Casting a Light on History: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See
H: As you can imagine, we read a lot of books here in the Black Hole. Some of them are awful, many are good, and a surprising number are the kind that make us grin as we pass them to each other for further consumption. The books we are driven to share are not always the most popular or lauded; it can be difficult to tell which books will strike a chord with us and yet remain relatively unknown, and which will be plucked from their shelves, draped with prizes, and transformed into the sort of thing that suddenly everyone seems to be reading. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See was propelled into this latter category by that greatest of stickers, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It surprises me that All the Light We Cannot See has been so widely embraced. Not because it isn’t any good, it’s excellent, but because it’s set during the Second World War, and I had assumed, with insufficient evidence I admit, that novels in this setting were on the wane.
M: Do you mean Second World War fiction is a bit unfashionable? Because I see more than a couple of examples on the shelves. 2014 Man Booker winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one example, although not one I particularly enjoyed.
H: I don’t think so. It’s more that that war, The War, is transmuting rapidly from memory to history, and as it does I fear it will become less relatable, less human. Either Anthony Doerr thinks this is unlikely, or he is determined to prevent it. Though set against the horror of the war in Europe, All the Light We Cannot See is not about war, it’s about people. Death and violence stalk the pages yet at its heart All the Light We Cannot See is about those moments of humanity amongst the madness. It is about survival, and it is captivating.
Though set against the horror of the war in Europe, All the Light We Cannot See is not about war, it’s about people.
The late Sir Terry Pratchett, who we miss terribly, hid a small illusion in his Discworld novels. Sir Terry wrote in a way that ensured that you continually expected the end of the chapter to be on the next page, and yet never noticed that it wasn’t. My experience of reading Discworld is promising myself I’d put down the book when I finished the chapter, and then finding the sun coming up and the last page now read. Doerr decided to take the opposite approach; each chapter lasts only a few pages, over before it has really began. Yet because each chapter rotates between the book’s three narratives with such speed you do not notice them passing, and I found myself carried along and never lost.
Sir Terry’s trick gave his books a sense of bottomless depth, Doerr’s gives his story a steadily growing pace that is the perfect complement to the growing tension of Europe before and at war. Driving the momentum, he weaves together two timelines. The first is set against the backdrop of Europe’s descent into continental conflagration in the 1930s, the other against the destruction of a small French coastal town following the Allied invasion in 1944. Doerr shows us the later first, then flitters between the two timelines, leaving us with no doubt where the earlier storyline will take us, only a growing dread at what it will mean.
The unseen light of the title is the blindness that confines the life of Marie-Laure, a young French girl, and the radio waves that expand the life of Werner, a German youth whose abilities with radios lifts him from his poverty stricken childhood. These parallel lives are drawn ever closer together by the Sea of Flames, a diamond guarded by Marie-Laure’s father, and sought by Doerr’s villain, a German officer playing his vile role in the Nazi plunder of Europe’s treasure.
Marie-Laure’s childhood is one of wonder, her playground is Paris’s Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle where her father is employed. Her indomitable spirit breaches the darkness brought on by childhood blindness, and she gives shape her to world by memorising the details of an elaborate model of central Paris constructed by her father. This world collapses with the onset of war, and the German occupation of France. Marie-Laure’s fate is decided when her father is entrusted with the Sea of Flames, and flees with Marie-Laure to that small coastal town that will later be destroyed.
This world collapses with the onset of war, and the German occupation of France.
Werner’s fate follows a different arc. His childhood is grim, an orphan in a coal mining town with little prospects for the future. His genius at fixing radios sees him drawn into the Nazi’s party’s determination to foster a new generation of leaders, whose ultimate fate, we know, will be as cannon fodder in the downfall of Berlin. He is educated and then conscripted to use his talents to triangulate the position of radios used by resistance fighters across Europe, including one hidden in a house in a small coastal town in France.
No one in All the Light We Cannot See is in control of their own fate. The diamond exiles Marie-Laure from Paris, the Nazi party pushes Werner from his hoped for career as an engineer and away from his loved ones. The war drives everyone from safety to danger.
M: If good books must ring true to succeed, then any good war book will be an anti-war book. War and occupation take away people’s choices and shrink their worlds. But I don’t think the characters are passive. There are some lovely moments of courage, another kind of light in the darkness of occupation and war.
War and occupation take away people’s choices and shrink their worlds.
This is a war story about non-physical kinds of strength, non-violent resistance, the bravery of frightened people who choose to act. In Doerr’s book ordinary people show immense moral courage. The war heroes are not soldiers but a housekeeper with bad lungs, a blind teenager, an orphan girl, an old man gripped by agoraphobia.
As you point out, the characters are not in control of their fate, but they can choose how they respond to it. heir acts of resistance give them a certain moral agency, even when they cannot live any other aspect of their lives freely.
H: I liked the recognition of the courage of the housekeeper and other women in the town who began small acts of defiance that blossomed into great acts of resistances. The role of women in the French resistance during the war is often overlooked.
M: Werner, in contrast with his sister Jutta’s relentless integrity and Marie-Laure’s indomitable spirit, is passive for much of the war and as such, although not an evil person becomes complicit in evil. Werner’s background gives him few options, but is not until he escapes his childhood drudgery that he is truly stripped of his ability to make meaningful choices. We see the numbing effect of violence and totalitarianism on Werner’s character, as he gives up on everything that matters to him — until, finally, he doesn’t.
At the end of the book, when the three narrative arcs meet, he chooses for the first time to do what is right instead of what he is told. These instances of caring for other people, of making brave but not violent choices, were the most compelling parts of the book for me.
H: That’s true. The drawing together of all these threads across two timelines is artfully done. But it is also not, I think, what shone brightly enough to attract so many readers to this book. In my thoughts on Footfall I celebrated Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy for its cast of memorable characters. The power of All the Light We Cannot See is that Doerr has outdone Robinson and so many others; by the book’s end I felt I knew, personally, Marie-Laure and Werner. Even more than that, I cared about them as individuals, as people.
Here in the Black Hole we like to say we don’t care whether a book is good, we care about how it makes you feel. All the Light We Cannot See made me feel happiness, fear, hope, and loss. It made me understand a little more the world of Doerr’s characters, the world of seventy years ago. It made me reflect on the millions of lives caught up in the maelstrom of the war, not as statistics, but as individuals with their own triumphs and tragedies.
All the Light We Cannot See made me feel happiness, fear, hope, and loss.
M: I agree that what has made this book popular is that the characters shine with humanity. We cannot help but feel strongly about Jutta and Werner and Marie-Laure. It is good to be reminded of the humanity of those living through war, whether in the streets of Saint Malo seventy years ago or the rubble of Aleppo today.
H: Doerr’s writing has ensured that All the Light We Cannot See is both approachable and engrossing. It is for everyone. If you are looking for someone to give it to however, may I suggest a teenager. Someone from those generations whose personal links to the war have already passed. Someone, if I may be permitted a gross generalisation, for whom the 1930s and ’40s are countries confined to textbooks. For such a person All the Light We Cannot See would be a treasure, allowing them to see the light cast by those in the now not so recent past. Showing that the inhabitants of the past are as human as they are. Give someone All the Light We Cannot See so that they see those caught by conflict, then and now, as individuals, people with their own stories, their own fates.
