Novel: A Swiftly Tilting Planet

Overview
Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet returns to the world of the Murry and O'Keefe family with a more mature Meg Murry and her husband, Calvin O'Keefe, at the center of an urgent, imaginative quest. The novel blends science fiction, myth and prophecy as it tracks a high-stakes mission to prevent a nuclear catastrophe that threatens the entire planet. L'Engle uses time travel not as an escape but as a way of showing how choices ripple across generations and landscapes.
The narrative centers on Charles Wallace Murry, now older and gifted in ways that set him apart, who is summoned to undertake a perilous psychic journey. Guided by a telepathic unicorn, he moves across centuries and through the minds of people in diverse historical settings to alter the threads of fate and stop the chain of events leading to imminent global disaster.

Plot
When ominous signs point toward a forthcoming nuclear exchange, Charles Wallace accepts a mission that requires him to travel not physically but mind-to-mind, entering moments in history to influence decisions and plant seeds of change. He is accompanied and watched over by Gaudior, a wise, otherworldly equine guide, while Meg and Calvin work from the present, confronting their own fears and responsibilities as parents and citizens. Much of the book unfolds as a series of vividly drawn episodes in which Charles becomes part of different peoples' lives, touching the minds of a Native American hunter, a medieval Welsh bard, a Viking mariner and others, each scene showing how a single compassionate act or a stubborn refusal to harm can alter the shape of what comes later.
Rather than battling an easily named villain, the struggle is against a cumulative tendency toward violence and small cruelties that accrue into catastrophic choices. Charles' interventions are subtle and intimate: he listens, speaks the right question at the right moment, or offers a truth that shifts a character's path. Meanwhile, prophetic fragments and symbolic images, echoes of earlier books' cosmic helpers and the idea of a universe that is both scientific and moral, thread the episodes together and build toward a confrontation in the present that tests faith, ingenuity and love.

Themes and significance
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is centrally concerned with connectedness, between people, across time, and between science and spirit. L'Engle insists that the consequences of individual choices are not contained within a single lifetime; small acts of mercy and courage can bend the trajectory of history. The novel interrogates responsibility on both personal and political levels, posing urgent questions about the ethics of power in the nuclear age while affirming stubborn human capacities for empathy and repair.
Lyrical, at times meditative, and often startling in its shifts of setting and voice, the book balances adventure with moral urgency. It celebrates family bonds, especially the subtle, sustaining love between Meg and Charles Wallace, and between the Murrys and Calvin, as the engine that enables risky hope. Ultimately the novel offers a hopeful, if wary, view that love and attention to the human heart can counter destructive tendencies and help steer a "swiftly tilting" world back toward steadiness.