Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See (2014)

Four Stars out of Five

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr has written two full length novels of fiction and two more of short stories. “All the Light We Cannot See” is his second novel; written ten years after his first novel “About Grace”. It was worth the wait for Doerr and readers alike. “All the Light We Cannot See” was listed number one on the NY Times Best 10 Books of 2014, was runner-up for the National Book Award, and did win the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is told for the most part in two first person story arcs in the era leading up to and through WWII: the adolescent and blind Marie-Laure in France, and the slightly older Werner Pfennig in Germany. The novel seems to suggest the oft-told tale of young love, but there is in fact much more to this story.

Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her locksmith papa, M. LeBlanc. He works at the National Museum where he often brings Marie-Laure. She went blind at the age of six. While at the Museum, she learns to love sea shells through the influence of a kindly researcher. She learns from her father an enduring love and patience. He spends much of his spare time helping her learn to cope with her new state of blindness. His techniques include making for her a scale model of their Parisian neighborhood and to sharpen her mind, he makes small wooden puzzle boxes. At the same time, in Zollverein Germany, Werner and his younger sister Jutta are adjusting to life as orphans. They live in the Children’s Home; a home run by a kindly, French- and German-speaking matron. During these early years, it is revealed that Werner has an unnaturally high aptitude for fixing radios, and that his sister has one for empathy.

Marie-Laure flees Paris with her father in 1940 as the Germans approach. Unknown to Marie-Laure, her father carries a precious diamond called the Sea of Flames. The museum’s intent is to get the diamond out of Paris and away from the onrushing German army. Marie-Laure and her father end up in the coastal town of Saint Malo, where he builds for her another scale model of their new home town. Werner has joined a school for the gifted or well-connected. He again demonstrates his abilities, this time to the local engineering professor. He also makes a friend with the far too compassionate Frederick, an avid birder. Werner has a first-hand observation of how a movement of bullies (i.e. the Nazis) disposes of such people as Frederick. Werner eventually joins a small detachment within the Wehrmacht that is tasked with using his radio skills to track down illegal radio broadcasts. His assignments eventually bring him to Saint Malo and into contact with Marie-Laure, and into contact with Sergeant-Major Von Rumpel. Von Rumpel is on a personal quest to track down the Sea of Flames.

The structure of the novel is very current in its frequent use of fragmentary sentence structure and parallel story lines. It is a little unusual in the brevity of the various chapters. Until the later parts of the novel are reached, the chapters are almost always less than two pages long. This allows the reader a sense of rapid movement through the lives of the various actors in the drama. It also gives a sense of the simultaneity of the events. What is Werner doing as Marie-Laure taps with her cane down some boulevard in Paris; this quick chapter structure helps give that understanding. I cannot personally understand the use of fragmentary sentences to tell a story, but again it seems like it is the intent of Doerr to use this style to help propel the book rapidly forward. The story telling is also told with a number of flashbacks. There are sequences in August of 1944 where Von Rumpel is closing in on Marie-Laure while Werner and his colleague Volkheimer are trapped in a basement that are intercut with scenes earlier in the war. The interleaving of these story lines helps to build dramatic tension and to increase interest in Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s backstories.

Another note on the structure of this novel requires mentioning, and that is the apparent deep understanding Doerr has of certain areas of knowledge. Werner’s story allows the reader a sense of how radios function, while Marie-Laure’s story gives the same reader a sense of Mollusca and the wide variety of snails that a blind girl might find so interesting. Doerr also employs passages from Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” to create a fictional world within Marie-Laure’s world. These passages help to build understanding for the life of a young blind girl caught up in the throes of war.

But what about the deeper meanings that might lie beneath the story of Werner and Marie-Laure; her story seems fairly straightforward: a young girl, dependent on the kindness and love of those that know her. Her personal development does not contain any surprises or psychological barriers. She simply must survive the war, find her father, and get back to Paris. Werner on the other hand does have some psychological hurdles to leap. Early in his life, he destroys a radio that meant everything to his sister (a sister that is held up in the novel as one who does care about the welfare of others – be they German or not); he did this to protect her from the authorities, but also because Werner always finds it easier to go with the flow than to fight for what he believes in. Time and again, Werner makes similar choices: when Frederick is beaten or when the various partisans he is hunting prove to be merely people trying to live their lives and not the desperate and vicious enemies he expected. Werner slowly does come to the conclusion that he has been making wrong choices, and finally does something for someone else to demonstrate the point. He also finally does something for himself near end of the war to atone for his errors.

“All the Light We Cannot See” has an elegiac ending that suggests an explanation for the title. That is to say, the lives, the souls lost to the air, are like light that cannot be seen. It suggests also in the actions of Werner an explanation why decent, intelligent Germans became caught up in the one of the worst horrors ever perpetuated by Man. Perhaps poor blind and reactive Marie-Laure is a stand-in for the situation France found herself in during WWII. But for me, the best parts and aspects of this book are that it gives a fairly unvarnished view of life during wartime: the starvation, disease, helplessness of most people, the blind loyalty of the various armies involved. There is no sense of the flag-waving enthusiasm often seen in war stories. Instead, there is just a quiet desperation felt by almost everyone in this story coupled with a desire to get back to a normal, non-war time life. And of course, there is also that sense of all those lives lost during this awful war, those children, young adults, and families torn apart forever. The book is not written in a highly emotional tone, but after reading it, it is unlikely the typical reader could walk away from it without feeling an intense emotional pain at all that loss.