REVIEW-ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

AVERAGE SCORE: 4.3125 out of 5 although we only had 4 votes, as Alistair and James couldn't make it.



ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
Anthony Doerr

TOM'S REVIEW

This is a meticulously researched and beautifully written book.  The physics of radio, the biology of sea snails, the Old World craftsmanship of the locksmith and the art of ornithology are just a few of the metaphors that tie several characters and their stories together, related in descriptions that are positively lyrical (“you can fight like a lion; or you can go as easy as lifting a hair from a cup of milk”).The overall story charts the decade-long courses of two apparently separate lives—those of a blind French girl and a wizardly German boy—that converge in the besieged French town of Saint-Malo in August 1944. The French girl Marie-Laure has hereditary cataracts, a love of gastropods and a father who is the locksmith at a Parisian museum housing the most valuable French treasures, including a priceless diamond called the Sea of Flames that der Fuhrer is keen to add to his art collection.  The German boy Werner is unusual in both appearance and intelligence: small in stature, large of ears, snow-white of hair; and with a preternatural instinct for the mathematics and physics of radio.  These two are the main characters in a roster more extraordinary even than the historic time in which they live. All of the principal characters—Marie-Laure, her Papa, her great-uncle Etienne, Madame Manec; Werner, Frau Elena, Frederick, Volkheimer the Giant, even the villainous Von Rumpel—have outsized intelligence, talent, courage and/or purpose.  In the world Anthony Doerr has created, to be ordinary—like Hans and Herribert, the schoolmaster Bastian, Professor Hauptmann, Frederick’s mother or Levitte the Perfumer—is to be morally bankrupt.And so when Werner dies in the most random and banal of wartime acts, I sat screaming with my inner voice in my mind’s ear, “No! No! No!”  For whatever reason, Doerr decides in the final act to become the bully who kicks over the sand castle.  It’s as if he’s realized he’s written a sentimental romance, decided that’s a bad thing, and thinks he needs to inject a short sharp shock of existentialism, which is what characterizes the novel’s last chapters against the tide of the previous 400 pages. For the survivors—Marie-Laure, Frederick and Werner’s sister Jutta—there is only resignation, regret or the desire to forget, all acceptable in a fatalistic world such as the one Frederic Manning so masterfully created in Her Privates We—but not in this one.    

 

 

 

 

FOUR STARS   

 

ERIC'S REVIEW

Movement and love. Gravity and time. Chance and physics. Sound and light. Fear and greed.  We as humans are insignificant flecks of dust in a vast universe. We are guided by light we cannot see, driven by desires we cannot fathom, shaped by forces we cannot comprehend. The invisible waves of the heavens crash against the shores of our existence, reshaping, revealing, sweeping us away to oblivion. 

In All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr the waves of sound, colour and light weave a lyrical tale using the magic of words to travel back and forth in time through the lives of two people fated to intersect for only a brief moment during World War II. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl in Paris lovingly cared for by her devoted father, a locksmith for the Musée de l'Histoire Naturelle. He unlocks her from her sightless prison by building scale models of her neighbourhood to help her navigate, teaches her Braille, and transports her with Jules Verne and the power of language. Werner is a young German orphan in the coal mining region of Germany who is allowed to escape, if that is the right word, a grim future as a miner due to his prowess with electronics. He is admitted to a school for the Nazi youth, the Schulpforta, designed to mold the elite of Aryan youth into heartless, ruthless killers. These two are linked through the sightless couriers of the air- radio waves, and by the bludgeonings of chance. They are both guided by the voice of Marie-Laure's grandfather in the past, broadcasting from the attic of the family home in St. Malo, who exhorted his listeners to 'open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever'. They do just that, metaphorically, and this book is the story of how their lives (and their fate) become intertwined.  We all have saviours we cannot see. We call them angels. 

A stone plays a central role in the story, a cursed diamond which through pressure and time captures fire within it, and becomes the object of the evil greed embodied in the least successful character and weakest part of the book, a cardboard cutout Nazi. But as her father tells Marie-Laure, stones are just stones, rain is just rain, and misfortune is just bad luck. 

 

Doerr's prose is spare, poetic, and mesmerising. This is writing of the highest calibre. It is a book which treads the rare fine line between making one want to greedily lap up one finely crafted sentence after another and taking the time to savour each morsel, between sating a hunger to find out what will happen next and not wanting the meal to end. The ending, when it comes, is deeply unsatisfying at first. Upon reflection, it becomes like life itself, a mystery full of chance where the logic of existence,  the rationale, the whys and wherefores, are all invisible. What do we call visible light?, asks the voice across the airwaves. We call it colour. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and to infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically all of light is invisible. And later: So how children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, create for us a world full of light?

 

The book answers its own question. Through imagination. The same imagination which enabled a gifted writer like Doerr to create this beautiful story, a story like the sea, only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite. 

 

FIVE STARS