(That really is St. Malo, a graceful town in Brittany composed of ramparts and tall stone houses and filled with ancient enmity for English invaders. It is the place of refuge for a locksmith from the National Museum in Paris against the ravages of the Nazi Occupation).

So, I had planned on going down to the farm yesterday, and curling up in front of the cast iron stove and doing some reading. Book group is coming up, you know, and I like to mind my deadlines. But it rained all day, and the radio warned that we might get a wintry mix, and it was generally vile. So I stayed put, and lost myself in this month’s selection.

This morning I rose virtuous in my achievement, and was looking around for some perspective on what I had just so powerfully experienced. Good literature is like that, and I wish I had the knack for it.

Some guy named Bill Vollman wrote a snide review that was published two years ago in May in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section. I am glad I didn’t read it until I had finished the reading assignment. It irritated me first thing this morning as I tried to capture my thoughts about Anthony Doerr’s massive novel of World War Two. “All the light We Cannot See” was a thundering and lyrical view of a side of that conflict that professional practitioners of war don’t see.

So maybe that is why Vollman’s pissy tone hacked me off. I invested the time, Doerr captured my interest, I fell deep into his characters and words, and was captured instantly by the lithe beauty of the blind Marie-Laure and the casual brutality of the Reich in which her opposite number Werner grows to young manhood.

Werner is an electrical prodigy – he can create radios from scrap, and uses them to escape an orphan’s fate in the coalmines of industrial Germany. But his salvation from the one evil casts him into a greater one, as he is selected for training in an elite Hitler Jugend academy where his only friend is beaten-literally- to a pulp.

That is about as much spoiling as I want to get into this morning. You are going to want to read this book if you like magnificent story telling, sharp poignant style, and a sense of the surreal nature of war itself. It isn’t so much about battle, per se, but about what the consequences of it are the humans who must endure the ravages and privations of armed struggle.

I could as easily have called this review “Triangulation,” since that is what Werner is about. That, and the electromagnetic spectrum that is mostly invisible to our sight. Oh, and Marie-Laure is blind, did I mention it? Her Papa created miniature cityscapes to help her navigate, a poignant plot device that is entirely plausible, as is her ability to walk independently, tapping her white cane to find the storm drains she uses as navigation aids.

Marie-Laure is unquestionably the most vivid character in the tale, though the host of others are sharply limned, from the bakery owner who provide the “ordinary loaves” with the coded messages baked within, and the monster treasure hunter stalking the crown jewel- it is a crown jewel- that falls to Marie-Laure to protect after her locksmith father is arrested and sent to slave labor in the Fatherland based on the erroneous tip of a collaborator.

You can feel the seething resentment against those opportunistic bastards, selling out their own.

Young Werner has a special gift that grows as he and his sister Jutta grow in the orphanage near the mine-pit that killed his father. He can see numbers in his head, and calculate the angles. Working with an instructor at the training camp, he helps devise a system of two radio receivers that can provide the vectors to a transmitter. No particular evil in that, is there? That was a major tool in my professional tool-kit, and HF-DF is part of the lifeblood of tracking mobile targets at sea.

Mostly we used the information derived from a global set of receivers for informational purposes. But of course we would also use the data to kill, if that is what we needed to do. And as things develop for Werner, that is what the Fuhrer needs him to do on the Ost Front against Ukrainian and Russian partisans behind German lines, whose electronic tradecraft is sorely lacking.

As the narrative dances back and forth in time, the war that started with such triumphs is not going well for the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party and Werner’s services are needed on the Atlantic Wall as the Allies prepare to land their troops from the greatest armada ever assembled in May of 1944, and the warriors are mostly invisible to the characters who resist or oppress. But in the sound of the bombers above, I can hear, like Marie-Laure our Uncle Dick and his crew on the B-17 Buzzin’ Betsy, bombing targets deemed significant by the Air Intelligence Officers along the coast that Marie-Laure loves but cannot see.

Lyrical descriptions? Doerr throws them up in spades. The Museum of Natural History, where the little girl spends her days with Papa, the locksmith. The account of fleeing their carefully-ordered home ahead of Panzers, sleeping in fields. The sunflowers of the steppes of Russia, concealing the agents of murder. beach at St. Malo, and the grotto where the snails thrive in the cool damp darkness open to the seas beneath the mighty ramparts.

Read the book. I am not going to spoil any of the rest of it for you, or make it any easier for Marty Lee, if she doesn’t get around to reading the assignment and just wants to drink wine at the meeting next week.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com