The value of the unseen

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

At the center of the lives of each of the main characters in Anthony Doerr's great World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014) are things or people they cannot see. This makes them no less real, no less important.

Marie-Laure, the French girl whose father has taken her from Paris to Saint-Malo along with the world's most valuable diamond, is totally blind. One by one, as the years of war slowly pass, her father, uncle and others in the huge house disappear, leaving her alone. Meanwhile a German officer, attempting to claim Europe's most precious gems for the Nazis, tracks the Sea of Flames, as the jewel is called, to that very house, where Marie-Laure hides behind a wardrobe.

Werner is an unusually shy, unusually bright German boy who, because of his special scientific skills, is conscripted into the army despite his youth and put to work tracking down radio transmitters operating in occupied territory. He finds them, his huge sergeant kills the radio operators.

But then Werner discovers that a radio in Saint-Malo is being operated by a French girl who reminds him of his little sister, Jutta, whose warnings he had failed to heed. As it happens, Marie-Laue's uncle had once used that very radio to broadcast science programs for children throughout Europe (see above), which Werner and Jutta used to listen to.

Doerr sets up the basic situation fairly early, then lets the tension slowly build through the course of the long novel. All the Light We Cannot See deserves all the readers and honors it has received since its publication.