All The Light We Cannot See - Review

What a book to end 2024 on! I watched the TV adaptation of this before reading. Netflix changed the ending to be far more gooey feel-good palatable. Both have their merits.

⚠️⚠️⚠️SPOILERS!⚠️⚠️⚠️

The novel revolves around two characters: Marie-Laure, a blind daughter of a locksmith in France; and Werner, an orphaned prodigy in Germany. As the war brews and the two become submerged in the machinery of either side, they are connected by a broadcast. First made by Marie-Laure’s grandfather and listened to by Werner and his sister Jutta in their childhood. Then, on the frontiers of bloodshed, Werner finds Marie-Laure’s voice on that same broadcast.

Debussy’s Clair de Lune [moonlight] is the broadcast’s leitmotif. It’s named after Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s poem of the same name describing masked dancers in the triste et beau moonlight. The movement breaks from strict metronome, just as the novel starts en medias res and weaves between timelines. Composed during France’s Belle Époque, the piece here is both scientific beacon and cultural resistance - as a distinctly French voice vis-à-vis the German occupation. Clair de Lune was completed during the Impressionist movement which was explicitly rejecting German Romantic traditions.

To me, the book is most of all about courage, carried by the conceit of light. Etienne, Marie-Laure’s great-uncle, has been buried in agoraphobia since the first world war. Marie-Laure describes the fear as” …That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark”; and how the fear grew on him such that “…any light, even through closed eyelids, became excruciatingly bright.” Werner’s moral paralysis sees his friend Frederick gets bullied into a vegetative state, watches a little girl get shot by a trigger-happy colleague, crushes his homemade radio out of fear.

But for Marie-Laure, Etienne leaves the house for the first time in nearly two dozen years. For Marie-Laure, Werner defies what is expected of him for the first time and saves someone’s life. The girl who cannot see opens the eyes of those around her.

And the braveries need not be grandiose. It is Frau Elena offering herself up to be raped first so that the soldiers are gentler on the rest of the girls. It is Jutta asking, “Is it right … to do something only because everyone else is doing it?” It is Marie-Laure’s father pretending to be well in letters from prison. Marie-Laure says:

She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

Werner responds: ”…Today maybe I did.” His life, instead of somebody else’s orders.

Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices. Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet - I will not - Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.

The hopeful message I take away is that bravery is forged, not given. Which means that you don’t need to be born with it to create it:

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

…so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

All of us begin small. The heroes that come before us emerged the same way, and perhaps we can follow in their footsteps if we so choose.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

Doerr paints this courage in achingly delicate strokes. Everyone is brilliantly multi-faceted. The sergeant who is willing to kill for the stone in hopes of curing his disease thinks of his daughters. The giant who slaughters without wincing closes his eyes to music and takes care of Werner. The French perfumer neighbour betrays his kinsmen. The moon is beautiful in Claire de Lune, and is also the frosty spectator watching Werner die and the war unfold. The line between German and French, soldier and citizen, adult and child blur; there is light and darkness on both sides.

But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

The diamond itself, The Sea of Flames, embodies the novel’s central paradox: “it had a touch of red at its center, like flames inside a drop of water”. This cursed stone promising its holder eternal life and destruction to everyone else is a kind of metaphor for war itself - its wielders seek glory at the expense of the people on the frontlines.

This two-sidedness is also presented in the recurring themes of order and symmetry. The Nazi training camp Werner undergoes constantly brings up the question of Order and Control:

The total entropy of any system, said Dr. Hauptmann, will decrease only if the entropy of another system will increase. Nature demands symmetry. Ordnung muss sein. [There must be order]

It reminds me of Ess Muss Sein in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is a response to Nietzsche’s die ewige Wiederkunft (eternal return). If we live as if our lives will recur infinitely, then our actions become unbearably heavy. Kundera’s response was that life only happens once, and so is unbearably meaningless; and is up to us to make it meaningful. The choice is ours to make, like it was for Werner. But what choice is there if you have no control? How much is determined by Nature and by us?

There is a literary chiasmus in the character arcs as well. There are only two chapters titled Light: the first one is when Marie-Laure, after months of tear-filled frustrated failures, finally finds her way home by herself for the first time since going blind. The second is Werner deliriously stumbling into a landmine and dying under the moonlight. The ignition of one and the extinguishment of another.

The denouement brings Jutta and Marie-Laure together. Marie-Laure offers to gift one of her grandfather’s recordings, and it is befittingly about the moon. Jutta responds:

I remember. And light? On the other side?