All the Light We Cannot See is one of those transformative books which stays with you for weeks, months – even years – after you’ve finished it. It is beautiful, evocative and portrays humanity in a complex and stunning fashion. I loved it so much.
So it was with both excitement and trepidation that I picked up Anthony Doerr’s most recent offering, Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is very much the equivalent of the famous ‘difficult second album’ – how do you follow up a book which won the Pulitzer Prize and seems to have an almost unanimous positive reception?
The answer, seemingly, is with an epic, 550 page, multi-narrative story which spans across continents and centuries. Doerr is nothing if not ambitious in his writing.
Cloud Cuckoo Land follows the stories of characters as diverse as a troubled young man groomed into becoming an environmental terrorist, a young girl in the future trapped in ship heading to restart humanity on another planet, and a farmer in the 15th century, outcast and left to die as a child when he was born with a cleft palate. And these are just a few of the stories we follow.
I told you it was ambitious.
As different as these characters and their lives may seem, they are all bound together by one thing: a story. The title, Cloud Cuckoo Land, comes from an ancient narrative whose transcripts are discovered and translated by one of the characters, and we in turn discover how this strange and wonderful story touches the lives of all those who come across it.
The novel is an unashamed love letter to the joy of books. It highlights so beautifully our need for stories: how they inspire us, comfort us and bind us together across time and space.
I loved this book. Though its complexity and the exoticism of some of the settings makes it perhaps harder to connect with than the more simple dual focus of All the Light We Cannot See, each character and place is so perfectly crafted that we are carried through the novel, and its central premise is something that no bookworm could turn away from.
I am always in awe of writers who can create such complex and spellbinding narratives. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be. In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, Doerr thanks his wife for her support and for keeping him from throwing the book away “on five separate occasions” – a testament perhaps to how grand his task was. But thank goodness she did, or this beautiful story would never have been available for us.
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