As Madeleine L’Engle matured as a person the characters in her novels often found themselves at a similar time in their lives. As a result, when L’Engle reached the later decades of life, a time when people start looking back almost more than they look forward, L’Engle’s characters began to review their lives. Her books shifted from coming of age stories to coming to terms stories. L’Engle’s fourth novel, Camilla Dickinson, was a coming of age novel. Over forty years later, L’Engle wrote a second novel about Camilla, A Live Coal in the Sea, which is a coming to terms novel.
Intense Characters
Early in her career, L’Engle’s novels often featured intense young women. Before L’Engle wrote the series based on the Austin family and the Murry family, there were single novels such as A Small Rain, which featured Katherine Forrester and the novel Camilla Dickinson whose protagonist was featured in the title. Katherine and Camilla were unique characters who were intense and driven. It was the passion and intensity of these characters that endeared them to sensitive teenagers.
Over the years, these two characters would show up in other novels. However it wasn’t until 1982, we got to learn the rest of Katherine’s story in the satisfying novel A Severed Wasp. It wasn’t until 1996 that we got to find out what happened to Camilla. The story of Camilla’s life as recorded in A Live Coal in the Sea is even more compelling and satisfying than A Severed Wasp and centers on a undeniable need in people’s lives – that of mercy.
Coming to Terms
Like many of L’Engle’s stories (especially those featuring older protagonists), A Live Coal in the Sea moves between the present and the past. And like many of her novels, the past has difficult moments and bad decisions that have a profound and often startling effect on the present. Some of the difficulties stem from the protagonist’s poor decisions, however, sometimes L’Engle creates episodes in other character’s and relation’s lives that give startling testimony to the concept of the sins of the fathers being visited upon the their descendents.
Camilla’s story gives eloquent testimony to how the actions of adults and parents can affect generation after generation of their descendents. However, L’Engle doesn’t forget the flip side of bad decisions, which are the wise choices and the consequences of those choices; consequences that can result in forgiveness, mercy, and ultimately peace.
Reckoning
A Live Coal in the Sea begins with Camilla receiving a prestigious award for her work as an astronomer. Her family travels to the college where she teaches to celebrate with her. The impromptu family reunion causes Camilla to begin reviewing the past. Her memories take on a greater importance when her granddaughter Raffi asks point blank “Are you or aren’t you my grandmother?”
As Camilla recounts the past to her troubled granddaughter she remembers when she first understood the fearful nature of mercy. She remembers learning that if you accept that others can receive mercy, then you must accept it for yourself and for those to whom you would rather not extend mercy. But in that awful mercy, comes healing, forgiveness, and peace.
Love It or Leave It?
Madeleine L’Engle is a love her or leave her kind of author. Few people are lukewarm when it comes to her writing. They either love her or they scorn her. However, even among her fans, reviews of her books are often disparate. One person will describe a book as being their favorite and the next will say it is the worst book she has ever written. As a result, the only way to really know what to think of one of L’Engle’s novels is to read it.
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