This book is beautiful, horrifying and a must read. It is a WWII story with two main characters—a young blind French girl who flees with her brilliant father, a locksmith for the Parisian Museum of Natural History, from the occupied French capital to outlying Saint-Malo, and an orphaned German child prodigy who gets caught up in the Nazi war machine which slowly crushes the light in him.
Marie-Laure lives in worlds created by her doting father, but when he is taken from her and she is left alone in the house of her WWI-damaged great uncle with only the care of the housekeeper and her father’s carefully-forged model of the city to guide her, she becomes vulnerable to the occupying Nazi forces. She turns to the resistance for both physical and moral sustenance. Werner is taken from his sister and the orphanage they both lived in after their father was killed in a coal mine accident, when a Nazi official discovers the boy’s unique talents with everything mechanical and electrical. He is sent to an elite Nazi training school where he is taught it’s either “them or us,” and is forced to stand by when Frederick, his nature-loving best friend at the school, is condemned as too weak, and horrifically savaged in a Lord of the Flies moment.
There are many fascinating characters peopling the terrain of this book, but what makes it so special is the author’s exquisite rendering of real people trying to survive—some with dignity, some with resignation, and some at the expense of others. There are no romantic endings in this story, but there is music, there is heroism, and there is lots of science. Indeed, there is a skillful interweaving of these underlying themes throughout the lives of the protagonists. This can be seen in the author’s effective depiction of radio technology which proves responsible for Werner’s self-discovery and his salvation but also his disgrace, while being central to Marie Laure’s discovery of her own inner self as well. And it is the theme of nature, in the form of Frederick’s fascination with birds and Marie-Laure’s fascination with the sea, which finds echo in the recurring broadcasts of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Whether or not the author has personal experience with blindness, he does a masterful job of depicting the trials of a blind person, especially under the stresses of war-time occupation. Like many other authors nowadays, Doerr interleaves his chapters from the differing viewpoints of his numerous characters, and also carries us back and forth in time. However, he takes special care to keep his chapters short, which enables the reader to make the transitions with ease while driving the story forward. This was one of those novels which you don’t want to see end, and while Doerr wraps up much of his tale in his final chapters, he leaves the door open for our imaginations to move into a more hopeful future.
