Book review: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Pictured edition: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Fourth Estate 2015. ISBN 9780008138301. Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images. Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara. Image used on this blog under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968. Surrounding design made by me using Canva.

Marie-Laure is a young French girl who goes blind when she is six. She lives with her father, who’s a locksmith for a museum of natural history, in Paris. He makes her detailed models of their neighbourhood, so she can learn how to navigate her way through the world. When the war comes, they evacuate to Saint Malo, where Marie Laure’s great uncle lives. They carry with them a great secret – a precious diamond they’re saving from the invaders.

Werner is a young German orphan, growing up with his sister Jutta in an orphanage, and destined for the mines. But he is fascinated by science and becomes proficient with radios. So he ends up in an elite and awful boarding school for Nazi officers-in-training, where he continues his technical education. Werner questions the brutality around him but is nevertheless obedient, much to Jutta’s scorn. He’s thrown too young into the war as it starts going badly for Germany and they need more men.

This is a classic literary example of historical fiction: well written, (mostly) complex characterisation and complex narrative. It’s a great choice for Texts & Human Experiences (HSC), for which it’s on the prescribed text list. It reminds me of In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, except not as poetic. I still prefer the Ondaatje.

All the Light moves along beautifully most of the time – it has really short chapters, which really helps – sorry to sound like a philistine, but there we are. And it’s fun to experience the two different points of view as they alternate and dance around each other, drawing ever closer. I’m also quite fond of a non-linear narrative, and this one is done well. I’m also a sucker for intertextuality, and Doerr intertwines Jules Vernes’ adventure novels with Marie-Laure’s life and experiences.

A couple of small criticisms: the Nazi diamond expert, von Rumpel, is a bit of a stock Nazi baddie. And I was expecting more from the ending. It just seemed to fizzle out. Endings are quite important to me as a reader, especially at the end of a longish book. I want to close a book like this with the sense that I’ve just read something truly beautifully written. Which it is, throughout, but the ending is a bit meh.

There’s an interesting negative review here, if anyone’s interested. Warning: contains spoilers.

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Title: All the Light We Cannot See

Author: Anthony Doerr

Cover: Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images. Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

First published: Fourth Estate, 2014

ISBN: 9780008138301

Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2015; Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, 2015;

Genre: literary fiction, historical fiction, WW2 fiction

Representation: female protagonist who is blind

Suitability: 14+

Fyi: war, death, very subtly depicted rape, bullying, the Holocaust, general Nazi brutality, mental impairment from accident, losing loved ones, grief, cancer

Themes: wonder, discovery, love, guilt, regret, war, loss

Literary features/tropes: non-linear narrative, mostly from roughly alternating third person subjective narrators, literary description, intertextuality

NSW syllabus: this novel is on the HSC prescribed text list for the Common Module: Texts & Human Experiences

If you like this, try: In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne