Review: "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr

4 stars.

I started 2025 with a very good read. Many critics have praised Anthony Doerr's vivid, sensory descriptions and lyrical prose (a fact even cited on the book's Wikipedia page). I'm here to tell you: the hype is real. William Faulkner once criticized Ernest Hemingway as being "never known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Doerr does not need to worry about that.

All the Light We Cannot See includes descriptions such as "His blood sloshes back and forth inside him like mercury, and out the windows, in a gap in the mist, the network of trenches and artillery below shows itself very clearly for a moment, and Werner feels he is gazing down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flowing single file down his own electrical path, with no more say in the matter than an electron has." (355). Another example: on page 470, Doerr writes, "That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth." I am a creative writer and I have never even thought of describing something as a sunrise in one's mouth.

The novel, in particular in its opening chapters, is full of good observations about war, about the human mind, about influence, about the worlds of knowledge that have not yet been touched by us. In a sentence quoted several times in later parts of the book, we are told, "Open your eyes...and see what you can with them before they close forever." (48). In extensive prose (the novel is over five hundred pages), Doerr details both the ethical concerns involving the destructive nature of war and many other ideas about science and nature.

I noticed that radios are a prominent symbol in the story. Any story with such a title as All the Light We Cannot See may perhaps demand something like that, as the title refers to the amount of electromagnetic waves beyond the visible spectrum. Indeed, in nearly every part of the story, you are not far from reading about a radio.

What is really worth noting is that the broad strokes of World War II in Europe play out mostly outside the story. Anthony Doerr assumes you know enough about the war to not explain everything that happened, and in my case, I was surprised at how much credit he gave me. We didn't have to be told about the Holocaust or Operation Dynamo or the Italian campaigns or Operation Overlord. Doerr assumes we know the history, and chooses instead to tell us a story of two lives - and some others - that were touched in unshakable ways by it.

Fair warning: the story is set in two time periods, and it switches back and forth. The first narrative is about the siege of Saint-Malo, France during the second week of August 1944. The second narrative is all the events leading up to the two main characters finding themselves in the siege, beginning ten years earlier. What I will say is that Doerr gives us a look into occupied France, which is a story I do not know much about. I knew that France fell rapidly to the Nazi German advance in 1940 and remained occupied until the summer and fall of 1944, but the novel shed much light on the lives of ordinary Frenchmen and Frenchwomen during that time.

Up until the climactic scene where the two stories merge (which is well over seventy-five percent of the way through), each character has a distinct narrative, which is even more to keep track of. Remarkably, Anthony Doerr manages to keep it straightforward. He is able to juggle four narratives: two characters times two time periods. That must have taken extensive outlining, and I see why All the Light We Cannot See took years to write.

One thing Doerr does very well is make you understand Nazi influence. It is terrifying how the German fascists were able to indoctrinate so many into their system. The question of how is more easily answered when you read the things young Germans may have been told. I am not questioning that the novel is historical fiction. However, if you assume that the type of rhetoric used in the novel was accurate, you can understand why many people followed Adolf Hitler and his government. A warrant officer, one of Doerr's most loathsome characters, says, "The only things that keep your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms." (168). Indeed, there are some - I am almost convinced there are many - who think this way today.

What I liked most about All the Light We Cannot See was that it is exciting. It makes you care about the characters in several ways. One, if you are familiar with the series 24, you know what I mean by this (I think I may have even made this comparison in another review): Doerr is a master at leaving a scene early. He does not do this with all chapters, but sometimes, he will make you want to know what comes next and at that moment begin a new scene, only for the same thing to happen when you switch back five or ten pages later. Two, he makes you wait until the last moment for certain resolutions, building tension all the way. You do not know what will happen, and you are not sure that what you want will happen in the next ten, twenty, fifty, or hundred pages. If at all.

My only complaint about this book, and it is significant, is that the ending did seem to drag. After the war scenes, there are about thirty-five pages of resolution set thirty, then seventy years after the events of the war. I felt that maybe a few pages of resolution were necessary, but thirty-five is overdoing it.

All in all, All the Light We Cannot See is a near-exemplary work of historical fiction, especially if you like a deep, slow read that moves at a faster pace than many such reads.

Time spent reading: 10 hours, 26 minutes.