All The Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See (2014)
By Anthony Doerr

While I'm not normally big on historical fiction (I've been trying to read The Luminaries for six months and am still on page 6...), I do have a bit of a soft spot for books set in World War 2. There's just something about that period that's fascinating and terrifying and so scarily recent - let's just say I have read an awful lot of these books. Some of them are fantastic (like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) but you'd think it would be getting a bit tricky by this point in time to find a unique spin on an era that's been written about so many times already. All The Light We Cannot See is a complex, absorbing novel set in World War 2, which manages to bring something different to the telling of a very well-known story.

The story follows two quite different characters. Marie-Laure is a young blind girl in Paris, who lives with her doting father: a locksmith who works at the Museum of Natural History and makes tiny models of the world so that Marie-Laure can learn to navigate by touch. The same age as Marie-Laure but far away in rural Germany, Werner is an impoverished orphan with a talent for repairing and building shortwave radios. As the story goes on, the war impacts both of their lives in quite different ways. Marie-Laure is relocated to the new, unfamiliar town of St-Malo where she can no longer confidently find her way around with the help of her father's models. Werner is snapped up by the Nazis for his engineering talents and sent to an elite military training academy. The two storylines follow quite different directions, but the two characters are linked through a series of coincidences (for example, a young Werner listens obsessively to a children's radio programme about science; the scientist who made this programme is Marie-Laure's grandfather) and eventually they are brought together in St-Malo in the final days on the German occupation.

Anthony Doerr's writing style in All The Light We Cannot See is unusually poetic - it's rich and descriptive and a little heavy at times. For example: "His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers" or "She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog." Some of it is quite beautifully worded, but there is a lot of it and it could get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. However, the book is quite cleverly structured with some very short chapters (often as short as one or two pages) interspersed among the longer ones. Breaking the narrative up in this way provides a bit of breathing space and means that the book is still very readable, despite its complexity and wordiness.

Anthony Doerr - he's pretty good with words. Probably why he won a Pulitzer Prize that time.

The narrative moves back and forward in time, with a number of different themes and additional storylines woven through the novel. The idea of light comes up again and again - the radio broadcasts that Werner is so fond of, speak at length about the way that waves of light move through space as well as human perception of those light waves and the way that the human brain can create light within darkness: ""The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children", says the voice. "It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with colour and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?""
This idea is applied obviously to Marie-Laure's world but also to the metaphorically dark times the characters are living in and the moments of hope and light that somehow survive... And this is just the start; there are a number of complicated themes brought to light (excuse the pun) in this novel, which should make it unreadably complex and overly literary but somehow it's still absorbing and interesting and very readable.

All The Light We Cannot See is beautifully written but it's also a stirring war story about two unique and likeable characters. It's really a great read and much more than just another WW2 historical novel.

9/10