Book Review: All the Light You Cannot See 

Background

All the Light You Cannot See was the final book club selection of the year for a club I attend at our local library. It's a group of well-read retirees who select, by democratic vote, the books they wish to read over the coming year. We'd been waiting to read this popular historical fiction until it became available in paperback; our host, a librarian, was unable to procure paperback copies for us, instead resorting to interlibrary loan.

Ordinarily I don't review our book club selections, keeping my thoughts and notes to myself in my little reading notebook. This book was one of the few that I wanted to ponder at length.

A summary of this book, containing spoilers, appears at the end of my review.

Review

All the Light You Cannot See begins with two epigraphs:

In August 1944 the historic walled city of Saint-Malo, the brightest jewel of the Emerald Coast of Brittany, France, was almost totally destroyed by fire. . . . Of the 865 buildings within the walls, only 182 remained standing and all were damaged to some degree. —Philip Beck 

It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. —Joseph Goebbels

Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel. Scribner, 2014. Kindle Edition. 

From the beginning, with its twin epigraphs, I expected the book to feature fierce and graphic battle scenes in Saint-Malo, with soldiers escaping the inferno the first epigraph describes, possibly using the radio noted in the second epigraph. Yet the book shattered my expectations of a story about WWII, a historical period which has nearly become over-used relative to book-club books. Because I'd read a few too many WWII novels, I began the journey into this volume hesitantly, with trepidation.

And my reluctance wasn't without merit. The book's unusual timeframes, shifting as they do backwards and forwards in time, appeared to be unnecessary, a structural choice to heighten tension in what felt like a slow-moving narrative. I objected to children as the primary characters, which I felt cheapened a story about serious adult events and ideas (war and its aftermath, for example) and gave naïve perspective. For hours of reading, I wanted the pace to pick up, the adults to speak more readily, and the "real action" to occur. Or just let me stop off reading what felt like young adult novel.

It took me more than a week to set aside any pre-conceived notions I had about how the story "ought to be told", and surrender to the author's chosen form. And then, after many chapters, Doerr's capable and enduring lyricism began to enchant me. Each of the settings in All the Light We Cannot See comes vividly and physically to life because of Doerr's sensitive style. The pace is a child's, living hour to hour, and each of the found objects and experiences of two orphan children scrounging for treasure in a mining town finds lifelike expression in Doerr's accomplished pen. Werner builds a rudimentary radio, and their lives open to another world:

One night Werner and Jutta tune in to a scratchy broadcast in which a young man is talking in feathery, accented French about light. 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 color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Of course the central metaphor, that of light, filters through every chapter and verse of the story, referring to the endless run of the electromagnetic spectrum, a scale so large that "mathematically, all of light is invisible," as Werner hears in his favorite radio broadcast in childhood:

Werner’s favorite is one about light: eclipses and sundials, auroras and wavelengths. What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

The motif of light imparts a sort of texture and rhythm to the novel, as well as a thematic tension between what is relatively insignificant and that which is miraculous, whether characters are literally or figuratively blind to it. And radio waves, which form invisible filaments between and among people through the war, are emitted at frequencies undetectable to our vision, a less obvious notion to the non-technical reader. That we can learn from those frequencies, as Werner did when he began to study the elements of radio transmission, and obtain military intelligence from them in order to identify and obliterate an unknown enemy only broadens the motif and provides an oscillation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and even between "now and then", which reverberates throughout the novel's structure and makes the reader ponder even the nature of time itself as both real and constructed, as both present and eternal.

And yet the novel is grounded in the physical world of mollusks, birds, jewels, keys, miniature buildings and actual buildings, and the miraculous natural world in which its characters live. Its philosophical and abstract underpinnings appear only in brief encounters, such as this lovely passage in which Marie-Laure reads and the metaphors of a book capture not only her imagination but also her dreams, only to begin the obsession that absorbs the rest of her life.

Marie-Laure reads Jules Verne in the key pound, on the toilet, in the corridors; she reads on the benches of the Grand Gallery and out along the hundred gravel paths of the gardens. She reads the first half of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea so many times, she practically memorizes it. The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite. At night, in her bed, she rides in the belly of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, below the gales, while canopies of coral drift overhead.

These characters move between the eminently described physical world, their interior worlds, and the remembered and imagined, each of those altering what they know and how they behave, until the ultimate yet expected encounter between three main characters occurs: Marie-Laure, the adolescent blind girl, Werner, the adolescent radio operator for the Nazi regime, and von Rumpel, the crystallographer, discover one another in the beseiged port of Saint-Malo, the city about to ignite. And once it's long been over, after years of reflection and present-day musing, only then does a pattern become obvious to a survivor.

Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived...And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. 

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

By the time I'd finished this novel, I had become enthralled with the intricacy of the work, its metaphorical heights, imagery, and philosophical insight. Doerr's achievement with this book deserved the Pulitzer he received. Its resonance will be with me for a long time to come.

Book Summary

NOTE: Spoilers.

Marie-Laure LeBlanc lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as a locksmith, the key maker for the Museum’s thousands of locks. After congenital cataracts blind Marie-Laure at the age of 6, her father whittles a miniature of their neighborhood to help her memorize it by touch and navigate her way in the larger world. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris. Father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, along the coast of Brittany, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle Etienne, still shell-shocked from the previous world war, lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what could be the museum’s priceless yet dangerous jewel, a diamond said to be cursed.  A German officer, himself a crystallographer, chases this jewel which he hopes will one day belong to Führermuseum, a German museum of treasures.

In the mining town of Zollverein, in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan boy, lives with his younger sister, Jutta, in an orphanage. Destined to be placed, at age 15, into the mines where their father died, Werner becomes enamored by a crude radio they find, on which they can listen to broadcasts from far-away France, and this novel technology carves a different path for the boy. Because Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, his talent wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, followed by an assignment to track the the Russian enemy and the French Resistance. Gradually more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. It is there, in the walled city under siege, that the German officer deduces that the long-sought jewel has found its hiding place.