The Young Unicorns

The Young Unicorns by Madeleine L'Engle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've just finished reading this book for the third time, and was surprised to find that I could remember very little of the plot, the characters, or what happened in the story, so it was almost like reading it for the first time. That's one reason that I haven't written a review on GoodReads before now -- though I remembered reading it, I could not remember enough of the story to write a review. I find that with all the books by Madeleine l'Engle that I have read, though I have not read many, because they do not seem very popular in South Africa, and so they are very hard to find.

The story is set in Manhattan in New York City, where three children pass a junk shop on their way home from school. They pick up an old lamp, and one of them rubs it when challenged to do so, and a genie appears. The girl who rubs it, Emily Gregory, is blind, and makes a wish, that she would be able to see again, at which point a stranger interrupts and says that he wouldn't trust a twentieth-century genie.

It turns out that Emily Gregory, now aged 12, was blinded in a robbery attempt a couple of years earlier. The family of the other children with her, Suzy and Rob Austin, rent part of Emily's father's house, so they live together. The Austin children have an older sister Vicky, and there is an older boy Josiah "Dave" Davidson, who helps Emily with her homework by reading to her from her school books.

"Dave" Davidson's father, whom he doesn't get on with, works as a handyman/maintenance officer at the nearby Episcopalian Cathedral of St John the Divine, and the cathedral itself is almost a character in the story, and some of its clergy are also characters in the story. And that was my main reason for reading it this time.

I've been writing a children's novel which features St Mary's Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg and its clergy, and so I re-read The Young Unicorns to see how Madeleine l'Engle handled such things. I did that partly because in the secular West, where most readers of English children's books live, religion, and especially Christian religion, seems to be a touchy topic, at least in reviews that I've read. 

Plenty of popular adult (as opposed to "Adult") novelists, like Susan Howatch and Ernest Raymond, heirs of Anthony Trollope, have written books full of vicars, canons, prebendaries, deans, bishops, cathedrals and such things, but mentioning them in children's books seems, to judge from some reviews I have read, to be a semi-taboo topic. Synagogues, mosques, gompas and covens are fine. But cathedrals? A bit iffy.

And, having said that, I recalled that the previous time I had read the book, in 1998, I was also writing a children's novel that mentioned St Mary's Cathedral, though more in passing than in the current case. 

On my third reading I was struck by the richness of the description of the settings, which Madeleine l'Engle seemed to do particularly well. The McGuffin is a new device for laser surgery, called a microray, which the father of the Austin children had moved to New York to work on in collaboration with a surgeon, Dr Hyde, with whom, however, he does not get on. This gives a slightly science fictional atmosphere to the story, though it cannot really be classified as science fiction. I had added it to my fantasy shelf on GoodReads, but it isn't really fantasy, in the literary sense, either. It is fantasy in the sense that some of the characters have fantasies about what they will do and achieve with the microray device, but that's about all.

There are hints that the backstory of Dave and Emily, and possibly of the Austin family, are told in other books, though I have never seen or read them, but I enjoyed this one enough to want to read them if I can ever find a copy, and I keep looking in second-hand bookshops for other books by Madeleine l'Engle.

One thing that twenty-first-century readers may find not quite to their taste is that Madeleine l'Engle doesn't adhere very closely to the "show don't tell" rule of fiction. There is quite a lot of telling in the story, especially of the main plot and the denouement.

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