Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerrt

Ever since I read All the Lights We Cannot See  Anthony Doerr is a favourite author. Such captivating story. I have also read his About Grace which I liked very much. It was with much anticipation I opened his latest story. It is quite different from his other books and a much more ambitious story. Set in three different time frames and through the eyes of five young people, he tells a story of our common history through an ancient codex, and our attitude towards it. 

"Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: thirteen-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress  and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldes stories to guide her community in peril. 

Doerr has created a tapestry of times and places that reflects our own vast interconnectedness - with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us and those who will be here after we're gone. Dedicated to 'the librarians, then, now, and in the years to come', Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship - of the book, or the Earth, of the human heart."

It is not an easy read. It is a rather big book (at least my copy) with over 600 pages of condensed text. This is not a book you can easily skim over the pages. Each page is important in the stories he tells us. It took me 2-3 weeks to read it, and then I read a little bit every day. While reading I was not sure what I thought about the book. Although the stories about the five youngsters are captivating, I had no idea where he was going. We follow all of them until the end of their lives, except Konstance who is our voice from the future. 

15th century - Constantinople

Anna lives in Konstantinopel in a house where she also works as a seamstress. She is not as good at it as her sister, and she always ventures out of the house to find something more interesting. By chance she meets a learned man whose fortunes have abandoned him. He teaches her to read which changes her life. Himerius is a petty thieve who blackmails her to, literally, crawl into an old monastery and steal books. It is here she encounters the codex, or ancient text, that is the theme of the book. She keeps it for herself, instead of selling it to the customers, and it is guiding her life.

Omeir - "Two hundred miles northwest of Constantinople, in a little woodcutters' village beside a quick, violent river, a boy is born almost whole. He has wet eyes, pink cheeks, and plenty of spring in his legs. But on the left side of his mouth, a split divides his upper lip from his gum all the way to the base of his nose." His life could have been a very sad one, but his grandfather takes care of him and teaches him about nature and animals. He has an extra gift to understand animals. One day in his teens the sultan's soldiers pass by and when seeing his skill with animals, brings with them the family's oxen and Omeir. They are on the way to conquer Constantinople.  

Mid 20th century to present day US

Zeno grows up with his father, but becomes and orphan when his father is killed in the war. He continues to live with his father's friend who takes care of him. He is somewhat lost in the world, not knowing what he wants to do. He goes to fight in the Korean War, and there, under the harsh conditions of a prison camp, he meets Rex Browning, an English grammar school teacher. They become good friends and Zeno falls in love with him. Browning teaches him Greek and this will change his life. 

Seymour is living with his mother under harsh conditions. The mother has several jobs to be able to support them. She inherits a house in a small community, next to a forrest, or big park. Seymour suffers from some kind of ADHD condition and keeps to himself. He makes himself comfortable in the park and befriends an owl, whom he names Trustyfriend. When a company exploits the park to build holiday homes, Trustyfriend dies and Seymour's whole world goes to pieces. 

Future

Konstance is a girl who has lived all her life on a spaceship with her mother and father. Sybil is the all present computerised overseer in the ship, and the lives of the people aboard. Konstance likes to go to the library, is interested in history and from time to time she goes on a 'tour' in the past. All is well until one day a pandemic hits the spaceship. Nobody understands how this could happen since they all live in the spaceship without any influences from outside. Her father takes her to a sort of emergency room where she has to isolate until it is safe to go out again. She is the only survivor of the ship, and her only contact is Sybil, and to do something of her time, she investigates the library and find an old codex. She also remember some names and places her father told her about, in their former life, and with the virtual travel machine she goes back in time.

""Today, he says, they will work on μῦθος, mýthos, which means a conversation or something said, but also a tale or a story, a legend from the time of the old gods, and he is explaining how it's a delicate, mutable word, that it can suggest something false and true at the same time, when his attention frays.

The wind lifts one of the quires from his fingers and Anna chases it down and brushes it off and returns it to his lap. Licinius rests his eyelids a long time. "Repository," he finally says, "you know hit word? A resting place. A text - a book - is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.""

Having recently read Maja Lunde's two first books in her Climate Quartet, The History of Bees, and The End of the Ocean, I somehow feels that Doerr wants to tell us something about our planet and the perils it suffers now. It is not a very clear line, but it lingers underneath. And, like Lunde, he does give us some hope in the end. 

The story lines are fascinating, all in themselves. You can't help loving the characters and feel with them while they try to sort out, or fight for their lives. As one can imagine, the two characters from each time line connects at a certain point. Doerr builds up the stories, not always in a chronological order, which from time to time is a little bit confusing. It was not clear, to me at least, where he wanted to take his characters. Of course, Doerr is so skilled in sketching his tale, and makes the three story lines come perfectly together in the end. I could not see the twist coming, but finishing the novel made perfect sense. 

As I mentioned above, it is not an easy book to read. The going back and forth of the stories makes for a little bit of confusing. The language is beautiful, the characters well drawn and, for a bibliophile and history fan like me, the underlying theme of an old codex, that travels through time is a winner. I must admit though that I did not know what to think about the book until I had finished it. Maybe this is a good benchmark for an extraordinary book? The stories have stayed with me, and I often think about the characters, and I guess this is also a sign of a good book.