All the Light We Cannot See
All the Light We Cannot See
Netflix transformed Anthony Doerr's novel into a "schmaltzy incoherent mess..."
Almost upon publication, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr became a cultural phenomenon. The breakthrough book of 2014, it was read in book clubs across America and spent more than 200 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list selling a whopping 15 million copies worldwide. Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, called it “hauntingly beautiful.” The Guradian pointed out that Doerr’s “attention to detail is magnificent.” Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the voting committee hailed the book as: “an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.”
All the Light We Cannot See has now been adapted into a Netflix miniseries (it premiered on November 2). Contrary to the ballyhoo surrounding the book’s publication, and the widespread praise it received, the TV series has been met with almost universal scorn: The Guardian called it a “superficial, self-indulgent mess” in which the acting is bad and the dialog gets “worse and worse” as it proceeds. The Financial Times noted that the series presents “a slab of melodrama built on expensive production and cheap sentimentality.” Time commented that the series is “Not just a bungled literary adaptation, but also a pointless drama that borrows emotional weight from the real history of one of humanity’s darkest hours, All the Light We Cannot See is doubly disappointing.” The Wall Street Journal says the that “the core malfunction” of the series is the fault of the writer and director “Messrs. Knight and Levy, with the collaboration of their cast, having made a story populated not by people of the 1940s, but by people from a movie of the 1940s.”
The book-to-movie transition is fraught with pitfalls and frequently, as above, suffers the slings and arrows of critics who are unhappy with the result. In this case, the criticism of the series has been as abysmal as the reviews for the book were laudatory.
I don’t happen to think that the fault the critics are decrying lies wholly with the media stars who brought the book to the small screen, nor with the actors (who deliver, at best, made-for-TV performances) — but with the mundanity of the book itself. For, while most of the critics went gaga for this saga — and certainly the book sales were out of this world — there were dissenters who thought the book wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
William T. Vollmann, in his review in the New York Times, noted the plot line that Doerr uses “could have been a profound parable: The blind transmitter, heroine, lawbreaker and potential martyr meets the ever-listening receiver, who has lost sight of his own principles.” But alas, the novel’s inherent silliness, like that of Raiders of the Lost Ark, precluded it from being serious literature. A review in The Guardian pointed out that one of the weaknesses with the book was that it has “many aspects of genre fiction despite the huge amount of research that has gone into it,” (Doerr spent ten years researching and writing it) and, “There is a worrying even-handedness in Doerr’s treatment of the Germans and the French.” Writing in The New Republic Dominic Green noted that Doerr’s novel “is an unsavory mixture of ‘relativizing’ and ‘aestheticizing.’ As a relativizer, he presents all violence, Nazi or Allied, as equivalent: the product of amoral, deterministic forces.” And, as an aestheticizer, “Doerr admires the shiny boots and tailored uniforms” of the Nazis. Moreover, there is “little depth to his reflections.” Worse, perhaps, is what Green has to say about the prose itself, characterizing it, not as lyrical, but as “pompous, pretentious, and imprecise. Every noun is escorted by an adjective of reliable but uninspiring quality. Eyes are “wounded.” Brown hair is “mousy.”
My contention is that these dissenters are onto something, and that something is that the book is far less than it was ginned up to be, and this has now become apparent in the Netflix series. With the above observations in mind, I revisited the book. A not-so-quick summary/review follows below. The scenes discussed are taken from the novel since the series doesn’t religiously follow the book, and there are some spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book or watched the series you may want to wait until you do — or not.
The main story line in All the Light We Cannot See (there is a distracting, dead-end subplot) involves the wartime adventures and brief uncanny meeting between Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French blind girl who works for the Resistance delivering coded messages over the radio, and Werner Pfenning, a German orphan, a Nazi whose knowledge of radios enables him to pinpoint the source of allied radio broadcasts.
The action occurs during the time period surrounding World War II. Each short chapter of the book (some no more than a paragraph or two, others as long as a page or two: “annoying fragments, for no good narrative reason” as an NPR reviewer noted) is linked to the episodic narrative that unrolls in parallel in Germany and in France to create suspense and to keep the reader turning the page. Each chapter carries a portentous, titillating title, eg, He Is Not Coming Back, Everything Poisoned, Sixth Floor Bedroom, The Stone, Weakest. You get the point.
When the Germans invade France Marie-Laure and her father escape Paris and travel to the ancient, seaside town of Saint-Malo. They take refuge with Marie-Laure’s uncle Etienne. Hidden in the attic of his house are radios: in fact, we soon learn that the radio transmissions that Werner fell in love with as a child in Germany were broadcast by Marie-Laure’s grandfather from this very house.
Sometime after their arrival in Saint-Malo Marie-Laure’s father is called back to Paris, but he never makes it there and is subsequently, mysteriously, imprisoned. Etienne takes up the cause of the Free French as the Germans tighten their grip on Saint-Malo. He begins to use the one radio that has not been surrendered to the Nazis to send out transmissions for the French Resistance. Marie-Laure does her part for the resistance, too, delivering the coded messages that are baked into loaves of bread to her uncle. Eventually Etienne is also imprisoned and Marie-Laure is left to carry on the broadcasts alone.
While Marie-Laure spent her early youth in Paris, over in Germany, thanks to his ability to fix and build radios, Werner attended a Hitler Youth school. His schooling saves him both from working in the coal mines, and from being sent to the Russian front to fight, but he had to become a Nazi. Doerr illustrates his successful indoctrination in a cliched but (I suppose) effective example: On a freezing cold morning in the quadrangle the boys are shown a nearly naked man cuffed to a stake. He is a degenerate their commander says and demands each boy to douse him with a bucket of cold water. The boys follow orders and cheer when he collapses and is near death. Werner throws his water on the dying man like the others. His friend Frederick refuses. He pours the water on the ground. Given another bucket, he says “I will not.” Werner — his only friend — does nothing to help save Frederick, who becomes, in the eyes of the other boys, a degenerate and is subsequently beaten so badly by them that he is sent away for an operation and never returns.
After school, Werner travels through German occupied territories with a team of killers in search of radio transmissions from resisters. They mercilessly liquidate the broadcasters when they find them. While Werner senses something maybe awry with the way his life is turning out, he is unable to articulate what it is: “He is being loyal. He is being what everyone agrees is good. And yet every time he wakes and buttons his tunic, he feels he is betraying something.” He feels he is betraying something, and even though it should be quite obvious what it is, he remains as hapless a fool as Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones in Ballad of a Thin Man: “But something is happening and you don't know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”
Eventually the team is called to Saint-Malo to locate the transmissions aiding the local resistance groups. Werner is charged with finding the house sending out the broadcasts. It doesn’t take him long, but upon hearing “the tenor of the voice matching in every respect the broadcasts of the Frenchman he used to hear, and then a piano,” he immediately understands that the broadcasts are the same as those from years ago that he loved listening to as a child, the ones that used to carry the professor’s voice (Marie-Laure’s grandfather) that intoned: “the most important light in the world is the light you cannot see.” He locates the house but he does not reveal the location to his superior.
The climactic scene of the book occurs when for one brief moment the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner crisscross, and this time, unlike his ongoing indifference to evil, Werner does something good. One might think at this juncture Werner would muster up some self-reflection about his life. Compare, for example, his former past indifference and passivity to his present action. And yet, all Doerr tells us about Werner’s state of mind in this highly charged situation is this: “It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.” This laughable banality tells us only what we already know about every situation: there is what we know, and there is what we don’t know. Statements of this type are tautologies, which give us no knowledge about the world…and not a hint about what Werner is thinking or feeling … if he is thinking or feeling anything.
Doerr is a “craft” writer1, one who focuses on style over substance. His pyrotechnic prose creates scenes of beauty. His perfect sentences rush along hurrying readers from one section to another. But despite his technical descriptive prowess, Doerr fails to get us to the heart of our two main protagonists. They never become “round” characters, in E. M. Forster’s sense of being complex and deep and showing an “incalculability of life.” In a highly mimetic novel, they never become real. His tight third-person narration keeps everyone in this story (particularly Werner and Marie-Laure) at such a remove that it seems as if we’re seeing them through the wrong end of a telescope: so small and so far away, they appear insignificant to the action … and hard to care about.
The great failure of this behemoth of a book is that it lacks a moral imagination as exemplified by the characters who have no inner life and are as flat and devoid of interiority as shadows on the ground. Substituting action for reflection, Doerr manages to manipulate them so that this lack of an inner life, or even a hint of self-consciousness—or rumination of any kind—goes unnoticed. Echoing his friend Frederick’s refusal to throw water on the dying man, Werner’s spontaneous decision not to carry out his orders does not redeem his previous heinous crimes or show evidence of a change of heart. Werner’s good deed is driven by the plot not by his character having been altered through ongoing reflection and a growing self-awareness of what he is doing. Which is to say, the structure of the story simply demands he save Marie-Laure, the plot itself is responsible for his deviation from his normal course of mindlessly following orders. And that is what makes Doerr’s enterprise empty.
In one of the penultimate chapters, when Werner struggles to think (and this is giving him more credit than he’s due) about his life, this is what Doerr writes: “There is something to be angry at, Werner is sure, but he cannot say what it is.” Really? After more than 500 pages of rollicking world-changing events and death and destruction and Werner can’t even venture a guess at what he should be mad at — if mad is even the right word. Which I would submit it is not. Perhaps something more along the lines of sad, or filled with regret, or shame, or guilt. Incapable of comprehending what his life is, Werner draws no lessons from it. His unexamined life and lack of self-awareness makes Werner a character without character — as are all the other actors on Doerr’s stage.
An unacknowledged2 forbear of All the Light — particularly of Werner — is the protagonist of Louis Malle’s extraordinary, haunting 1974 film of World War II France, Lacombe, Lucien (the screenplay co-written by Patrick Mondiano, the French author and 2014 Nobel Prize winner). Lucien, the film’s eponymous main character, tries to join the French resistance, but they won’t take him. So instead, he collaborates with the Gestapo. Like Werner, he helps hunt down members of the French resistance. He watches with indifference as the resistance fighters he turned in are tortured in his presence, just as Werner stands by while members of his Nazi team liquidate the broadcasters he has located with his radio. Lucian falls in love with a Jewish girl and his feelings for the girl puts him in an untenable, paradoxical position that leads to the film’s tragic conclusion. If you want to watch a film that actually opens a portal to the heart of darkness (and the moral decisions demanded by individuals) that was wartime France under the German occupation, this is one of them.
All the Light We Cannot See is not a bildungsroman. Nor is it a novel of ideas, nor is it a psychological study, or even, as some critics claim, a meditation on good and evil. That the Netflix film series “is particularly flimsy, shallowly skimming each character’s surface and failing to meaningfully address the big moral questions” should come as no surprise since the book shares the same defects. The high-end production values and sometimes lush (but unexceptional) cinematography in the TV series rush you along from one scene to the next the same way the novel’s lapidary prose does, but nothing can fill the hollowness at the core of this novel. Why All the Light We Cannot See was awarded the Pulitzer remains a mystery.
For a more in-depth analysis of the deleterious effects of craftism see my On the Cult of Craftism in which I also discuss Doerr’s work, some parts of which appears in this essay.
In his acknowledgments Doerr mentions a debt to Michel Tournier’s The Orgre. The two books have little in common except their wartime setting. In fact, in contradistinction to All the Light, Tournier’s novel (mostly set in Germany) is an exceedingly dense allegory, or meditation, on good and evil and innocence. The protagonist, Abel Tiffauges (who may be an idiot savant and who has, perhaps, something in common with the perversions of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and the innocence of Prince Myshkin) possesses a deep interior life that is immensely complicated and for the most part illegible. The Orgre is a novel of deep introspection, a psychological and ontological investigation into a state of mind, not an empty page turner like All the Light.