CLOUD CUCKOO LAND, much-anticipated and praised successor to ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND
ANTHONY DOERR
Scribner
$30.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 32ND ANNUAL READING THE WEST BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION!

A bargain at $7.99 on Kindle (non-affiliate link) until Monday, 27 June, that is.

Rating: 3* of five

On The Guardian's Best Fiction of 2021 list

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – FICTION SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK FOR 2021!

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BUZZIEST WORKPLACE BOOK OF 2021!

The Publisher Says: Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: My rating seems mingy, doesn't it. It did to me...I was fully expecting to five-star this bad boy. I wanted to five-star it. I five-starred All the Light We Cannot See, and it was (like this book) a braided-perspectives structure telling a deeply felt and emotionally fraught story.

I blame it on the sci-fi bona fides I have learned to demand of mainstream writers.

Author Doerr's gorgeous sentences are all here:

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.
–and–
“Repository… you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
–and–
There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.

His gift for the pithy aperçu is on display, too:

“Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”
–and–
"Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up."

That last is particularly resonant to me. Cloud-cuckoo Land, invented by Aristophanes in his play The Birds, never existed (as far as I am aware) in the form posited by Author Doerr in this story. Big ups to him for actually fooling me into looking up "Antonius Diogenes Cloud Cuckoo Land" to be absolutely sure of it, though.

So what was the problem? It was the generation-ship element in which Konstance, in all our future, resides. An Earth that can muster the resources to create such a massive object, which has AIs as sophisticated as Sybil (I had to check...I'd've named it "Sibyl," so I verified that it wasn't before typing this), would not need to flee their home world. (Also, is running away from home because we've made a mess really all that hopeful a message in the first place?) It's part of the charm of 1950s sci fi that there were generation ships launched to escape nuclear-war ravaged Earth without anyone saying, "waitaminnit waitaminnit all those resources would be just ducky used on Earth to help people!" but it's 2021 and those sorts of naïve assumptions are scrapheap-of-history material. And yes, I got to the end... I know about the twist...but it comes very late and, for me at least, doesn't change the jarring code-switch from its intended if not entirely successfully sold hope-full to hope-less. The point of making this last-minute course correction was simply lost on me. It ended up making the whole narrative line feel like a cheat.

Another thing that *needs* to be scrapheap-of-history'd is the coding of villains as neurodivergent. One entire star vanished for that. This is all I will say on the subject.

In the end, though, it's the gestalt that doesn't happen that costs this beautifully told tale another of my stars. I expect, if I'm following five (or six, depending on your take on Aethon) main threads, to experience a coming-together, a thematic unity that makes each strand of the story stronger after I've reached it. This was, I'm very sad to say, missing in my reading experience, much as it was in my unhappy read of Cloud Atlas. A much more successfully gestalted example from my own reading is the near-future India of SF chunkster River of Gods, or the outstandingly exciting present-day crime-story chunkster also set in India, Sacred Games.

It verges on misery porn to use children's PoVs in highlighting the cost to innocents of the great human-caused upheavals of History. I'm very glad Author Doerr presented the misery of unnatural change from both sides of the 1450s fall-of-Constantinople story; no triumphalism allowed here. I was less convinced that the overarching thematic reach for Hope was successful, in that these children are all facing the awful, wrenching adjustments whether or not the world actually collapses around them. I mean by that, that the collapses are hard-wired and the survivors are going to be powerless to do more than respond to the New World Order. This vitiates any real hope, at least to my mind it does. That's more than the usual problem for me in this book's case because by its very nature...a story about stories and libraries and words in their eternally exciting welter of meaning, connotation, metaphorical freight...Hope should be the one thing that each character finds, retains, develops, has by the end of the tale.

In the final analysis, this is an Anthony Doerr book. Reams and reams of printer paper, a metric ton of toner, all used to commit the MS's supremely descriptive language to the page. Deeply felt and beautifully written dialogue. Thought-provoking and well-presented explorations of significant thematic concerns of the world right now. But this many pages in the present tense? I felt pummelled with the immediacy! urgency! of that choice, the sense that I was being asked to move through the story at far too rapid a clip. Your book club will, I am pretty sure, love it anyway or even because of this, will discuss it for the required hour and probably go over.

In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you're this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
–and–
It's never easy. Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there's the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that makes him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness.
–and–
Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

I needed things I didn't get...a faster pace in each timeline, fewer flowery passages (though they are gorgeous!)...got things I didn't want (coughSeymourcough), and yet read the book from giddy-up to whoa. Never once did I so much as contemplate abandoning the read, and that is saying something.

This title is a FINALIST for the 2021 Best Fiction Award! The winner will be announced on 17 November 2021. My most sincere well-wishes to the author and the publisher for their success in this contest.