When his novel All The Light We Cannot See was published, Anthony Doerr established himself as a master of the non-linear narrative. His newest release, Cloud Cuckoo Land, showcases the exact same type of mastery, but with higher stakes this time—five characters, five complex points of view. To alternate between two characters sets the bookshelf bar high enough, but to take the thread of a story and weave it between multiple protagonists whose lives are spread out across thousands of years is an astounding feat.
In Cloud Cuckoo Land, it is a story-within-a-story that draws the characters together—an ancient play titled “Cloud Cuckoo Land” about Aethon, a restless shepherd who sets out on a journey to find a legendary utopia in the clouds. Anna and Omeir, two adolescents on opposite sides of the disastrous siege of Constantinople in the 15th century; Zeno and Seymour, an old and young man sharing a library space in a present-day small town; and Konstance, a space traveler fleeing a dying Earth many years into the future, are all touched by this transformative text and interact with it in different ways.
Despite their separation by many years of time and many miles of space, these characters share something admirable: they are surviving through times of crisis, peril, and profound uncertainty about the future. From besieged Constantinople to overdeveloped Lakeport, Idaho to a spaceship whose youngest occupants have never seen our planet, various crises—war, famine, loneliness, environmental destruction, death—shape the most formative years of the characters’ lives. However, just like the shepherd Aethon in “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” they possess a hunger to rewrite the endings that are being forced upon them. This makes each of them—even troubled Seymour, who aims to blow up a public space in order to draw public attention to a militant environmentalist cause—easy to support.
The central concept around which their stories revolve is not merely self-preservation, but the dire importance of preserving stories in a world that so easily destroys them. As the threat of war looms over the walls of Constantinople, a merchant tells Anna,
“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills”
p. 172
In such fragile environments as the ones the characters are trapped in, stories—the cherished repositories of cross-generational memories and ideas—must be protected at all costs. As “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is translated and read aloud by different people at various points throughout the novel, it adds pops of color and warmth to their graying, collapsing lives. Zeno, who embarks on an ambitious translation of the text thousands of years after it was first written, considers the translation work to be a spiritual experience: “it looks magical,” he thinks, “the Greek characters seeming to glow somewhere deep beneath the page…not so much handwriting as the specter of it” (474). How telling that the five characters at the center of Doerr’s masterpiece satisfy their relentless desire for a better life not by facing toward the future, but by turning to a textual relic of the past and the treasure trove of knowledge it contains. Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, Konstance, and the shepherd at the center of the ancient play all recognize that to share a story is to save the world.
“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.”
P. 51
Touching and uplifting, Cloud Cuckoo Land draws our attention to the enduring power of the written and spoken word and the profound dangers of erasure. A story can shatter the barriers of space and time and lift people out of crises, but if not preserved correctly, it can fade into oblivion. Doerr does an outstanding job replicating the sacred transfer of a story from page to mind to word of mouth. The characters’ fragmented thoughts and memories blend seamlessly with snippets of text from the play, reflecting the potential for a person to learn and evolve with the aid of a powerful piece of literature. If a single ancient text can touch the lives of so many people in Doerr’s world, what are our beloved books, essays, myths, and legends doing for us?
