“Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land, 2021
Five stories of cataclysm unfurl across 800 years, peopled by the unlikely and overlooked, bound together by the last fragments of an Ancient Greek play.
The boy marching his precious oxen toward the siege of Constantinople; the girl inside as the great city falls. The closeted Korean War vet finding meaning in organizing a children’s play; the radicalized eco-terrorist whose botched plan threatens the life of the cast. And in the far future, a human colony en route to another planet as Earth becomes uninhabitable.
I commend Doerr for aiming for the sky on this one. Alienated characters navigating themes of preservation (of stories, of the environment, of shared experiences) amidst Armageddon are, in theory, immensely compelling. Sadly, the summary was better than the execution this time around.
I found Doerr’s clipped, Wikipedia-stuffed prose grating, and his characters flat. They are Sad and Noble, and that long-suffering seems intended to be Meaningful in a way that never quite lands. Chapters are too short, ending just as things happen. And there are too many.
Style aside, my strongest frustration is around a specific character choice. The radicalization of the autistic central character seems to have been handled with only a cursory understanding of autism, undermining the emotional core of the book.
There are excellent examples of main characters with differences (Christopher in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” Auggie in “Wonder”) where I felt connection to a fully realized character. Seymour, on the other hand, read as a checklist of poorly researched symptoms, whose actions moved the plot because the plot needed to move.
The final payoff was welcome, but not particularly earned.