There’s no book in 2021 like Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner) by Anthony Doerr. The 623-page novel spans centuries, and, for transportation fans, has a spaceship headed for a distant planet, envoys on horseback, oxen pulling a cannon to invade Constantinople, Army tanks, cars, buses, trucks, and planes. It examines the effects of climate change on the environment and the consequences of development of paved roads on wildlife.
As with all of Doerr’s books, the characters are beautifully described, the story is mesmerizing, and the carefully-crafted tapestry of themes pulls characters and time periods together into an incandescent whole—tempting the reader to start over as soon as the book is finished.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is Doerr’s first book since All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer Prize-winner set in Saint Malo, France, during World War II. Published in 2014, All the Light sold 15 million copies and Netflix is making it into a movie series. Doerr has also written two volumes of short stories, The Shell Collector (2002) and Memory Wall (2010); a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome (2007); and another novel, About Grace (2004).
Cloud Cuckoo Land is “intended as a paean to books,” according to Doerr, and is dedicated to librarians. It features a small public library in the fictional town of Lakeport, Idaho (based on McCall, Idaho), a collection of books in Umbria, Italy, and a library with almost every book ever written in the metaverse of the spaceship Argo. It focuses on the fragility of books and the fragility of the planet.
The book, with 400 short chapters and over 100 characters, follows five story lines at the same time, and (fair warning) the reader has to concentrate to keep them all straight. But the effort is well worth it.
The story within the story is an 1,800-year-old invented old Greek tale, called Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Antonius Diogenes, loosely based on the donkey in The Golden Ass, by Apuleius. The term “Cloud Cuckoo Land” was invented by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes 2,400 years ago in his play, The Birds, and has come to mean a fanciful utopia.
The shepherd Aethon in Doerr’s Greek story is searching for a better life, and wants to turn himself into a bird. But, by mistake he turns himself into a donkey, and spends most of the story trying to return to what he was. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, the ancient Greek text managed to survive through a series of coincidences, linking the past with future.
The book begins with Konstance, traveling in spacecraft named Argos with her parents in the 22nd century to a distant planet, BetaOph2, to escape pollution, droughts, and wildfires on Planet Earth. In the 15th century readers meet Anna, an orphan in Constantinople, and Omeir, a boy with a cleft palate in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria. In the 20th century, living in Lakeport, are Seymour and Zeno (named for Zenodotus, first librarian of Alexandria), as well as some wonderful librarians.
The five main characters all find the Greek story when they need it most, and all have a relationship with a librarian or with a curator of books. Konstance discovers the virtual library in the spaceship; Anna is illicitly learning to read Greek and finds Italians from Umbria who collect old books; Omeir learns the value of books from Anna: and the Lakeport librarians befriend Zeno and Seymour.
In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has selected places where new technology is disrupting the status quo. The Ottomans destroy the longstanding walls of Constantinople with cannons. In Idaho, the Internet causes militants to be able to radicalize teens. Those of us interested in transportation are always looking out for these disruptions.
Why read novels at all? Doerr, in an interview last month with Pen America, gives one reason,
“Books, for me, have always been a way to slip out of the confines of my own boring, white, bald-man life. . . The library was like this place just full of portals to other worlds, and other lives, and other times. So in many ways this book Cloud Cuckoo Land is kind of a tribute to that, that books allow us to slip out of the walls—the proverbial walls or the metaphorical walls—of our own lives.”
Just as with Aethon, all the characters in the book are searching for better lives, but find happiness in unexpected places. Konstance’s father volunteered to join the space crew and leave Earth but regrets his decision. Anna wants a life with books; Seymour wants somewhere quiet. Omeir’s and Zeno’s adventures cause them to appreciate the small pleasures of domestic life. In the end, the message of the book is that we can find happiness at home rather than in Cloud Cuckoo Land—a good message to take into 2022.
