REVIEWS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE BY ANTHONY DOERR

Content Warning [highlight to read]: Swearing, some graphic imagery, a non-graphic rape scene

Abstract: An engaging but also disappointing read.  Characters are likable enough, but the story is too long and shifting perspectives in present tense make events a bit hard to follow.  By the end, the parts are greater than the sum.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a beautiful title for a book that doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of that title and the book’s premise.

The story follows two scientifically-minded characters, a blind, French girl who loves marine biology named Marie-Laure and a German orphan turned Nazi radio specialist named Werner.  It tells of their lives leading up to, during, and after World War II.  I can’t say much more without going into the critique, so I will begin with the positives. 

Anthony Doerr accomplishes what I have seen very few authors do: capture a sense of wonder towards scientific study.  Most books I’ve read with scientist characters treat science almost as a dead thing, assuming that we readers know its value while treating it like table scraps.  Perhaps because he starts in the characters’ childhoods, Doerr is able to introduce scientific study with a sense of awe and beauty.  This is helped by the tone of his writing, which is on a softer, elegant side, with many beautiful descriptions set within flowing diction and syntax.  He maintains this tone, even while also showing how the scientific discovery can be used for evil, throughout the character’s lives.

The characters themselves are likable enough.  I never felt, though, like the main characters quite became people; my personal favorite character is actually Werner’s friend Volkheimer, despite his lack of presence for much of the book.  However, neither of the main characters are annoying, and following their lives is interesting.  Blindness is a struggle I find automatically interesting in a character, and Marie-Laure’s life and the turns it takes kept me invested in her story.  Werner’s tale, how a kind brother who loves the radio turns into a Nazi, is also interesting, emphasizing the inherent potential to act for evil in every person.  The two stories, Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s, don’t intersect much till later in the story, but it never feels like one is dragging down the other.  The side characters are also, generally, quite charismatic (see my aforementioned favorite), playing off the mains in believable ways and moving the story along naturally.

In a way, with Marie-Laure’s story, these secondaries move it along a bit too well, as she rarely takes the initiative to start something herself.  While she isn’t a passive character in the terms of only existing to the extent that another character exists, she is a follower, occasionally encouraging but mostly just following another person’s instructions.  This isn’t an inherent negative and in fact provides an interesting contrast to Werner, highlighting how the different people we choose to follow can shape us.  It might frustrate some readers, though, who prefer more ambitious characters.

Another negative, this one more definite, is that the story is too long.  One third of the story could have been cut with little mending needed.  The largest chunk of this cut revolves around a jewel subplot that bobs in and out through the story.  The jewel acts as a MacGuffin, moving certain events along, but it was unnecessary.  Most of the events brought about by this jewel could easily have been instigated through other events tied to the war narrative.  There is an attempt at thematic significance towards the novel’s end, but it falls flat and feels forced, especially when the same theme had already been shown through other events of the story.  Maybe Doerr wanted a potentially supernatural element to keep a sense of mystery in the world, but, even as a Catholic, I would rather he had gone full scientism than to try forcing a supernatural element into his story in the way he did.

There are also some stylistic choices I did not much enjoy.  First, while the prose does flow and have a beautiful rhythm to it, it does boarder on purple.  Some of the descriptions draw too much attention to themselves, pulling me out of the story.  Simplicity can be poetic.  I wish Doerr had been simpler in places to help balance the descriptions.

Another style choice that kept breaking my immersion is that the whole story is in present tense.  Present tense has no good will with me, so any story that uses it is already at a disadvantage.  Unfortunately, this story is also told in a non-linear style, jumping between the characters’ pasts and presents.  While there is some pattern to the times, it isn’t fully followed, and I found myself confused at parts as to which timeline I was reading.  If he really wanted to use present tense, though there really is no good argument for why he did, then I wish Doerr had confined the present tense to the present events and used past tense for the past, as though the past moments are the characters remembering how they got to the opening scene in Saint-Malo during a bombing at the end of World War II.  As it is, with both past and present events told in present tense, the prose reduces the story’s level of sense.  Not “sense” as in intelligibility.  It is confusing at times, but I could understand what was happening.   Rather, I mean “sense” as in a kind of holistic cohesion.  It’s like writing “Eye eight dear four dinner last knight.”  Our brains can translate the sounds of that sentence so that we can understand it, which is great for riddles and games.  However, on a technical level, it doesn’t make sense, doesn’t hold together in a meaningful way.  Those words in that order simply don’t fit, and so that sentence is still erroneous even though we understand it.  Within All the Light, having both the past and the present be told as if they are the present breaks the cohesion of the prose and narrative.

My biggest issue with the book is also along this line of cohesion, though I will not go into much detail here for spoiler reasons.  In brief, some of the events of the ending break the world building, and while the ending is still emotional, it rings hollow.  I plan to go into more detail on this subject in my next post, so that will have to suffice for now.

All in all, All the Light We Cannot See is an enjoyable book.  The plot, while too long and falling apart somewhat at the end, is engaging.  It is well-written, for the most part, and the characters are likable, even if a bit unfinished.  “Unfinished” is a good word for this book: good potential put together with lovely language but still in need of a bit of polish.