Historical fiction novel explores World War II

Rachel Conway, For the Review

If you think you’ve read all the poignant, emotional World War Two era novels in existence to date … Sorry to disappoint, but there’s one you’ve missed, and it’s incredible.

“All the Light we Cannot See,” published in 2014 by American author Anthony Doerr, winning the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is the Holocaust from a perspective you’ve never experienced before.

The novel follows multiple storylines: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young French girl at the beginnings of the war, is born sighted but loses her eyesight at the age of six. Her locksmith father, in order to assuage his daughter’s fear, builds a perfect miniature model of their small town, each building expertly crafted and accurately spaced.

By running her hands over the model, Marie-Laure eventually learns her surroundings and can get around town alone by running her cane along the rain gutters, counting their number between each street corner until she can navigate by herself.

Marie-Laure’s father works at the town’s museum, and, as one of its most loyal employees, is entrusted with a priceless stone rumored to make its owner immortal, with one grave condition: as long as the owner is in possession of the stone, their loved ones will continue to suffer greater and greater injury.

The stone in Marie-Laure’s father’s possession could either be the original or one of three copies made; either way, as war breaks out, it is imperative that it remain out of German hands.

Werner Pfennig is a German boy living in a small coal-mining town in Germany with his sister Jutta. Born with an insatiable curiosity for all things scientific and mathematic, he soon teaches himself how to make radios and tune into local and foreign stations.

After gaining a reputation as a young prodigy in his town, he is recruited by the Nazis and invited to an elite training school for boys, where he is allowed to learn all that he can about radio transmissions.

His talents take him on missions where he must track down “rebels” of the Third Reich using radio signals to murder them. Once a childhood dream for Werner, his thirst for knowledge quickly turns nightmarish under Nazi regime.

Eventually, Werner and Marie-Laure’s paths cross in complex and unexpected ways. The author uses an interesting format, jumping from past to present throughout the novel and alternating narratives by chapter, so that the reader is never bored by any given storyline, making the novel’s 500+ pages seem like hardly enough. I enjoyed Doerr’s work on multiple levels.

Hearing the perspective of a French child before, during, and after the German occupation of France is a revealing experience.

Understanding the occupation from the perspective of a child who sees the small changes everywhere – in her father’s behavior, in the gossip of school boys thrown her way, in the tone of the baker’s voice, who is at risk for treason if she is discovered baking notes of rebellion into her loaves of bread – sheds new light on the trauma of the French people, who have so recently faced such psychological and physical terror on their own soil.

Furthermore, understanding the monstrous conditions under which young boys were selected and then conditioned with the values of the Third Reich through Werner’s story is horrifying, intriguing, and necessary.

The novel’s depiction of the war from a child’s perspective is revelatory of the horrors that our generation’s children must endure in light of today’s hardships (a topic especially pertinent with the current events in Syria taking place).

I give this book five stars, and recommend it to anyone who would like to understand further the crimes we have committed against humanity, and who still believes that there is hope for humankind, because, spoiler alert: against all odds, Doerr does too.