Enthralling epic of the ages
CLOUD CUCKOO LAND By Anthony Doerr (Fourth Estate) ★★★★✩
YOU can’t fault Anthony Doerr’s ambition. His last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning All The Light We Cannot See, set during World War II, was the serpentine story of an orphaned German soldier who rises in the ranks because of his talent with radios, and a blind French girl trying to escape Paris. These storylines gradually intertwined over 550 pages, swelling into an emotional crescendo.
While All The Light We Cannot See sometimes drifted a little too far into sentimental territory and its fragmented timeline was loveable arguably only to its author, its scope and aspirations didn’t prevent it t from becoming a runaway hit.
In Cloud Cuckoo Land, though, h, Doerr (right) outdoes himself. Six-hundred-plus pages, with a whopping four storylines — set in 1400s Constantinople, 1950s Korea, contemporary Idaho (specifically Payette Lake, which reflects Doerr’s love affair air with nature), and in the deep future, on an apparently crewless ess spaceship heading toward a distant planet. And all four timelines are connected by a story written by the Greek philosopher Diogenes.
If that all seems deeply inaccessible, it isn’t. Doerr breaks the story down into bite-sized chunks. Cynics may suggest that he employs short chapters as a sop to those with limited attention spans but Doerr claims it’s because of the time constraints of parenting – short chapters are the only way he can get writing done in between the duties of being a dad.
Whatever the reason, it works. Within 30 pages or so, the lives of the Constantinople children, hare-lipped Omeir and orphaned slave girl Anna, are mesmerisingly and movingly realised, and Doerr has the reader snared. His adroitness at weaving together the four stories spread across four ages and two worlds is almost magical – at no point does the episodic structure feel manipulative or forced.
Doerr uses bewitching writing to tell this tale of human interconnectedness across the vast expanses of time.
THE VERDICT
Doerr’s colossal work delivers on all fronts – an imaginative classic