"What the war did to dreamers."
^Essentially the whole plot of this novel.
This is a good book. But I must admit I was disappointed by it.
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To be honest, I really have a feeling that I'm going to manage to blurt some spoilers in this review so if you wish to remain unspoiled, don't read beyond this point!
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆
I really like the way that Doerr frequently drew attention to the idea that a million different things are happening to different people at exactly the same moment in time. I felt that he really enjoys writing about chance and probabilities and the fact that our actions can affect people more than we may think. I really enjoyed this part of the story.
However, I felt that the rest of the book was simply mediocre. That includes storytelling, plot and characters.
Where was the dialogue?? I kept noticing a distinct lack of dialogue for long stretches of the novel. To me, dialogue is a very, VERY important part of storytelling. It's what fully characterises your characters. It's what draws your readers in, makes them relate to the people in your novel. And it's very difficult to get right.
In All The Light We Cannot See, Doerr quite often doesn't bother with dialogue. His main characters don't often say much at all, and for this reason I found it hard to like them.
Next: Descriptions. They were too long and uninteresting, to put it bluntly. Why did he spend so long describing the quality of the pavement rather than giving his characters a personality? Don't get me wrong, sometimes the descriptions were beautiful. But mostly, they were a turn-off for me.
Okay here's my final rant: the ending. What was with that ending?!?! I was very dissatisfied with this ending. Maybe that's just me - after all, I am a real lover of happy endings. Or at least, if I'm going to read something sad, I'd like to feel emotional enough about it that I shed a tear or two? I was pretty unmoved by this book. The overwhelming feeling was only Frustration ("I've pushed myself through 530 pages of descriptions and that was the ending??")
I read because I want something that is going to distract me from the real world. Something that's going to excite me, or thrill me, or teach me something. Sometimes I read a book and get a new perspective on life. Sometimes I read a book and there's no particular philosophical point to it, but the story was interesting enough to have gripped me for a few days.
This book has left me feeling... kind of bored, kind of frustrated, kind of disappointed. I honestly don't think I've learnt much; all that stuff about radios and science and snails was so in depth I haven't actually remembered any of it.
But there was an interesting side to the war that I haven't read about before. The nazi school was interesting. The occupation of France and how it affected the normal people. The way the war played with people's consciences and thoughts and left them emotionally wrecked.
It is a good book. Just not a particularly great book.