All the Light We Cannot See (2014)
Anthony Doerr (1973)
531 pages
Anthony Doerr’s wonderful novel All the Light We Cannot See fires a readers imagination from the opening scenes, and maintains its magical grip straight through to the final lines. At its heart a story of the fate of a jewel with a diabolical curse, Doerr transforms this simple mystery into a deeply engaging exploration of human dreams and desires in the face of a world seemingly bent on repressing them.
In the late summer of 1944 the German army — though in full retreat — desperately holds an isolated outpost along the Brittany coast of France: the walled, port city of St. Malo. As allied planes approach the city to fire bomb it into submission, a pair of adolescents who have already experienced far too much horror in their young lives find themselves caught up in the imminent attack: sixteen year-old French girl, Marie-Laure, and eighteen year-old German private, Walter Pfennig. As the bombs begin landing on the city, Doerr jumps back ten years, to introduce and begin the winding paths that eventually bring these two teenagers to that fateful day in St. Malo.Though growing up just a few hundred miles apart, the two come of age on opposite sides of the calamitous decade that followed Hitler’s final assumption of power in 1934. Marie-Laure grows up in Paris in the years before the war, living with her father who works as a locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History. At the age of six she goes blind, and to encourage her to develop some level of independence, her father builds a miniature model of their neighborhood for her to study. Through his gentle but insistent encouragement she eventually becomes able to walk the streets on her own, and her self-confidence grows. At the same time she develops a deep and abiding fascination for the natural world as she spends time wandering her father’s workplace and untiringly posing questions to the scientists working there.
Across the border, in the Ruhr Valley coal mining region of west-central Germany, Werner lives with his sister in an orphanage. Already as a young child he exhibits a remarkable curiosity about the world, as well as an uncanny ability to build and fix things — most particularly radios, which gradually brings him to the attention of neighbors, who regularly arrive at the orphanage door to have their sets fixed. As an orphan, he has little hope for the future, expected to eventually work in the nearby coalmines, the same mines in which his father died.
But then Germany’s rise out of economic collapse and transformation into a nation gearing up for war offers Werner an opportunity to escape his dismal destiny, when his technical gifts lead to an offer to study at a military school of the regime, known as a National Political Institute of Education. Desperate for something better, he ignores his sister’s prescient warnings about the terrible consequences of the bargain he is making, and enters into the repressive web of the new regime.
When war finally breaks out, Marie-Laure and her father escape Paris just ahead of the invading German army, ending up at the home of her great-uncle, in St. Malo. Her father carries with him a beautiful diamond from the museum, with orders to hide it from the Germans. Only the size of a small egg, the piece comes freighted with an ancient and terrible curse, one that, however much rational thinking might desperately try to dismiss it, events seem repeatedly to reinforce.
Werner takes a more circuitous route to St. Malo, as the war first leads him far to the east, his expertise with radios in heavy demand on the Russian front. There the technical skills and work that he had found so thrilling and engaging while at school reveal a darker side that comes to weigh heavily on him. Eventually these same skills pull him to the coast of Brittany, to a hotel in St. Malo just blocks away from Marie-Laure. As the town awaits and then experiences the ineluctable allied assault, Werner is offered a chance for redemption, as he discovers his fate to be bound up tightly with a young girl he’s never met.
A recurring theme in the story centers on puzzle boxes that Marie-Laure’s father makes for her as gifts — intricate little wooden devices that she must learn the secret to opening in order to discover the prize contained within. For Marie-Laure the joy lies in discovering the secret; the prize inside is secondary. Doerr’s story presents readers with the intricate detail of such a puzzle box. The mystery lies not so much in the main plot line, for we know from early on roughly how things will develop; it lies instead in the paths taken by the characters, and what they experience on the way to their intersecting destiny in St. Malo.
Doerr builds the novel as a series of short chapters, each from a page to at most four or five long, and each told from the viewpoint of a different character. The chapters are grouped into sections that jump forward and backward in time, from the nominal present of the Germans losing their grip on St. Malo, to events during the decade leading up to that moment. From chapter to chapter, Doerr develops scenes slowly, a short, thrilling piece at a time, progress sometimes delayed by sections that jump to entirely different characters and points in time.
By never following a story-line for but a few pages at a time, the threads that bind the characters together — though invisible to them — become poignant realities to the reader. The tightly woven and intricately detailed structure helps make manifest the interconnected paths characters take as they follow their unknowable destiny to arrive together in St. Malo in the catastrophic final days of the war.
Constructing the story in this way also has the effect for the reader of becoming a kind of wild ride into a whirlpool — inexorably pulling us inward toward the dramatic climax. The result is a powerful urge to read faster and faster to discover what happens next. Resisting that temptation gives the benefit of not missing out on the joy of Doerr’s beautiful writing, his sensitive descriptions of both the physical world and the inner complexities and confusions of his characters.
A mystery lies at the heart of All the Light We Cannot See, though not so much about what will happen in the end, as in how the characters will confront the relentless demands of the world around them, as they seek to realize their hopes and dreams. Doerr reminds us that even in the darkest depths of war and destruction, opportunities for wonder and beauty — and hope for the future — can blossom.
Other reviews / information:
The destiny that draws Marie-Laure and Werner together evokes a bit the idea of the Chinese belief in a deity, the ‘Old Man of the Moon’, as for example recalled in (to admittedly completely different effect) David Rabe’s story, Girl by the Road at Night (my review here):
... the legendary Old Man of the Moon who sits in the moonlight reading his book in which are recorded the connections that will come between people in the world. Quick and silent as a spider, he puts a web of invisible, rosy threads throughout the world until all people everywhere who are destined to be pairs are linked in a secret, lovely manner. Down through their lives the threads draw the lovers, down the trails and rivers, from city to forest, until they finally meet…
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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