8 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Series Time Quartet Originally published 1 September 1986 Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 4/5 Goodreads Cover artist Charles Mikolaycak Language English Publication date September 1, 1986 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Genres Young adult fiction, Fantasy Fiction Preceded by A Swiftly Tilting Planet, A Wind in the Door Followed by Many Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, An Acceptable Time Similar Madeleine L'Engle books, Kairos books, Fantasy books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Many waters lyric video
Many Waters is a 1986 novel by Madeleine L'Engle, part of the author's Time Quartet (also known as the Time Quintet). The title is taken from the Song of Solomon 8:7: "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. If a man were to give all his wealth for love, it would be utterly scorned."
Contents
The principal characters of the story are Sandy and Dennys Murry, twin brothers who are, ironically, somewhat out of place (they are "normal") in the context of the multifarious and eccentric Murry family from A Wrinkle in Time. The action of the story follows that of A Wind in the Door but precedes the climactic, apocalyptic event in A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
Many waters victory worship
Plot summary
In the middle of a New England winter, protagonists Sandy and Dennys accidentally disturb an experiment in their parents' laboratory, and are teleported to a sandy desert. There, they are acquired by water-prospector 'Japheth', and guided by him to an oasis; but Dennys is separated from the others. Sandy remains with Japheth and his elderly grandfather Lamech and is cured of his heat stroke by a variety of improbable beings, including a brethren of seraphim who disguise themselves, periodically, as animals. Dennys reappears in another tent, only to be thrown into a refuse heap, and comes under the care of a friendly family in the center of the oasis, headed by a gruff but kindly patriarch, called Noah. It soon becomes apparent that the boys have been interpolated into the story of Noah's Ark, shortly before the Deluge. The nephilim meanwhile distrust the twins, and their human wives investigate; but discover nothing. Separated for much of the book, the twins become more independent of each other, and gain maturity over the course of a year in the desert. Both are in love with Noah's daughter Yalith (and she with them), but do not consummate their affection. Dennys convinces Noah to reconcile with Lamech, and both twins eventually care for the old man's gardens while he lies ill. After Lamech's death, Sandy is kidnapped, and eventually found by Japheth. Both twins assist the construction of the Ark; whereupon they are sent home on unicorns summoned by the seraphim.
Major themes
The story largely concerns the teenaged twins' emotional coming of age, but, like the other three novels about the Murry family, includes elements of fantasy and Christian theology such as the seraphim, a heavenly race of angels and the nephilim, a race of giants that were the result of the mating of mortal women and angels are the main antagonists of the story (see Genesis 6:1-4 ). Author Donald R. Hettinga notes that the world of Noah's oasis is especially difficult for "the empirically minded twins" to accept because in L'Engle's theology of "a gradual Fall", it is still populated by manticores and unicorns, "everyone can still see angels," and some people "can still converse intimately with God." Similarities to the fantasy-science fiction works of C. S. Lewis, always present in L'Engle's oeuvre, are particularly notable here. The twins' difficulty in believing in things that exist outside their empiricist world is a trait they must overcome in the story, because it is only by believing in a "virtual unicorn" that they can obtain transportation back to their everyday world.