Anthony Doerr - All The Light We Cannot See

Rating:2/5

Review:
Not for me

Oh dear. I'm afraid I'm badly out of step with the rave reviews because I didn't like this novel. It's a decent idea and has its moments, but for me the story and characters were constantly swamped by a deluge of self-conscious style. Plenty of people will disagree - and fair enough - but this is my take on it, for what it's worth.

The story is of two very different characters growing up before the Second World War and the impact of the War on them and on others. One is an orphan German boy who turns out to be a genius with radios and is recruited into the German army, the other is a blind girl in Paris who eventually has to flee westward to Saint-Malo. How their stories develop and interact is well explained elsewhere and it's a decent vehicle for a story, but I found that the story and characters often disappeared beneath an avalanche of adjectives and adverbs, and the whole thing was so fast-edited that it seemed like an MTV video at times. Obviously, many people don't agree, and you may well like the style too - these things are a matter of personal taste, after all - but the style the author describes as "lyrical" I found overblown and pretentious, so that it positively detracted from the story rather than enhancing it. It is prose which draws attention to itself rather than to the narrative or the characters, and I felt it was forever glancing coyly in my direction to make sure I'd noticed how frightfully *good* it was. The result was that I found his protracted, over-written descriptions of being caught in an air-raid, for example, far less powerful than the much lower-key but quite brilliant description by Clare Morrall in After The Bombing

I also found the structure very hard to deal with. It has a fractured timescale (a current fad in fiction) and we jump backward or forward in time every 50 pages or so. This can be effective, but I couldn't really see the point here, other than to create little cliff-hangers which began to irritate badly. Then, within each section there are very short chapters which jump between different scenes; until about page 450 I don't think there are two successive sections which actually follow on from each other. Again, rather than being an effective device I just found it mannered, and it became very wearing.

I would like to know what a blind person thinks about this, but I also have to say that, certainly in the first part of the book, in his desire to appear empathetic Doerr gives very high-octane descriptions of what it is like to be blind which seemed far more like his own "oh my God, how would I cope if I went blind?" ideas than the responses of someone for whom it was part of everyday life - brilliantly and matter-of-factly evoked by Marcus Sedgwick in She Is Not Invisible, for example.

I know that lots of people liked this novel and that its Big Themes and Fabulous Style will attract a lot of praise. For me, though, it was overblown, over-long and a good deal too pleased with itself. In the end I didn't think it added up to all that much, I'm afraid, and I can't recommend it.