Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See

Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014

You might describe All the Light You Cannot See as an historical novel themed around the absurd tragedy of war. Someone else might see it as psychological realism; a story about the resiliency and tenacity of people in the throes of crushing horror. Both would be right; both assessments would be too simple.

Structurally, All the Light We Cannot See can be described as a sequence of triangles, their arms always converging at points. In fact, radio signal triangulation preoccupies the military strategy of the German Wehrmacht as it seeks to clinch its subjugation of France. Resistance movements were thorns in the side of German planning; broadcasting from remote, hidden transmitters, partisans were able to stymie the Germans again and again. New technology made it possible to triangulate the location of the transmitters, however, surprise the resisting civilians bringing the arms of resistance and of anti-insurgency to a point of reckoning.

The reckoning point in All the Light We Cannot See is Saint-Malo, a fortified town on an island off the French coast. Two central characters—a German Hitler-youth named Werner and a blind French girl named Marie-Laure—are followed through youth into early adulthood to a convergence in Saint-Malo just before the city is leveled by the American liberation. It’s through the eyes (the other four senses in Marie-Laure’s case) that we see the unfolding and conclusion of World War II: the excessive cruelty, the indifference to life that escalates and escalates as the world becomes first appalled, then resigned and finally, inured to death and destruction.

Werner and Maurie-Laure both become trapped in the rubble of Saint-Malo, he under a hotel that was communication headquarters for the Wehrmacht and she in the attic of a great uncle’s house where a resistance radio has evaded discovery. Using their skills and learning in new radio technology, they are destined to converge through that medium.

That Doerr is a skilled narrator—probably a writer who could teach Charles Dickens and Jules Verne some useful lessons in gripping, sensory prose writing—almost goes without saying, especially to anyone who’s enjoyed About Grace or The Shell Collector. His handling of structure here, however, amazed me. Disconcerted somewhat at first to recognize that All the Light We Cannot See was going to be told in non-chronological order, I soon came to appreciate the benefits of such a structure, particularly in a case where character-development is absolutely of the essence as it is in this novel. Sections are dated, a concession to the reader I found helpful.

Werner’s primary dilemma is illustrated in his experience as a cadet in a Nazi training facility (Schulpforta). A sensitive, brilliant lad, small for his age, he is cajoled into participation in cadets’ cruelties meant to harden them, and his failure to defend his best friend, Frederick, who is selected for beatings and tortures for his physical weakness will haunt him forever. But although there is no limit to the excesses of the training program, for a youth like Werner who grew up curious and creative, the complete brainwashing cannot necessarily be achieved:

“It seems to Werner that all the boys around him are intoxicated. As if, at every meal, the cadets fill their tin cups not with the cold mineralized water of Schulpforta but with a spirit that leaves them glazed and dazzled, as if they ward off a vast and inevitable tidal wave of anguish only by staying forever drunk on rigor and exercise and gleaming boot leather. The eyes of the most bullheaded boys radiate a shining determination: every ounce of their attention has been trained to ferret out weakness. They study Werner with suspicion . . .. (Page 62, online edition)

For Marie-Laure, the struggle, beyond her survival, involves a rare, magnificent artifact from the museum in Paris, an object museum officials seek to protect from the marauding, hoarding German Reich. This object acts as a connecting link through the Paris and Saint-Malo phases of Marie-Laure’s story. Mysterious and unparalleled, she finds it her duty to protect the object from the shameless greed of Nazi officials charged with seeking out and confiscating national treasures. 

What exactly might “treasure” mean to persons who send youth to their inevitable deaths while ferreting through conquered lands, stealing art and handling it with kid gloves? Young Werner says it best:

For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity—Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye—the body can never be pure. but this is what the commandant insists upon, why the Reich measures their noses, clocks their hair color. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. (Page 276, on line edition, emphasis mine.)

Werner’s sight and Marie-Laure’s blindness provide an enchanting, symbolically rich progression from the intriguing title onward: All the Light We Cannot See. One is tempted to say that it is only the blind who really see when the rest of the world is rendered sightless by madness. That would be too simple, but Marie-Laure’s blindness as summarized by the narrator must give us pause concerning light and darkness:

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. (Page 390, online edition)

There is light to be had, but it does us no good if we cannot see it, if we’re blinded by the madness of greed, our propensity to follow cruelty and avarice into battle. All the Light We Cannot See.

To learn more about Anthony Doerr’s conception of the novel, the story he envisioned, hear him speak about the novel.

The online edition (and I presume the paper edition as well) contains helpful discussion questions for book club consideration.