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Book review: 'All The Light We Cannot See'

In All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr paints everyday people so richly, it makes it possible to understand World War II in a more humane light.

Novels that come with Pulitzer prize-winning tags are usually picked up with great expectations. And with great expectations usually come great disappointments. Not so with All The Light We Cannot See.
Anthony Doerr's masterpiece about two young children dealing with the horrors of World War II lives up to every bit of the brilliance it is touted to come with (it made its way onto at least 20 bestseller lists - spending 58 weeks on The New York Times' Best Sellers list alone).
Blinded at the age of six, Marie-Laure is a young French girl, whose innate curiosity for the minute details of a world she can no longer see drives her to resilience of a most admirable degree. Werner Pfennig is a German orphan with "hair white as snow" and an incredible gift for circuitry that is his ticket away from labouring in the mines that killed his father, and into a training school for Hitler's military elite instead, where they are taught to "eat country and breathe nation". They're from as opposite sides of the tracks as could be - but you already know that their paths are going to meet.
The youngsters' stories are told mostly through flashbacks - but these aren't too difficult to keep up with, since Doerr keeps his chapters short, his thoughts shorter and his storytelling masterful. It's not just the two protagonists that carry the tale forward either: you're rooting for Marie-Laure's father, a principal locksmith, who builds perfect scale models of their neighbourhood to help his daughter navigate the outside world; you fall in love with Frederick, a gentle German boy who is forced to attend the Fuhrer's ruthless school along with Werner (although his dearest ambition is to study birds) and who breaks your heart as he bravely pays the price for alone defying the inhumane training of the school's top brass; and you despise the repulsive Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel, as he seeks the elusive Sea of Flames, an infamous cursed diamond that supposedly brings long life to the keeper, but ruin to his/her loved ones.
Doerr's attention to detail is exquisite. It doesn't matter whether he's describing snails, radios, towns or birds - nothing is exempt from his meticulous research, and it is easy to believe him when he blames the 10 years it took to write the book on the amount of research it called for.
With All The Light We Cannot See, Doerr also sheds some light on much-asked moral questions of the time, perhaps making it (a little bit more) possible for readers to understand how everyday people could commit the atrocities they did during what they thought would be the Thousand Year Reich. The people's indoctrination into a 'supreme order' was almost complete - and always justified by the torrent of propaganda they were surrounded with. As Werner is once told: "A scientist's work is determined by two things: his interests and the interests of his time. We live in exceptional times, cadet." (In other words: silence your conscience and do as you're told, lad.) Yet, the book also highlights how people find ways to be good to one another - and that's what makes it such a moving read.
I've been gravitating towards historical fiction ever since I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help. For me, these books pave the way to understanding critical events that shaped history, yet occurred long before I was born. So for epic reads like these, I'll always be grateful.
karen@khaleejtimes.com