Anthony Doerr, "All the Light We Cannot See"

All the Light We Cannot See (2014) is a fine novel in the "saccharine tragedy" genre; bittersweet, I suppose the publisher would call it. I just listened to it and enjoyed it, and I must not be the only one, since it sold 15 million copies. But I have some questions about this kind of book.

All the Light We Cannot see narrates the lives of a blind French girl named Marie-Laure and a German boy named Werner who are, we discover early on, fated to meet in 1944 as war rages around them. The story sets up two moral poles: the horror of Nazism and war, and the enduring wonder of human life. We swing between them, seeing the nightmare loom and then burst upon Europe, but always around and under it are the miracles that we may, Doerr seems to be saying, take too much for granted: the love of family members for each other, the creativity of ordinary people, level-headed bravery in the face of crisis, the long thread of history, the way life endures and goes on no matter what we suffer. Perhaps especially Doerr dwells on the power of radio, of ghostly voices drawn from the ether, the way it can propel a dictatorship or connect two people thousands of miles apart. Thus the title, since radio is light we cannot see.

Terrible things happen in All the Light We Cannot See. Some of them are at least vaguely heroic, but others are drearily random, the humdrum banality of death in a decade when 60 million were killed. We see the horror of Nazism mainly through the eyes of Werner. Werner is a brilliant orphan boy who becomes the neighborhood radio repairman, a conceit lifted from the memoirs of Richard Feynman, at times word for word. This brings him to the attention of a Nazi party functionary who recommends him for a special party school. Thanks to his score on the entrance exam, and his blond hair and blue eyes, Werner is admitted. He thinks this will be a school for the academic elite, but no; it is a training ground for Nazi leaders of the future Reich, with more emphasis on shedding humanity than on learning physics. You are a volley of bullets, the school commandant tells the students; you should not think, but obey with force and fury. The weak are bullied without mercy, but the strong earn only officer's commissions that doom most of them to early death.

Meanwhile, Marie-Laure deals with her existence as a motherless blind girl, to which are then added the grim realities of invasion and occupation, and the deaths of people around her.

There is no shirking of horror here; people we care about die, while those who survive are hardened. And yet alongside the tragedy there is always the sweetness, the devotion, the love, the purity, the reverence for the miracles of life. It has the effect, sometimes, of saying, really, it's not so bad, people still love each other, still marvel at wonderful things.

I can see certain people being irritated by this book; there were a couple of places where I was a little irritated, and I'm basically a sentimental sop.

On the other hand.

It seems to me that if you want to be an optimist about human life, and you don't think God will sort it all out after we die, you have to take a sentimental position something like Anthony Doerr's. You have to say, yes, there is horror, yes, Nazis, yes, World War II, but look at how this old man loves his blind niece. Look at these people from different nations and generations bonding over their love of science, connected by the magic of radio. Look at how we make this suffering into beautiful stories that bring tears to our eyes but joy to our hearts.

I don't think you have to believe that the joy and beauty outweigh the misery and horror; you simply have to think that the misery and horror do not cancel out the joy and beauty, that those things remain wonderful and good no matter what else happens. To some, that is sentimental nonsense; to others, it is art.