Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land. Scribner, New York, 2021. F; 5/24.

I’m afraid I’m slowing down a bit. It’s taken me a couple of months to write about this quite lovely book. Or are things around me speeding up? This novel hints at that second question: it’s complicated and spans about 2500 years eventually telling a story of a story (of a story). Don’t let the goofy title put you off. I loved Doerr’s All the Light we Cannot See.  This one has similarities to it but it’s more abstract, more literary, and in ways a lot more modern. It did get me thinking about what I’m really after reading fiction which I know intuitively but find hard to describe.

Greek philosopher Diogenes was a polymath. As well as founding what came to be known as cynicism, he wrote fiction. And this story traces the history of a book he never wrote, allegedly created to amuse a dying young girl.

I am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you’ll never believe a word of it—and yet, it’s true. For I, the one they called birdbrain and nincompoop—yes, I, dull-witted muttonheaded lamebrained Aethon—once traveled all the way to the edge of the earth and beyond…

…its narrator tells us. With that I felt the pull of Doerr’s charm, humility, and creative reach.

Diogenes’s physical book containing his story surfaces in the 15^th century where young seamstress Anne is taught a bit of Greek. She finds her way through an old nearly-destroyed and barely-accessible library to a manuscript that has some mysterious value. She escapes from Constantinople as it is historically captured by Sultan Mehmed’s Ottoman army and connects with young Omeir, who is also escaping (but from the conquering army) who “prays that (people’s) eyes will not meet his, that if something goes wrong they will not blame the defect in his face.” He has a cleft lip.

Meanwhile autistic teenager Seymour in something like the present is convinced by a partially imaginary girlfriend to join radical activists and bomb the local library where by coincidence a bunch of kids directed by Korean War veteran Zeno Ninis (who has come by the titular story and translated the parts of it that survive) are conducting the dress rehearsal of a play of that same story. There is a good TV-series climactic scene involving Zeno and that bomb.

But credibility is stretched (mine anyway) when we are introduced to 14-year-old Konstance born on the Argos, an earth spaceship on a multi-century journey to a presumably habitable exoplanet. Curious Konstance unknowingly exemplifies Diogenes by questioning the wisdom of Sybil, the ship’s repository of everything to do with Earth:

… the entire world: a thousand variations of recipes for macaroni and cheese, the record of four thousand years of temperatures of the Arctic Sea, Confucian literature and Beethoven’s symphonies and the genomes of the trilobites—the heritage of all humanity, the citadel, the ark, the womb, everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need.

Konstance through an onboard “atlas” (which is the old Earth as a simulacrum of Google Maps) discovers a blue-covered book (guess what) on her father’s bedside table decades earlier, but there is no such book in the Argos library.

Zeno reconnects with fellow Korean war prisoner Rex with whom he shares academic interest in old manuscripts but also has a gay unrequited romance. As he visits Rex he finds him already partnered with Hilary, “a six-foot-six man with prematurely silver hair and apricot-colored pants that flare at the calf” and Zeno with his “cardboard suitcase, his all-wrong suit, his lumberjack boots, his Idaho manners, his misconceived hope that Rex invited him here because he wanted something romantic from him” leaves the city where they have visited together:

(getting) out of the car, suitcase in his right hand, books under his left arm, something inside him (regret) thrusting to and fro like a spearman, pulverizing bone, destroying vital tissue. Rex leans over and puts out his right hand and Zeno squeezes it with his left, as awkward a handshake as there’s ever been. Then the little car is swallowed by traffic.

Seymour’s autism is all too human also:

(he) stops taking the buspirone. For several days his body crashes. Then it wakes up. Sensations roar back; his mind feels as if it becomes the huge, curved mirror of a radar telescope, gathering light from the farthest corners of the universe. Every time he steps outside, he can hear the clouds grinding through the sky.

In 15^th century Constantinople Anne takes risks with a young helper to explore the old library. Her disorder and fear is baited with poetry:

Every now and then the boy leans forward and uses a widemouthed jug to bail water from between his bare feet. Behind them the great towers of the Portus Palatii are lost in the fog and there is only the faraway boom of surf against rocks and the knocking of the oars against the boat and her simultaneous terror and exhilaration.

Reading all this I wasn’t sure whether it was the almost ironically contrived main book/library metaphor, or the vital offbeat characters Mr. Doerr packs with credible life that caught and held my excited interest. Or both. Whatever, I loved it and didn’t want to put it down. Of course us addicted to fiction are bookish and librarical (new word) down to our socks. So we can’t resist the turning and twisting of a wonderful made-up story both through history and in our imaginations as a representation of something truly grand. It survived! And not only that, this story of that story is so charming we can feel its life.

Still. Somehow I don’t embrace Cuckoo Land with quite the same enthusiasm I feel for Nabokov, David Wallace, McCarthy, or certain short stories by Sam Shepard and Alice Munro and I’m not sure why. Maybe I find the book metaphor too pat. The old obscure book is not only alive, we are invited to see it as a representation of life itself. It’s supposed to be the key that makes a Google Maps’ static reality real. Our experience transcends the imaginary spaceship that contains the whole world. The big deal is that inanimate representations of everything are only alive through a wonderful story.

But for me as best I can express it the most important stories aren’t about any such thing. They jump over ideas and unlock my mind so something real flies in. Characters do things and plot events happen but suddenly that something entirely else is going on. What I’m reading makes a difference, makes me different. I have no clue why or how.

Cuckoo Land is wonderful and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It’s as good as anything I’ve read lately except my magic ten or so favourites.

9.4/9.5