TRIBUTE TO A WOUNDED WORLD
Anthony Doerr's new novel celebrates libraries past, present and future as a way of connecting humanity
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr Simon & Schuster
It was a climactic moment in western civilization — the fall of Constantinople, glittering centrepiece of the Byzantine Empire, to its Ottoman conquerors in 1453. One might think there would be more than enough here to fill the pages of any book — yet the blazing drama of this event provides but one strand of Anthony Doerr's dauntingly ambitious new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land.
We're also in the year 2020, where an Idaho library and a group of children are in jeopardy from an eco-terrorist attack and we're transported to an ark-like spaceship of the future with a sealed room and a sequestered teenage girl obsessed with ancient history. Along the way there are forays into swinging London and the Korean War of the 1950s. Crucially, there's the recurring presence of an ancient book, discovered by chance by a child in the days before Constantinople fell, that has miraculously survived over two millennia.
Now that Doerr's eagerly awaited epic is arriving in bookstores — all 622 pages of it — this soft-spoken 47-year-old author is coming to terms with what he managed to bring off. “I had up to seven stories with an eighth one in the centre of the book, and I needed to keep all the plates spinning,” he says in a tone of some awe.
Indeed, there came a moment during writing when Doerr felt distinctly nervous.
“I thought — `Oh my God, this is too ambitious,'” he says from his Idaho home. “There were moments when I never thought I would pull this together. But my wife was always by my side, encouraging me all the way, and that gave me confidence. So once I got this big fleet of 747s in the air and got all the characters off the ground and introduced, I started feeling that readers would be engaged.”
Doerr makes clear that he was intimidated by the particular task he had set himself with this new novel — not by pressure to deliver a worthy successor to his Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See, a much loved bestseller set in wartime France.
Despite the Pulitzer hoopla, he was still able to maintain personal equilibrium.
“The important thing is that you still have to go on living your life, You still have to fold laundry and go and pick up chicken breasts at the grocery store. So once into the rhythm of daily life and the mundanities of being part of a family, I wouldn't be thinking about those other things.”
As for his chosen career of writing for a living: “You put the bestseller lists to one side, along with the critical acclaim and all the nice things people are saying about you. That's because you have to relearn each time. You may learn some tricks as you get older, but basically you're still trying to make something from scratch each time.”
That previous novel, however, did plant the seed for its successor. While researching its Second World War background, Doerr became fascinated by Adolf Hitler's “maniacal” dream of protecting his growing empire with the building of an Atlantic wall. That kindled Doerr's interest in the place of the defensive wall in history — “it was the pre-eminent defensive technology in the world and it lasted for 1,100 years.”
And Constantinople came to haunt him, with its massive, seemingly impenetrable land walls that were 12 metres high and further protected by moats that were six metres deep. “I put a 15th-century engraving of the city next to my desk while I was finishing All the Light We Cannot See,” he reveals.
So yes, the idea for his next book was already tugging away while he worked on its predecessor. And two important characters would eventually occupy the 500-yearold canvas that would figure so prominently in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Anna, a bright but restless apprentice seamstress in the ancient city, longs to learn to read and is introduced to the wonders of ancient Greek. Omeir, a 13-year-old ox-herder, has been conscripted into the Ottoman army to help haul a super cannon to the walls of Constantinople. The lives of these two youngsters will dramatically converge as a result of the bloody siege.
Meanwhile, centuries later in the western state of Idaho, there's 86-year-old Zeno, a Korean War veteran and a self-taught translator of ancient Greek who's working with local youngsters in bringing his work to the stage. His path will cross with that of a troubled youth named Seymour, whose grief over the destruction of a beloved forest by real estate developers has radicalized him into terrorist action.
Such characters reaffirm one of Doerr's most striking achievements — the ability to create genuinely good human beings without lapsing into maudlin sentimentality.
“I think I've always turned to literature for hope and I've always tended to look for goodness in people around me and look for this in my characters,” Doerr says. “The great majority of us are decent but we all make mistakes. So I am drawn to characters who are complicated yet tend to make the right decisions by the end of the narrative.”
Critical choices also confront a further character — a 14-year-old girl named Konstance, confined to a spaceship in the mid-21st century with access to an infinite digital library that brings her into a contact with a long-lost book from ancient Greece. And this book — by Greek philosopher Antonius Diogenes — provides a link to everything that happens in Doerr's novel.
Little actual writing by Diogenes survives, but that hasn't deterred Doerr from being inventive. And some of the most beguiling sections of Cloud Cuckoo Land are devoted to products of his own imagination as he offers fragmentary moments from the adventures of a first-century shepherd named Aethon who's searching for the perfect Utopia.
Doerr is forthright about his purpose with this new novel. He sees it as a celebration of story as a means of connecting humanity, and the dedication at the beginning is heartfelt: “For the librarians — then, now, and in the years to come.”
He expanded on this in a message to booksellers, librarians and advance readers. “I tried to pour all my love for our astonishing, green, wounded world into this novel. There are children here, and teachers, and libraries large and small, and two brave oxen, and a great grey owl, but primarily this is a book about our planet — in itself a vast library — and the stories that connect us.”
There were moments when I never thought I would pull this together. But my wife was always by my side, encouraging me all the way, and that gave me confidence. Anthony Doerr