Evil Is in the Doing

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.  Scribner.  530 pp. $17.00 *****

All the Light We Cannot See is so unusual a novel that it’s hard to know how to write about it.  Compounding my difficulties is the fact that it’s been a couple of weeks since I finished it, but events (mostly basketball games) have conspired to keep me from writing.  But I was completely entranced the whole time I was reading, even more impressed when I finished.

The novel alternates chapters about two people who are caught up in the events of World War II, a blind girl whose father works at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and a German boy who becomes fascinated with radios and has an uncanny knack for fixing them.  At first these characters seem to have nothing to do with one another, and we don’t understand why the chapters alternate.  Eventually we understand that their lives will converge, and converge they do, toward the end of the novel.  There was a chance to make that meeting overly coincidental or incredibly schmaltzy.  There were all kinds of opportunities to ruin the novel, or at least diminish it.  That Anthony Doerr was able to avoid those pitfalls, and write about an encounter that was plausible and even likely, deeply impressed me.  These two people touch each other’s lives, and that touch reverberates far into the future.  But the story doesn’t make too much of that.  It finds exactly the right touch.

Werner Pfennig, the German boy in question, is the only Nazi I’ve ever encountered in a story who seems largely blameless.  He’s only interested in radios, and it’s because of his extraordinary ability that the authorities notice him at all.  People treat him abominably (in fact, there’s a kind of training school for young Nazis that is horrifying to read about; not since A Tale for the Time Being[1] have I been so disturbed by an account of soldiers being trained), and if he has a failing it’s that he’s naïve; for a period of time he doesn’t see what he, and others around him, are doing.  Such naiveté is not an excuse; his sister clearly sees what’s happening, and tries to warn him off.  But he’s the proverbial scientist or technician who just wants to practice his craft; he has no intention of doing evil with it.

I was simultaneously reading Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom, Kosho Uchiyama’s commentary on several fascicles by Eihei Dogen, including Shoaku Makusa, which might be translated as Refraining from Evil.  Dogen lets us see that nothing and nobody is inherently good or evil; situations are good or evil because of what people do.  Werner does perform evil in his life, but finds a way to turn away from it at the end, and in a way redeems himself.  He’s not an evil person—Dogen would say there is no such thing—but he has inadvertently performed evil.

One thing I clearly saw in this book—and in that way it seemed a religious novel, though Doerr sees his outlook as scientific—is the way that all our lives touch each other, in ways we don’t begin to suspect.  That is a Buddhist teaching, and the author clearly illustrates it, though he makes no reference to Buddhism and seems to have no interest in it.  I was also struck by the fact that a lot of suffering in people’s lives has to do with when and where they were born, apart from anything they might have done.  To live in Europe during the years of World War II was to suffer, in ways that many of us today can hardly imagine.  People didn’t do anything to deserve suffering; they were just alive in that time and place.

I felt in awe of the novelist who conceived of this story, and this method of presenting it.  Supposedly the book was ten years in the making, and one can only wonder at the confidence that Doerr must have had to construct this story so methodically.  All the Light We Cannot See is a religious novel whether it wants to be or not.  It’s religious because it examines questions at the deepest part of our experience, illumining things without being obvious and letting us draw our own conclusions.

[1] Another magnificent novel