All the Light We Cannot See

The thing about this book, this overly-long book, is that it's a kitchen sinker. It has everything you want in An Important Novel: the World War II setting; the big, chunky themes of human connection, heroism, loss, redemption and Good vs. Evil; pathos; profound insights; measured, weighty prose; significance-charged dialogue . . . no wonder it took Anthony Doerr the better part of a decade to complete. It's like he just couldn't stop tinkering with it and, like an obsessed medieval lord, kept adding wings to the castle.

The second thing is that everything about it is vaguely familiar. Wasn't there another book about a precocious young teenaged girl from the second world war? Don't I recall a movie about an obsessive Nazi searching Europe for a precious artefact? Didn't I once read a heartbreaking story about a besieged city, secret communication, brave partisans, doomed soldiers, and an improbable rescue just when all seemed lost? Isn't there a tale about a charmed talisman that simultaneously endangers and protects its holder that the minions of evil are hunting? Like The Barenaked Ladies sang, “It's All Been Done.”

I'm not taking away from Doerr's achievement. It is a very well written, moving novel, and at times I had difficulty putting it down (though possibly that's from the gimmicky and propulsive 2 page chapters). I do enjoy historical fiction, and have a particular fascination with the interwar and World War 2 era. Doerr took a risk in setting his story in World War 2, probably the most written about period in history, to tell this story of human connection and loss. I mean, it has to be tough to find a story that doesn't rely on, well, everything he ultimately relied on, and it has to be even more difficult to catch the imagination of the reader who will wonder what else is there to explore.

In telling the story through the eyes of two children Doerr found his novel approach. Marie-Laure and Werner are paired opposites joined by the light we cannot see. She, blind, lives an auditory existence and he, a brilliant, self-taught radio engineer, develops a range-finding device for the Wehrmacht that allows its users to find hidden radio transmitters (just in case you missed the point, we get a snippet of a lecture by Marie-Laure's haunted great uncle that the electromagnetic spectrum is mostly invisible). Marie-Laure and Werner are further linked by loss and loneliness, and their yearning for human connection. Letters, infrequent and maddeningly censored, are their only tethers to the people they love most dearly, and their lost connections only make their suffering worse. How awful it is, we see, to live in literal and metaphorical darkness. We get to know them the most intimately, so much so that by the time the book ends the rest of the main characters feel more than a little undercooked.

There are moments of great poignance and profundity - the friendship between Werner and Fredrick, the discovery of the secret place under the ramparts, Frank's personal mission in 1974 - and a deeply painful sense of futility and loss as we see how Hitler's megalomania affects the people whose only crime is living in the path of his war machine. And there are moments of great, shocking surprise, horror, dread, and fear that will have you half afraid to turn the page, half afraid not to. Despite its heft, the book does keep you reading.

Overall I have to recommend it if only for the prose. Doerr is a skilled craftsman and many chapters, while short, read like paintings - a frozen landscape here, a Paris street scene there - and the dialogue is naturalistic and spare. People chat, discuss, sometimes expound but, consistent with the themes, they communicate.