This is a big book – it’s one of those giant paperbacks, and
it has over 500 pages. Yet Doerr uses language with the precision of a poet. To
test this out, I’m going to open it at random and see what’s there. Here we go:
He looks up. Suspended lamps, rows of
spines fading off into dusty gold. All of Europe, and he aims to find one
pebble tucked inside its folds. And again: All morning Etienne crawls along the attic floor with cable and pliers
and tools her fingers do not understand, weaving himself into the center of
what she imagines as an intricate electronic net.
The novel is set in France in the Second World War. Like
Richard Flanagan’s Wanting, which I reviewed here a while ago, it weaves together two
stories, and it’s difficult to see exactly why they will come to meet – except,
of course, that here is a continent – a world – in chaos; so that unexpected juxtapositions
might almost be expected to happen.
Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the subject of the first story. Blind
from the age of six, at the beginning of the story she lives in Paris with her
father, who works at the Museum of Natural History. He has constructed for her
a model of their neighbourhood; each house, each street, each storm drain is
there, so that she can learn it with her fingers and then apply her knowledge
so that she can find her way about the real city. Every day, he takes her with
him to the museum, and some afternoons he leaves her with Dr Geffard, ‘an aging
mollusk expert whose beard smells permanently of damp wool’. He tells her about
the reefs he explored as a young man, and he lets her feel the thousands of
specimens he has: The murex Dr Geffard
keeps on his desk can entertain her for half an hour, the hollow spines, the
ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it’s a forest of spikes and caves and
textures; it’s a kingdom. This knowledge becomes important to her later on;
nothing is wasted in this book. When war breaks out and the Germans are about
to invade Paris, Marie-Laure and her father flee, eventually taking shelter in
St Malo, in the tall, narrow house where her reclusive Uncle Etienne lives,
cared for by his redoubtable housekeeper, Madame Manec.
Meanwhile, a white-haired boy called Werner Pfennig (who, we
learn at the very beginning of the book, will also end up in St Malo), is
growing up in an orphanage in a mining town in Germany with his sister, Jutta.
Werner has an agile mind and capable fingers; he and Jutta are fascinated by
radios, and he teaches himself how they work and constructs his own. He dreads
the thought of working in the mines which killed his father, and when his
unusual skill comes to the notice of the authorities, it seems that he may have
found a way out. But in the Germany of the Third Reich, his education comes at
a price; he sees terrible things and he fears that he is morally compromised.
It would be unfair to say any more about what happens to the
two young people – but perhaps you would like to know that, unlike Wanting, this novel ultimately offers
hope: it suggests that goodness exists despite evil, and even emerges and
develops as a reaction to terrible circumstances.
One of the many remarkable things about this novel to me is
the way in which Doerr succeeds in recreating the detail and texture of life in
mid-century France and Germany. It’s easy to take this for granted as a reader,
but it really isn’t an easy thing to achieve. I’ve written some historical
fiction. I did a lot of research for a book about Alfred the Great, called Warrior King, and eventually began
to write. After a couple of pages, Alfred needs to have a bit of a think before
he decides what to say, so he reaches out for a drink. But a drink of what? And
from what? What were cups/goblets made from in the 9th century?
Metal, wood? What kind of metal? It’s those little details, which you don’t
even have to think about when you’re writing a contemporary novel, which trip
you up so easily. So far as I noticed, Doerr doesn’t put a foot wrong. Here,
for instance, he’s writing about what happens when the electricity supply in St
Malo becomes erratic. Clocks run fast,
lightbulbs brighten, flare and pop, and send a soft rain of glass falling into
the corridors. How did he know that’s how it happens? I would have thought
the electricity would just flicker. You hardly notice such details, but they all help to create a completely authentic world.
This is a remarkable novel. There’s so much in it that I
know I will come back to it and re-read it, and I don’t do that often.
Just one criticism, and it’s for the publisher, not the
author. Usually, I find these large format paperbacks a pleasure to read. This one looks lovely, but it's incredibly difficult to handle, because the spine is so stiff that
you can’t open the book properly, let alone get it to lie flat. If publishers
want to encourage readers to buy traditionally published books, they really
need to do better than this.
The story sheds an interesting light on a turbulent and not particularly well-known period. We know now that fascism in England was a dead end; but it's important to remember that they didn't know that at the time. It must have been very frightening to see the Blackshirts marching through the streets and to witness the riots and the rabble-rousing speeches, particularly if, like Isabella, your mother was a foreigner and you worked for a Jewish factory owner. Isabella senses for herself the charismatic power of fascism in the person of her brother Arthur's friend, Rupert; she distrusts him, but she sees his power - and his good looks. The people she loves are in very real danger, from several different directions. By the end, no-one is left unscarred. 
