Review of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See

Because all of my friends who have read this have loved the book, I wanted to love the book too. But the further I got into it, although I loved the way the story was told and the superb prose, I couldn’t appreciate the characters as much as the author wanted me to, and I couldn’t appreciate the startling lack of realism in many areas.

This book really did have superb prose. It read like poetry in many places, and the imagery was vivid, fresh, even startling. It was a pleasure to read, pure pleasure.

I liked the jumping chronology, which is the way memory so often works. Of course it was much more orderly here, but you did have to pay attention so as not to become confused. It would have helped to have had the year as a standard subhead on each chapter. The chronology acted as a spoiler, but it also increased the tension, since the question moved from, “Did they survive?” to “How did they get from Point A to Point X?”

Some of the character problems I noted were:

Werner’s development was predictable. You learn he’s a genius with radios; ergo, he’s going to become a radio technician for the Nazi army. You learn he suppresses his emotions when faced with ethical problems; ergo, he’s going to pay a price for that and will stop sometime and have a crisis. He hears Marie-Laure’s grandfather’s recording being broadcast; ergo, he’s going to meet her somehow. As soon as he does, he falls instantly in love with her. It was all too sweet and clichéd for me. That he dies is perhaps the most real thing about his war experience. That he is haunted by the child they killed is the second most real thing.

Jutta. She was so interesting, and she is mostly off-stage after Werner joins the army, but then we have a synopsis of her war experiences at the end. Why? This is not fair! She should have had more of a role than Frederick throughout the novel, especially since she survives and has a major role in what occurs 30 years later. She is the one who has the right ethics, the right courage, the strength of will, and everything that needs to be set against Werner all the way along as a foil. Her story should have been told in snippets like the others, throughout. This is the only major plot fault, I think.

Marie-Laure. She could have been a more interesting girl, but she hardly develops at all through the novel. The only development we really experience with her is her increasing ability to do physical things, and only because the adults around her are rendered powerless and are forced to allow her to do more. Why not give her some characteristic flaw that she has to overcome that her blindness itself forces her to deal with? Why not allow her to be frightened by her blindness and slowly develop courage? Or frustrated and develop patience? Something! She hardly seems real to me.

Etienne. The great-uncle of Marie-Laure suffers from shell-shock from his experiences in World War One. We would call it PTSD today—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and to my knowledge, it is not something one simply throws off one day when the need comes. He should have had serious problems, especially in that prison fortress. For nobody to have helped him deal with his challenge, I could not believe he was just “fine” one day when Marie-Laure needed him to be.

Characters whose development I liked:

Daniel Le Blanc. The father of Marie-Laure was written well. I liked his willingness to do as much as he could for his daughter, and I liked the way he was written, with his puzzle boxes and keys and secrets. His being captured and dying of pneumonia—these were all credible events and of course necessary to the story being told.

Frank Volkheimer. He was an interesting character. I liked his mysterious devotion to Werner. I liked the ambiguity of his actions, especially when they get to Saint Malo. I really liked that he delivered the bag personally to Jutta and taught her boy to fold a more intricate paper airplane.

Now on to unrealistic elements, which I could not ignore.

The most glaring unreality was that the author simply did not create a complete female psyche for Marie-Laure and others. A growing girl should have had something of her developing sexuality included, not in a prurient way, as this novel was not like that, but it should have been acknowledged. When Marie-Laure learns early on that bad things could happen to blind girls, this problem should have been explored in her psyche. As his daughter grows, Daniel LeBlanc should have been shown teaching his daughter about growing up. His giving her baths when she is 12 and 13 seemed to me to stretch things too far. Why wasn’t Madame Manec bathing her by this time? Neither Daniel nor Madame Manec seems to address Marie-Laure’s personal safety around men either. Women have always had to prepare girls for dealing with men, and it should have been shown at least by a line or two. This is something integral to almost every woman’s psyche.

That the author doesn’t get this right is shown when the rape happens to Jutta and the girls she lives with. That nobody made much of a sound is very unconvincing. One or two of them might have been stoic and mute, but all of them? As young as they were? I couldn’t believe it. Some should have been crying, and at least one you would think would scream, because it would hurt so badly, or because she was so scared or shocked by the horribleness of the violation, or both. That may be very uncomfortable for the readers to have to process, but it’s real, and if you’re going to have a main character gang raped by Russian soldiers along with the rest of her companions, you have to write it believably or not at all. (When I was a teenager, I worked with an older woman who had been through this horror as a teenager herself. She and her sister fled and ate grass and weeds as they ran by night and hid by day from the Russian soldiers until they could cross to West Germany. She said no words could describe how horrible they were.)

The second glaring unreality was the unresolved question of whether the diamond had magical powers to protect its holder while cursing everyone around, or not. The question was left open, although all the events pointed to the curse being a real thing, which was pretty weird to allow.

A third unreality was Frederick coming out of his catatonic state after 30+ years. Really? Does that ever actually happen? (That was on the same level as Etienne throwing off his PTSD.) If it does happen, then I wish it had been allowed to happen immediately after the war, to give him some years of twilight content. He probably should have died young, as his injuries were so severe. I’m not sure what was added by having him live so long. Werner could have posted the bird book pages on his way out of Saint Malo, or given them to Marie-Laure and let her post them. There were so many jumps in chronology that it wouldn’t have been a big deal to have a scene set in 1950, say, showing him dying and rehearsing what happened when he received the bird book pages.

Okay, all that said, I still really liked this book. It was beautifully written and had so many wonderful and powerful scenes that I could hardly wait to get back to it every time I had to put it down. The story line was interesting and mostly well told and easily held my interest all the way through. That I didn’t like some elements was overwhelmingly secondary to how well I liked most of it.