All The Light We Cannot
See by Anthony Doerr. HarperCollins.
Anthony Doerr is a celebrated writer who has written other very
moving stories but All The Light We Cannot
See (2014) stands one level above
all of them. This story, of a few lives
tightly intertwined in the days of the Second World War, is written like a screenplay (optioned already
in most probability!) with separate frames showing us the lives of its main
protagonists, Werner Pfennig and Marie-Laure Leblanc, and the convergence is
almost unbearably beautiful.
Werner, the German orphan of unknown but in all
probability `pure` parentage, a brilliant radio engineer in the making, has his life pretty much mapped out for him
when he is made to join the Wehrmacht. He puts his brilliant mind to the use of
his masters, and tries his level best to squash all the doubts that keep rising
up to his mind like the inexorable tide. And like the tide, these waves of
doubts do not go away completely, they just ebb and flow, ebb and flow.
Marie- Laure is as helpless a pawn in the conflict of life; she
has slowly gone blind and her doting father, a locksmith who works at the Museum
of Natural History in Paris, just
happens to be doing something very dangerous. When the Germans occupy Paris, the two move to her great-uncle`s
sprawling family house in Saint-Malo in beautiful and bleak Brittany, and all
too soon, her father’s activities catch up with him… or rather, the Germans do.
Enmeshed with these two lives are others: Jutta the little
sister Werner leaves behind when he goes out to fight a war he didn’t seek to
fight; Madame Manec , the faithful and feisty family retainer at great uncle Etienne`s
house who suddenly turns Résistance fighter; Etienne who lost the moorings of his
mind a while ago and is now struggling to keep it all together for the sake of
his blind niece. And a German Sergeant Major who is an expert on diamonds, because
at the heart of this story is a magnificent blue diamond with dancing
red flames at its centre, the Sea of Flames, and the attempt to keep it
out of Nazi hands.
The dread and devastation, the misery and hope, the little
pockets of courage in war is beautifully delineated in Doerr`s story. Quite
deservedly, this jewel won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.