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A Ring of Endless Light, published in 1980, is from the Austin family series of books. L'Engle always celebrates the family, parenting, friendship and caring, while creating realistic portraits of sibling conflict, the need for independence, and the challenges of aging. She also explores the themes of death and the search for meaning in many of her novels. A Ring of Endless Light tells of one summer in the Austins' story, the summer in which they support their minister grandfather as he dies of leukemia. In her new friendship with marine biology student Adam Eddington, 15-year-old Vicky Austin comes to accept death as part of the cycle of life, and to have faith that there is meaning in loss. Two other young men provide a counterpoint: Zachary, who has just attempted suicide, and Leo, whose father, Commander Rodney, was killed rescuing Zachary. Ostensibly a book for young adults, the themes speak to all ages. In this excerpt, Vicky and Adam continue their experiments with telepathic contact with dolphins. One dolphin in Adam's study, Ynid, has just lost her baby, and as they swim with the wild dolphins, Vicky practices her telepathic link with the dolphin called Basil. Then Basil came to me. What shall we do? I asked him silently, and listened for his response with my inner ear. I seized his dorsal fin and we went flying through the air. Then he dove into the water, what must have been a shallow dive for the dolphin but was deep for me, and up, up into the air again. He was much gentler with me than he was with Adam; it was, in fact, a completely different game. He wasn't trying to dislodge me, but to see how high he could leap into the air with me holding on, how deep he could go without my having to let go and surface. Leap, dive, in a regular but increasing rhythm, so that each time we were longer out of the water, deeper under the wrinkled skin of the surface. He seemed to know just when it would have been impossible for me to hold my underwater breath one moment longer, for he broke up into the air and gently flipped me off. He swam rapid and widening circles around Adam and me, then came back and nudged me, as though wanting something. I began to scratch his chest, gently but firmly, and he wriggled with pleasure. "Right," Adam said. "Playtime's over. Ask him something." I pushed slightly away from Basil and he bathed me with his smile, and my hand almost automatically reached for his dorsal fin, and he did a dolphin cartwheel with me holding on. Now a backward one with Adam. Aloud, I said to Adam, "Take his dorsal fin." And Basil flipped over, backward. "Terrif," Adam said. "Try something else. Simple. In a few minutes you can try something more complicated." Swim, dear darling Basil, and I mean every bit of the dear and darling because you're very dear and darling to me. Swim out to the horizon and then turn around and come back to us. Like a flash he was gone, and then as he was about to vanish from sight he was back. "Right," Adam said. "Now maybe you could try something a little more subtle." What I wanted to do was to ask Basil to give me all the answers to everything, as though he weren't a dolphin but some kind of cosmic computer. And I knew that that was not only not realistic, it wasn't fair. But I wondered . . . I thought of Ynid and her grief at her dead baby, and I asked Basil, Is Ynid's baby all right? (Is Commander Rodney all right? Is my grandfather all right? Am I? Is it all right?) Basil pulled himself up out of the water and a series of sounds came from him, singing sounds. And what it reminded me of was Grandfather standing by Commander Rodney's open grave and saying those terrible words and then crying out, full of joy, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! And then Basil was gone, flashing through sea and sky, to disappear at the horizon. |
