Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014. Print.

This book won accolades from critics all over. The cover of the edition I have tells us that the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of the year. And it received a Pulitzer Prize, not a guarantee that the work is great, but a good sign. Was it worth reading? Yes, most definitely, yes.

Even the title, All the Light We Cannot See, suggests the nature of the writing. There is a mysterious quality to it, yet it makes sense. It is rhythmic, even poetic. The title echoes the famous line from The Merchant of Venice: “All that glisters is not gold.”

Instead of a gold casket, part of the tale involves a priceless diamond said to have originated in Borneo called the Sea of Flames. It has supposed occult powers, making its owner immortal but those around the owner accursed. It has been the property of the Museum of Natural History in Paris until World War II when much of the museum’s mineral wealth is dispersed among the French countryside to avoid appropriation by the blitzing Germans.

As with other such jewels, copies have also been made, so no keeper of gems knows whether he has the originals. One of the story lines tells of the search of a Sergeant Major von Rumpel for this stone. He is one of the few Aryan gemologists in Germany, so he is commissioned to locate valuable gems for the Reich just as others were commissioned to capture valuable works of art for the country.

Von Rumpel may only have a few months to live because of a cancerous tumor. He hopes to find the Sea of Flames not so much for the fatherland but so that he can live on. Ironically, as secularists like Hitler or this character reject the historical faith in God, they grasp at superstitious straws. He who believes in nothing will fall for anything. Alas, when such a person has the power of a Hitler that can devastate the whole world. (There is a brief description of the mustard gas treatments Von Rumpel was given for the cancer. Those reminded this reader of John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud who described in some detail the mustard treatments his son would be subjected to for a similar tumor.)

One of the people who is apparently given one of the stones (whether the original or the copy, we have to read to find out) is the museum’s locksmith, a M. LeBlanc. He has created some unique devices for safely storing some of the museum’s valuables. He also has made a scale model of the Latin Quarter of Paris where he lives with his daughter Marie-Laure, who is blind. She learns her way around by touching the buildings, sidewalks, lampposts, storm drains, and other features of the model and then using it as a map she has memorized to find her way around the city.

When it becomes clear the Germans will occupy Paris, most of the museum’s employees are told to flee. M. LeBlanc and Marie-Laure, with some adventures on the way, flee to Saint-Malo where M. LeBlanc’s eccentric Uncle Etienne lives.

Saint-Malo is an exotic location even for the French. It is in Brittany in northwest France and is an island citadel just off the coast. At low tide, people can walk the causeway to the city, but at high tide, it is completely moated. Its residents also consider themselves a people apart to some degree. We are told that they are first Malouin, then Breton, and finally French if there is anything left over.

Much of the story focuses on Marie. The writing is exquisite. Doerr’s imagery is unsurpassed in prose. Marie’s world is one of touch and sound and occasionally smell. She understands light and color because she went blind at age six, so her ways of visualizing are distinctive.

When they move to Saint-Malo, her father makes a model of the island similar to the one that he made of the Latin Quarter. Twelve-year-old Marie-Laure, thanks to associates at the museum, has also developed an interest and knowledge about mollusks. She can feel the shells and in many cases tell what they are. She is overjoyed when at Saint-Malo she discovers a place where thousands of snails find shelter on the water’s edge.

She loves stories. Her Uncle Etienne reads her stories. She reads and re-reads the few Braille books that she owns. Her favorites are two by Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The second book is longer, and for a long time she just owns volume one, which she has practically memorized.

Marie’s story is told parallel to the story of Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is fascinated with radio and electricity. Though the orphanage only has a handmade crystal set, he is able to hear faraway places and broadcasts in different languages. He grows up in the Ruhr Valley. Elena, the mistress of the orphanage, grew up in disputed territory just to the West, so her first language was French. The orphans, then, pick up some French along with their German.

Werner knows that most of the boys in his town are fated to work in the coal mines, where his father worked and met his death. Werner believes that if he learns enough about radio, he can perhaps go into a different line of work.

That is indeed what happens. Locally, he is treated as kind of boy genius because of his ability to repair radios. When he is fourteen, he is called away from his home town to a special military school. Most of the boys there are sons of government or military officials, but some like Werner get scholarships because of athletic or intellectual abilities.

Not only does this military school indoctrinate the boys into Nazi beliefs, it practices them. Weakness is not tolerated. The slow runners and the physically smaller and weaker boys are weeded out. It is pure Darwinism—the survival of the fittest. Lord of the Flies with adult supervision.

Werner is small for his age, but he is quick. And every evening a colonel brings him into his house so he can study radio, trigonometry, and repair broken radio sets. Even among these more elite adults, he has a reputation of being a genius when it comes to building and fixing radios. He ends up constructing a radio direction finder (RDF) that is more effective than the types that the German military has been using.

Eventually, the colonel declares that Werner is eighteen, not sixteen, and sends him to the Eastern Front and then to France to locate and silence partisan and underground radio broadcasts, which he does with great success. We see that eventually he will meet Marie-Laure in Saint-Malo as he tracks down the resistance radio station there which Uncle Etienne operates.

One of the most striking themes, perhaps contrasts, are the descriptions of natural scenes like the grotto of shells or a field of Queen Anne’s Lace with scenes of savagery at the military school and on the battlefield. Since Marie-Laure likes the two adventures Verne about world travel, Uncle Etienne reads to her Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. There is a gorgeous passage from this book describing Darwin’s first awed impression of seeing the Amazon rain forest.

Of course, The Voyage of the Beagle was published in 1839, twenty years before On the Origin of Species, and nineteen before Darwin’s first published article hypothesizing evolution. In Walden (published in 1854) Thoreau speaks highly of “Darwin the naturalist.” That, too, is before The Origin and when the name Darwin became loaded.

This becomes one of the themes of All the Light We Cannot See. We hear the young Darwin, Darwin the naturalist, telling us the beauties of the natural world. We get this through Marie and her fascination with shells and Werner’s friend Frederick who loves birds and observes the living world around him while the bullies are devising ways to intimidate him because he is “weak.”

So then we see the effects of the older Darwin, Darwin the theoretician, giving a “scientific” justification for cruelty and amorality: Orwell’s vision of the future, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Survival of the “fittest”? Fit for what?

Doerr does understand one thing. While there are books and articles refuting virtually every claim made by Darwin and his disciples, an intellectual case against Darwin in and of itself is not generally effective. It is, as always, a question of the human heart. Pride is such a terrible beast to bring down. What price will it take? Unsettling stories like this that remind us of how a good naturalist got corrupted who knows how just as a civilized country got corrupted by his philosophy—and it is a philosophical tautology, not observable science.

I am not aware that Doerr knew this, but the passage from The Voyage of the Beagle about the Amazon rain forest is cited in Darwin’s own autobiography, which he wrote much later, after he had become an atheist and published his theories. He said that when he saw the majesty of such a creation, that he could not help be a theist, a believer in God. He said he thought then that “there was more to man than breath of his body.” It was only later that he was able to suppress such thoughts. A very significant quotation. “It may be truly I am like a man who has become color-blind,” he noted when looking back on that time. Didn’t Jesus say something about the blind leading the blind?

There is a lot more. The title also suggests the lessons in physics that Werner hears over the radio coming from France. Scientists are learning that light is just a small part of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum we cannot see including the electric waves which operate turbines and electric motors, magnetic waves which create electrical currents, and radio waves which we can send long distance through the air and change into sound waves.

Doerr deliberately includes a contemporary scene with people talking on cell phones, sending text messages, and accessing the Internet to show how the technology continues to change us.

All the Light We Cannot See, though fiction, is quite realistic. Some of the war descriptions are not for the faint of heart. The book does not sensationalize them, but it is direct. We appreciate all the more those who do survive, and what they had to go through to eventually lead a normal life in pursuit of happiness.

All the French, except perhaps one very old woman, seem to be existentialists. Was that way of thinking that prevalent in France? Even before the war? Perhaps so, but I am just asking that. I do recall reading Georges Bernanos’ La Joie (Joy) and Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) or Andre Maurois who were contemporaries of Camus and Sartre and hardly thought as they did. Eh, well.

Doerr’s narrative technique is a little different, and some readers may find it unsettling. The chapters are very short and alternate among various characters, usually between Marie or some other French person and Werner or some other German. On top of that, the chapters wander all over time. Even the section headings which give dates really only apply to the first chapter in that section, and not always even then.

Still, there are enough context clues that the reader can usually clearly figure out where and when the episode is taking place. And together, the chapters do progress in such a way that we see that the main story begins in 1939 right before the German occupation and ends in 1944 after the liberation of Paris, but it has a good deal of prologue and some epilogue as well. It all works together. All the Light We Cannot See is a pièce de résistance if not a chef d’œuvre.