Tag Archives: Anthony Doerr

The resilience of libraries

Libraries, , , ,

In recent weeks, Russian barbarity has damaged or destroyed many libraries in Ukraine — along with hospitals, schools, universities, and residential areas. But the librarians of this battered nation have risen to the challenge. Libraries that are still standing are “buzzing like hives” day and night, according to the President of the Ukrainian Library Association.

Barricades protect Ukraine’s National Parliamentary Library. (Source: IFLA)

Some have become neighbourhood bomb shelters or field hospitals. Some have organised practical support for military defence, such as weaving camouflage nets. As far as possible, all are continuing and even extending their traditional functions. They are not only providing reading material for the families sheltering in libraries but also packaging books for transfer to adjacent countries where huge numbers of Ukrainian refugees are now arriving. And a particular focus is on actively countering the disinformation that runs rife in times like these.

The resilience of libraries in Ukraine is the latest episode in a long and fascinating story of devotion to civilised values by the keepers of institutionalised literary knowledge in the face of formidable challenges.

I’ve just finished reading two books that remind me how extraordinarily durable and adaptable, over many centuries, book-centred establishments of one kind or another have been. The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, traces permutations of this cultural phenomenon from ancient times to the present day. Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr, is an inventive work of fiction written (as the author puts it in an appendix) “to show how a book survives through time, both because of human technologies and because of human stewards.” In their different ways these two substantial volumes (over 500 pages each) are inspiring tributes to the ideals that libraries exist to cherish.

Pettegree and Weduwen record in great detail the long development of the library from ancient collections of clay tablets and papyrus scrolls to parchment codices, from small hoards of unique manuscripts to huge assemblages of printed books … and so on, through countless vicissitudes, up to the emergence of public libraries in the 19th century and our 21st-century information hubs dominated by digitally disseminated texts.

As this comprehensive chronicle’s subtitle emphasises, the ability of book repositories to survive has always been fragile: they have often faced the ravages of natural events — from insidious incursions of mould, rot and vermin to sudden accidental disasters like fires, floods and earthquakes — as well as the depredations of thieves, plunderers, censors (political or religious), book burners and warmongers.

The library of Holland House, London, after a bombing raid in 1940. (Source: UK Gov’t)

The two 20th-century world wars devastated countless European public collections across Europe. Priceless literary treasures were lost — bombed to smithereens, stolen by opportunists, cancelled by ideologues.

In Britain the Blitzkrieg of WW2 wiped out the complete library book-stock of city after city;  in a matter of days, more than a million books perished in Exeter alone, for instance.

On the other hand, a few memorable wartime images testify also to lucky escapes for some libraries and a keep-calm-&-carry-on stoicism on the part of their custodians and users, as in a famous photo of readers imperturbably browsing shelves in the ruins of Holland House.

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is dedicated to “librarians then, now and in the years to come,” and its acknowledgements page includes the author’s “thanks to every librarian who helped me find a text I needed or didn’t yet know I needed.”

It’s an elaborate fictional work, a great feat of imagination and narrative ingenuity that sweeps through history from the heyday of classical Greece to an imagined future in which human initiative is almost subordinate to the dictates of artificial intelligence. The latter has become the controller of a purportedly infinite library of information – yet it turns out that this cannot meet all emotional needs, and so one resistant human, a young girl, secretly creates a personal library of her own, thus linking her situation to a chain of earlier storytellers. Similarly spirited, but at quite different points in time and place, several other youthful characters in this novel manage to defy the destructive and repressive forces around them with enough resourcefulness to ensure the transmission of an ancient text through centuries of hazard.

Attached to the end of this novel is a conversation with the author in which he salutes the fact that the world’s oldest extant stories have reached us only because they were conscientiously preserved and copied over many centuries in imperial, monastic and private libraries. Long live books, their creators and their custodians!

The War’s Not Over Yet: instalment 2

Books about World War 2, , , ,

The novelist Anthony Doerr has remarked that there will soon be nobody left on earth who can personally remember World War 2.

In a previous post I discussed a few recent examples of “postmemory” writing (to borrow Marianne Hirsch’s term), where authors are retrieving and pondering the traumatic wartime experiences of an earlier generation – often parents, grandparents or other older relatives – even when the genre is notionally fictional. Their stories, I suggested, seem driven by a desire to expiate or exorcise – or simply to ensure that some memories of World War 2 are not forgotten.

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Here I’ll pursue this theme in relation to three more novels. The first is by Anthony Doerr himself, and it’s one of the most impressive works of historical fiction I’ve read for a long time.

All the Light We Cannot See creates a powerfully sustained tension by using the perspective of children (one French, one German) to dramatise the build-up to World War 2 and the subsequent devastation. Its early chapters quickly drew me in and the device of frequent alternation between the stories of the two main characters, mini-chapter after mini-chapter, held my interest throughout.

Already on the first page there’s a tensile quality in the writing:

 

LEAFLETS

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

That quality, blending the stark with the lyrical, never slackens. It’s August 1944 when the book opens, and fierce bombardment of the historic French town of Saint-Malo is imminent. Two months after D-Day, with half of western France now liberated, this last German stronghold on the Breton coast faces destruction. As the waves of bombers approach it, two teenagers who are unknown to one another become the dual nodes of the narrative: a blind and seemingly helpless French girl is hiding in an attic, separated from her family, while a young German soldier with a flair for radio technology is sheltering nearby in a hotel cellar.

The gradual unfolding and suspenseful convergence of their stories is handled with great skill. More than anything else, what holds it all together tautly is the consistent stylistic control. Poised, precise, the language rings true. Rhythm and tone never seem forced.

The title image works on several levels. Light suffuses the action, yet one of the main characters cannot perceive any of it. Besides, another kind of electromagnetic radiation is pervasive in this novel – the wireless transmission of sound. Much of what happens is dependent on radio waves, which are of course invisible, a form of “light we cannot see.” The author says in an interview:

I wanted to tell a story [about] a time in history when radio had a lot of power. When hearing the voice of a stranger in your home was a magical thing. So I knew I’d have to go back to World War 1 or World War 2.

He chose the latter period because the rise of Nazism and the devastating impact of German propaganda were made possible by radio. That technology was a key to the terrible events of the 1930s and 40s.

One slight reservation about Doerr’s fine novel: by prolonging the story far beyond the war years he risks weakening its impact. I can well understand, and forgive, his reluctance to take leave of such memorable characters; but the novel’s centre of historical gravity is 1944, and when the final chapters stretch  forward to 1974 and then 2014 it’s as if the author feels compelled to affirm (needlessly?) the lingering power of “postmemory” through a narrative relationship between his own generation and those wartime predecessors.

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The other two recent war stories I’ve been reading are prize-winners by notable Australian authors: Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a story of Australian POWs, and Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People, which mostly takes place in London during the Blitz but also dramatises its aftermath by focusing on a traumatised Australian pilot. This pair of works controversially shared the 2014 Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction after the PM himself insisted that Flanagan’s should be placed alongside the judging panel’s strong preference for Carroll’s. Flanagan also won the Booker Prize for his novel.

Both have arresting qualities, but neither of them, I’m sorry to say, has aroused in me the passionate admiration evidently felt by many readers, though I don’t intend to provide here a full-on critique. As a general rule I think Australian novelists should hesitate to review in negative terms the work of other Australian novelists – not so much to avoid the risk of reprisals as just to acknowledge that our national literary scene, being small and commercially frail, is not well served by internecine strife. Yet in this case, having committed myself to a couple of blog posts about recent WW2 stories, I can hardly avoid mentioning these two acclaimed novels – and it would be lily-livered to disguise the fact that they underwhelmed me. (Both Flanagan and Carroll are well-established and highly successful writers, so my murmurings won’t inflict any harm on their secure reputations.) Perhaps it may be worthwhile to ponder why, despite the plaudits The Narrow Road to the Deep North and A World of Other People have attracted, I’m by no means alone in my inability to be totally enthusiastic about them.

The main problem, perhaps, is that they tend to become over-insistent on their messages. In The Narrow Road, for example, despite powerful scenes and images that linger in the mind, too much of the prose can seem overwrought and strident, with far-fetched similes and repeatedly gruesome in-your-face details. After so many pages describing emaciated bodies and extreme physical torment, some readers will wish the author had understood that “less is more”; and they may also think there is undue reliance on stereotypes: the Australians are too Australian in their laconic bravery and mateyness, the Englishmen too class-bound, the Japanese too shrilly and insanely Japanese. Perhaps credible, but too loud in the telling. Yes, yes, we get it!

Flanagan’s novel has been flayed almost as often as it has been praised. Tony Abbott’s foolish intervention in the decision-making for the PM’s Literary Award provoked one of the prize judges, Les Murray, to break confidentiality and announce publicly that most of the panel members thought The Narrow Road “a stupid, pretentious book.” Less succinctly scathing but just as fierce was a critique by Michael Hofmann in the London Review of Books. Among the novel’s many faults, says Hofmann, is that “the writing is overstuffed, and leaks sawdust.” Phrases such as “sham texture,” “sticky collage” and “descriptive cant” run through this review, which sees Flanagan’s prose as parading a show of tender sensitivity, full of romantic clichés.

Susan Lever’s discussion of this novel in the Sydney Review of Books is less dismissive, but still expresses “unease” at the book’s insistent “literariness” in representing vicariously a generation of war veterans whose experience “is now receding into the past.” Lever concludes by describing it as “a work of filial and national piety.” That’s a shrewd comment, putting a finger on the obvious source of the novel’s emotional investment – and what some see as its sentimental excess. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is dedicated to the author’s father, a survivor of Japanese POW camps, and with understandable feeling Flanagan himself has spoken in interviews of growing up as a “child of the Death Railway.” This work, then, is an expression of “postmemory” in Hirsch’s sense: its focus is on “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.”

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Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People has also come in for censure as too strained in its romantic gestures (What does that cover image on the left tell you?), too self-consciously literary, and “in no way convincing.” That verdict is by Andrew Fuhrmann, writing in the Sydney Review of Books. He describes the novel as “a somewhat bland story of doomed love” with “a romantic feebleness to the psychological mechanism.”

To judge by comments on this novel to be found on the Goodreads website, some readers think Carroll’s writing too often draws attention to itself. For example, in paragraph after paragraph nearly all the sentences are so short that the result can look like a kind of stylistic stammer, awkward and unproductive, yet with a portentous air. Here’s a random example:

You had to be watching to notice and Iris was. The statue has moved.
As she pieces the movements together – the shoulders, the hands, the eyes – she realises what they signal. The statue has not only moved. The statue, she realizes with astonishment, is crying.
She was about to leave. But she can’t now. Not while the statue is crying. Absurd as it may seem, she feels implicated. Responsible in some way. She has been watching him, studying him, all this time. Fascinated by the immobility, the stillness of the young man, and drawn to the waves of intensity radiating from him. Almost willing him to break. And now that he has broken she can’t go. Bronze and marble have melted into life.
So she waits.

There are other difficulties for a lot of readers. The way in which this novel uses T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding as a framing device can seem contrived and fail to carry conviction. Arguably, Eliot’s presence as a character in the story feels awkward: he is “stiffly drawn” and other characters are “cardboard.” Those comments, too, are from the review by Fuhrmann, who adds: “it is hard not to wish the whole thing had been done without dragging in Eliot.”

These resistant readers of the Carroll and Flanagan novels remind me of John Keats’s remark in a famous letter 200 years ago: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” (For him and his contemporaries, the term “poetry” could apply to imaginative literature in general, including fiction.) Many of us feel, as Keats did, an antipathy to literary works that are too stridently insistent on commanding our attention. In the same letter, Keats says this:

Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.—How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, Admire me I am a violet! Dote upon me I am a primrose!

If you’ve read any of those novels and have a different opinion, tell me.