, the hunter Shem then thanks an animal spirit instead of El after a successful hunt, something I don’t necessarily associate with Old Testament hunting practices.) The human society is relatively primitive; the nephilim are attempting to add some industry to the area; and the seraphim, who can shift in and out of time, are confusing pretty much everybody with chatter about atomic bombs, Alexander the Great, and so on, when not healing and hugging people or warning the twins not to disrupt the time stream. (The twins, of course, do.)
L’Engle uses poetic, often powerful language to describe the interactions of seraphim, nephilim, mortals, mammoths and unicorns. But somehow, perhaps because of the language, or because this culture does not fit in with either the Bible or archaeological evidence of any early society (and not just because of the unicorns), it never manages to feel quite real. This is not necessarily a defect: the most powerful scenes of the novel are those with a decidedly unreal feeling. But it does serve to reduce any suspense the novel might have had. It’s not just that I know the flood is coming anyway, but that I can’t bring myself to care about the complete destruction of a place that never feels quite real.
The book also demonstrates the problem with writing a series out of order. We know precisely what Sandy and Dennys will be in the next book: graduate students focused on law and medicine, respectively, supportive and concerned about their siblings, and, critically, skeptical of unordinary things. And unfortunately, this is very close to what they were in the earlier books, meaning that L’Engle has little room for character growth of any sort. Heading back to the time just before the flood should change Sandy and Dennys, but it can’t, and that’s a problem. And, of course, we never have any real fears for their safety: we know they’ll survive the Flood, since they show up in the next two books.
Watching them adjust to this different culture might have been interesting, but the truth is, neither one really adjusts: they just accept not taking showers and drinking fruit juice instead of water, and then, pretty much go straight back to what they were doing in their ordinary lives: taking care of a garden.
Even beyond this, Sandy and Dennys are, alas, rather dull characters. As Meg noted in their first appearance, they are, above all else, ordinary. In one potentially intriguing moment, one of the seraphim suggests that the twins are only ordinary because they choose to be ordinary. But this is never really followed up on. They lack Meg’s temper and Charles Wallace’s arrogance, or any other flaw that might make them interesting. Both are so blah that it’s sometimes difficult for readers to remember who is who, and the book often slows to a near crawl when they are on the page. I get that they are identical twins, but identical twins don’t have to have identical personalities, especially on the printed page.
Admittedly, both do fall in love with the same woman: the lovely and short Yalith. But even here, L’Engle downplays the tension. The twins know that they are both attracted to her, and just choose not to discuss it, and in any case, before this can become a serious problem, Yalith and the twins realize that she’s about to drown in the flood in any case, so, er, no worries. (Especially since we already know the twins will be heading back and marrying other women.) Which is as well since, as noted, the twins are so similar in this book that Yalith could hardly be blamed for being unable to choose.
The end result, something unusual in a L’Engle book: boredom.
I do have to give L’Engle credit for this: she creates a highly patriarchal world, drawn from the Old Testament, and doesn’t flinch at the implications: the problems of pregnancy, and the reality that in this world, Noah’s daughters, but not his sons, would be left behind. (In the New International Version of the Bible, daughters aren’t mentioned, although the daughter-in-laws board the ark; my Sunday School teacher told us that Noah only had sons.) And where before L’Engle featured women characters doing the rescuing, here, Yalith has to be saved by a man (and not even one of the protagonists, at that.)
But if the patriarchy feels real enough, one thing does not: at no point does the society feel evil enough to deserve the flood. Genesis is quite clear on the subject: God sends the flood because humans are wicked, evil, violent and corrupt. Some of the mortals in Many Waters are decidedly grey, and sliding towards evil, but apart from kidnapping Sandy (another non-suspenseful plot point), and even then, none of the humans seem to reach the levels described in Genesis, and this is fairly troubling. And while I’m carping, I have no problems depicting cockroaches as evil, because, well, yes, but bats actually aren’t evil creatures.
Still, despite my carping, I think the setting could work—if not, as I noted, for Sandy and Dennys. Without them, this could be a lovely, delicate book of a vanished antediluvian race, and the dealings of mortals and angels. It also might have featured protagonists with uncertain futures, or with the ability to change. With them—well, it’s a lovely, delicate book, interrupted by twins thinking about environmental law and atomic weapons. I’m left thinking about just how wonderful this book could have been, which is a terrible distraction from the wonderful bits.
Mari Ness lives in central Florida, sadly without a single unicorn.
The biggest image that stayed with me from this one was the many-hued, beautiful Nephilim. It’s still the first image that comes to mind whenever anyone talks about fallen angels in any sense.
Other than that … goodness, I can’t actually recall anything other than that it has the twins in it, and they help Noah.
I, however, was not spoiled in terms of the twins surviving, because I had never read the books about Meg and Calvin’s children. There wasn’t a lot of tension because, well, we know they don’t die in the Flood, but not because of their popping up elsewhere. This is actually the last L’Engle book I’ve read, since I’ve only read what’s usually boxed together as the original quartet. Your reread has, sadly, made me wonder if I should just leave it like it is and not read the others.
I totally forgot how much mammoth was in that book! I sort of have shoved it into the corner of memory labeled “what the heck was that.” I dip in there for anecdotes at parties, like “Did you know L’Engle wrote a book about the Flood?”
I read this for the first time last year, and I was really bothered by the message that the best way to get out of a bad situation is to ignore the problem and wait for the rest of the world to fix it for you.
@arianrose — Sandy and Dennys also show up, alive, older and in medical/law school, in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which is set after this book. It’s listed as number 4 in the series because it was the fourth one in the series that L’Engle wrote, but the beginning chapters show that it’s set before Planet — Meg isn’t married or pregnant yet, Charles Wallace is younger, and Sandy and Dennys aren’t in medical/law school yet.
@Mordecai — The mammoths kinda threw me; I realize that the idea is to show that yes, yes, we really are in the past, with mammoths, but the Biblical story, in so far as it can be set in a specific date at all, probably happens after mammoths died out, since Noah and his sons are said to be engaging in agriculture (specifically, tending grapes for wine) and they don’t seem to be living in caves either before or after the Ark.
I realize that trying to set a date for the Flood is an exercise in futility, and certainly the concept that the dinosaurs and other extinct creatures died out because they couldn’t get on the Ark has been stated in unscientific contexts before, but the mammoths here still seem a bit weird.
@jorenko — You know, you’re right – that’s another problem with the story: the failure to try to fix things. And not just because it’s a bad message, but because it adds to the sense that people are just waiting around and not doing anything, which in turn leads to that lack of drama/suspense I was mentioning.
It is certainly true that some people do respond to bad situations by just ignoring the problem and waiting for the world to fix it for them, and that can be interesting to look at, but that’s not really how it’s done here.
Sorry, double posted because of internet competency failure :(
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only person to find this book confusing and offputting.
This is another one that makes me wonder what L’Engle was doing- the magic, something that even Sandy and Dennys get to access, is gone by the time Poly/Polly and Charles get involved. It can’t just be the Nesbit/Lewis- ‘only children get to have magic’- or we’d have it in the later books.
Tiny mammoths rock! Wasn’t there one in a Heinlein story- Jerry Was a Man?
I was unable to finish this one and was almost hoping this post would give me a reason to try to read it again. I think the seraphim went down better when I was nine, and didn’t know the official definition of the word, than the nephilim did at twenty-two. And you’ve hit the nail on the head with the word “boredom.”
Also, you’ve mentioned that Polly seemed implausible as a real late twentieth-century child in House Like a Lotus, that people not knowing Shakespeare at a literary conference seemed implausible–I couldn’t buy that Sandy and Dennys didn’t know about Noah and his ark. They didn’t know they were time-traveling at first, okay; looking for stories you could be living probably isn’t the first thing kids, especially, think of when they get into a weird situation; but many people, even those who don’t know much about the Bible (and I don’t perceive the Murrys as poorly read or as living in an especially irreligious community), are perfectly capable of hearing “Noah” and “ark” and placing the context correctly. Weird.
Ah, this one. I have fond memories of my 7th grade Rebbe telling me not to read this book because it was heresy. Unfortunately, he told me this the day after I finished it. Good thing he never saw me with His Dark Materials, since I’d finished that the year before. That could have been a very awkward conversation. Not that anything I read in a fantasy book ever drove me anywhere near apostasy.
What I remember most about Many Waters is being annoyed that L’Engle had her names all wrong. Oholibamah was a wife of Esau, not Japheth! And why’d she make Japheth the good brother and Shem the cipher, everyone knows it’s the opposite! And who the heck is Yalith?! Noah didn’t have any daughters mentioned in the Bible, and surely he wouldn’t have let them drown if he did! And so on. I couldn’t get over the fact that it seemed like she’d pulled some random names from the Bible, and then made the rest of it up, instead of basing her book on the actual verses, or at least some Midrash.
But I still liked it. It wasn’t as harrowing as A Wrinkle in Time, or as mind-blowing as A Wind in the Door (I read them chronologically, so I hadn’t read A Swiftly Tilting Planet yet), but it was sort of interesting to watch Sandy and Denny hang out in this weird, quasi-Biblical society. My least favorite of the books, certainly not as classic as the other three, but it was an interesting day’s read. And it was definitely the trippiest thing I’d read by L’Engle, and I never thought I would read something as trippy as her first two Time Quartet books.
@RishaBree — Definitely not.
@Pam Adams — Aside from increasing the general sense that something is a bit odd around the Murry house, this book really doesn’t fit in with the rest of the Time Quintet — no interaction with the People of the Wind, no sense that destiny can be changed, no travelling wildly through the universe.
So inconsistency in magic is just one more thing.
@Bianca steele — Yeah, I kept thinking, come on, twins, haven’t you figured it out by now? Because you’re right — I don’t necessarily think that everyone would be familiar with Noah and the Ark, but the Murrys certainly would be. In the other books they show an at least casual acquaintance with the Bible, and given where and when they live, they should know the basics. And yet the twins inexplicably don’t make the connection. The only explanation I can think of is that perhaps L’Engle wanted readers to be able to make the connection before the twins do, but it just adds to the feeling that the twins are not very bright.
The word “seraphim” appears in some Methodist and Anglican hymns (“Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before Thee,”) and had been explained to me in Sunday School as special words for angels, so I knew those words, and I suspect other kids who regularly attend church/Sunday School would be as well. Nephilim was less familiar. I didn’t encounter the concept of angelic hierarchies until a bit later.
@Imitorar — Ah, here’s where getting trained by slightly more liberal Methodist interpretations of Genesis comes in handy. My junior high Sunday School classes were very indignant that Adam, Eve and Noah didn’t have any daughters. Our Sunday School teachers and Methodist ministers said that they might have had daughters, but sometimes the Bible doesn’t say everything. So I was ok with the idea of Noah having a daughter, even if she’s not named in the Genesis account.
I think “trippy” is an excellent description.
I read A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters, in that order. I was so impressed by the first three that the fourth was an even bigger disappointment than it normally would have been. It was just so… boring. There was none of the tension in the story that the others had.
I think out-of-sequence stories can work, but you’re right that this one doesn’t. Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomancy series is one set of stories that are told almost entirely out of order, but work in large part because Chrestomancy was so mysterious in the first book by publication (Charmed Life), so the remaining books develop his back story.
I think the premise of Many Waters could have worked, particularly building on the theme of fitting in and skepticism as a self-defense mechanism for surviving those seemingly horrible schools they saw Meg go through a few grades above them.
And why’d she make Japheth the good brother and Shem the cipher, everyone knows it’s the opposite!
In the (extremely racist) V.M. Hillyer history I was raised on (I hasten to add that my parents didn’t agree with this bit, and tolerated the book in the house merely because it provided a child-readable overview of a lot of basic history), Japheth was the ancestor of the Aryans, Shem of the Semites, and Ham of the colored races. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if L’Engle was taught something similar. It’s astonishing how many such stories continue to percolate (e.g., getting seized on as mythic backgrounds in fantasy stories) just because they make pretty patterns or something.
@TyranAmiros — I can think of many ways where Many Waters could have worked out, either by exploring the ways Sandy and Dennys learned to pass as absolutely normal, to avoid the issues Meg had, or by eliminating Sandy and Dennys entirely and focusing just on the world depicted here, or by making Sandy and Dennys interesting. We didn’t get any of that; we got this.
@HelenS — Right. I completely blanked on that, although it was a fairly standard belief held by many Protestant theologians and historians for years, and used as a justification for colonialism and the enslavement of blacks.
For the curious, this comes from Genesis, Chapter 9, with the bizarre little story of Noah getting drunk and Ham seeing his father naked, and Genesis, Chapter 10, which more or less assigns some of the Meditteranean and Near Eastern people the Hebrews were aware of to the lineages of one of Noah’s sons. The sons of Ham include “Cush, Egypt, Put and Canaan,” and then we get a lot more than we really need about the sons of Cush and everyone else’s sons. Cush is usually interpreted to mean “Ethopia.” Put is usually interpreted to mean the area that is now Libya. Egypt is Egypt and Canaan is geographically Israel.
Making up nasty stories about the heritage of other tribes and countries was a Meditteranean pastime — check out any number of Greek legends — and this pretty much fits the mold. Current scholarship tends to agree that this passage was meant as an assurance to the Hebrews that they would eventually triumph over their oppressors. The main context that needs to be remembered is that the Hebrews lived in an area that people were constantly fighting over — Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, just to name the highlights. But that hasn’t stopped later people from using this passage to justify racism.
Regarding the “good brother” — yes, Shem is the good brother because he is the eventual ancestor of Abraham and thus the Hebrews; Japheth was the ancestor of the “coastal peoples” and in later interpretations the Aryans; some of these later interpretations note that Japheth was a good boy during all of the drunkeness bit, unlike Ham saying, whee, Daddy’s naked, and that Japheth was allowed to live in the tents of Shem, which in context seems to be more an attempt to explain why so many people kept invading/walking through the geographical area that became Canaan/Israel than any attempt to make a racial point. But I suspect HelenS is right, and someplace L’Engle was taught about the superiority of Japheth and that snuck into this book.
As in Genesis, the nephilim are very interested in mating with human women. As not in Genesis, this desire, along with other matters, is slowly tainting this pre-flood world
Not explicitly, but the description of the Nephilim is immediately followed by ‘Now the whole earth was very corrupt’, and there’s a long tradition, going back at least to the Book of Enoch, that they were the source of the corruption. (I’m rather doubtful about this myself, since it does say that the Nephilim were also present later; I suspect that Og King of Bashan, who is described as a giant, was one. But it’s an ancient reading.)
In the (extremely racist) V.M. Hillyer history I was raised on (I hasten to add that my parents didn’t agree with this bit, and tolerated the book in the house merely because it provided a child-readable overview of a lot of basic history), Japheth was the ancestor of the Aryans, Shem of the Semites, and Ham of the colored races.
Actually something like this (though without the labels) is implied by the biblical narative; Shem is the ancestor of Abraham, and hence of both Jews and Arabs, and also the father of Asshur (Assyria) and Aram (Syria); Japheth is the father of, among others, Javan (Greece); Ham is the father of Cush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Egypt) – though also of Canaan, which messes the correspondences up a bit. I think the sons of Noah were, from the start, envisaged as ancestors of various peoples known to the ancient Israelites.
@AnotherAndrew – Heh. We must have been writing our posts at similar times. I think, like the story of Lot’s incest with his daughters, much of the Ham story was intended to paint the enemies of the Israelites/Hebrews in a less than flattering light, and also intended to help explain why various people kept coming along and fighting in the Canaan/Israel area.
I read “Many Waters” as an adult around 15 years ago, and remember thoroughly enjoying it. I had read “Wrinkle”, “Turning Planet”, and “Wind”, as a child, and had been enthralled by them. There was a gap of probably twenty years between them, so I really didn’t compare them too much. The one thing that strikes me when I recall “Many Waters” is that one twin remarks to the other that Yalith is “what they call an easy lay”. That seemed pretty shocking in a book I assumed would be filed in the children’s section. Maybe it’s filed in the “Young Adult” section nowadays. Just sayin’.
One thing that’s always made me happy about this book is that all of the angel names and attributes are as described in various Gnostic texts, including but not limited to the apocryphal scriptures of Enoch. That research is very much there, which is just cool; I eventually had to resort to Gustav Davidson’s wonderful A Dictionary of Angels Including the Fallen Ones to find the sources for the last few. (The Davidson is exactly what it says on the label and covers Judaic, Christian, and Islamic angels.) In general I suspect a lot of the less Biblical aspects of the mythology of Many Waters are because of L’Engle’s interest in early Christianity and related esoterica– which causes one to read a lot of Gnosticism.
@AnthonyWill – I would shelve Many Waters in the Young Adult section myself, but from what I’ve seen, it’s shelved in children’s books (as part of the Time Quintet series) when it’s shelved at all.
@Rush-That-Speaks — Huh. I wouldn’t have classified either Enoch 1 or 2 as specifically Gnostic scriptures myself — I thought they were more usually thought of as Jewish Pseudepigrapha/Creation myths/Apocalypses, although certainly used as reading/inspiration by early Christians and Gnostics and William Blake. Fragments of the Book of Enoch were found at Qumran.
But anyway, yes, I suspect you’re right and that much of this stemmed from L’Engle’s interest in other writings of the Biblical period.
For something totally different, try ‘The Other Side of the Sun’ – it’s one of my favorites…
Here are some review bits I had posted to a mailing list back in 1997:
“The fourth book has a few way-out conceits, one of which (the fact that Sandy and Dennys get sent back to Noah & family basically by typing ‘Take us someplace warm’ on their dad’s computer) as a computer person I found rather charming, but the fact that a major part of the plot is a struggle (to the point of even including fallen and non-fallen angels) for teenage (chronologically the fourth book takes place between the second and third books) Sandy and Dennys to stay virgins definitely got a lot of ‘oh come on!”s from me.”
A friend responded that I was brave to risk “evangelical flames” :-) with my book reviews, and I continued on with:
“Thanks! Though getting flamed for something like that is more a consider-the-source high compliment than anything else … I’d also find it kind of funny for any of them to be claiming that scenes with Noah’s son Ham’s sister-in-law (at the urging of her ‘fallen angel’ boyfriend) trying to get into the teenage heroes’ pants make for good Bible-study lessons for young children. :-) And the evangelicals would no doubt be pissed off by the teenage heroes’ comments about the sexism of the writers of the Bible, and their disapproval of God’s wanting to wipe out most everyone in sight with a flood and so on.”
“So yeah, the ‘sex = poison’ part of the theme and the heavy-handed, unintentionally-funny attempted-seduction conflicts I didn’t find very appropriate, but I still found a lot to like about the book. Again, I thought the ‘Take us someplace warm’ was charming. And gee, Sandy and Dennys actually finally get to have an adventure, instead of just taking up ‘you morons, why can’t you be more normal and popular like Sandy and Dennys?’ space.”
“They turn out to have some insecurities of their own. They have to think about who they are when they’re suddenly separated from their normal/popular life and even from each other. They get stuck with an awful lot of hard work and rise to the occasion. They become valued members of their new community. They, yeah, complain about religious sexism and injustice.”
“I can’t remember everything they do, because some years back a friend borrowed the book and never returned it, but I do remember having found things to like about it despite all the virginity-uber-alles soap opera-ness.”
And then a month later added:
“Since I’ve talked before about (1) the mixed bag that this book is, and (2) how I was supposedly going to write/post a message about nurturing boy characters in children’s books (but still haven’t done it), I thought I’d mention that as best as I remember, good ol’ Sandy and Dennys’s main job in ‘Many Waters’ is just to hang out and be nurturing.”
the preceding comment just makes me want to reiterate that, as long as you are not directly comparing them to the rest of the brilliant Time Quartet, Many Waters is uber imaginative and superior juvenile fantasy. I think, Mari, your re read gives the impression that it is a basically bad book, and in my opinion I would give it an 8 out of 10. Just one readers opinion.
@AnthonyWill — I don’t think it’s a basically bad book. I think it’s a basically boring book, and the main, perhaps only, reason people continue to read it is because it’s part of the Time Quintet. But you’re more than welcome to disagree with me — this comes down to personal opinion.
It has been a while since I read this book. I honestly didn’t expect so many negative comments about it but they are valid points. I like it but it doesn’t stand out that much in my mind. I will say this: I remember enjoying it more on my second reading so maybe the third will be even better :)