All The Light We Cannot See
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
It’s just before the Nazi invasion and occupation of Paris. A young blind girl relies on her father for everything and she is his world as well. He spends all his time making her a wooden model of the city so she can get around alone with her white cane. In neighboring Germany, a young boy, who lives with his sister in an orphanage, starts fooling with crystal radios and becomes a crackerjack radio repairman enthralled by these voices coming over the air.
Her blindness and his fascination with these invisible waves give us a main theme of the book. “How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see the radio waves crowding the darkening sky.” “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.” And late in the novel, her great uncle says to the blind girl, “We’ll go to Paris…I’ve never been. You can show it to me.”
The chapters of the book jump around in time -- 1934, 1944, 1940 -- so we know on occasion, for example, how a soldier will die even before the main character meets him. We have the brutal story of the boy’s education at a military school; the chaotic flight of the girl and her father from occupied Paris to distant relatives in St. Malo in Brittany; the military escapades of the boy as he works with a German unit identifying and killing resistance radio operators; the imprisonment of the girl’s father; the search for a missing jewel (because her father had been the locksmith at the natural history museum); the formation of a women’s resistance movement in St. Malo; a budding one-day romance between the French girl and the German boy. Letters from his sister back in Germany become the boy’s conscience after he enters military service.
Doerr's chapters are short and readable, and often contain pleasant nuggets of prose which was obviously carefully thought-out. To maintain suspense, he switches both between perspectives and time periods: various parts of the book are set in different years, mostly non-chronologically, and are comprised of chapters alternating between different characters.
The trouble with the book is that it's not very compelling, surprising, or illuminating. With Doerr's outline for the story - three characters, three different viewpoints - we know that their stories will eventually collide, but when they finally do it happens in a quick, unsatisfying way. Doerr's characters lack moral complexity which would make them properly engaging - Marie Laure spends most of the book in hiding, which is understandable, but which also stops her from being forced to make important moral and ethical choices regarding her own survival. Werner is even more troubling - while he is troubled by brutality he witnesses at the Nazi school, he seems resigned to it. Werner neither openly embraces Nazism, nor condemns it - he's indifferent to the whole experience and role he plays. It's as if Doerr never gave Werner the opportunity to grow up, choosing instead to preserve the young boy, fascinated by radio - which goes contrary to what boys and children in general experience in any war, which instantly strips them of their childhoods forever. The subplot featuring Von Rumpel, the old Nazi who searches for the mystical diamond seems to be attached to the rest of the book for no reason except to move the plot forward - there's no complexity to his character at all, and develops exactly as expected.
This is a book which looks as if it was designed to be read by younger readers - it's colorful setting, short chapters, switching points of narration will satisfy those with short attention spans, who require their story to be told quickly, engagingly, and not too demanding. I think all swearwords used in the book can be counted on the fingers of one hand; its language is very mellow and mild on obscenities. For a novel set during World War 2, it is a surprisingly tame book - murder and death cannot be escaped, but is downplayed as much as possible. One horrible instance of violence - which could have very well changed a character's perception on things - occurs essentially off screen, lowering possible impact it could have had on said character. This is World War 2, PG-13.
All The Light We Cannot See is a carefully crafted and constructed book, which for me remains its greatest flaw - I could never stop seeing the author's own hand behind the scenes, which made characters act out events in a certain way, obviously planned well ahead. It's a fantasy world populated with unreal people, who engage in a fantasy war - and is bound to appeal to hundreds of readers, because this is what they want and appreciate. Popular for one season or two, but unlikely to be remembered in a decade or more.
