Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

 

It’s not often I get to the end a book and burst into tears. So what made me cry, and cry again, as I turned the last few pages of Cloud Cuckoo Land? 

I think it’s to do with tension released.  We’ve walked dangerous pathways with the five main characters in this book by Anthony Doerr (author of All the Light we Cannot See)  – a tightrope journey over ravines full of spikes – and the knowledge that all of them, in their way, will reach an amazing, a perfect conclusion to their journeys led me to gush with tears of joy and sadness. 

The Guardian describes this book as ‘a deep lungful of fresh air’ and the  Washington Post as ‘a love letter to books’. 

We all know what we mean by this fantasy place; it's an over-optimistic, idealistic state of mind where everything appears to be perfect. Someone in cloud cuckoo land believes that impossibly good things might happen and seems unaware of realities.

The story starts with a Greek play by Aristophanes, The Birds, first performed in 414 BCE, in which Pisthetaerus, a middle-aged Athenian, persuades the world's birds to create a new city in the sky to be named Νεφελοκοκκυγία (Nephelokokkygia) or Cloud Cuckoo Land.  We then move onto The Wonders Beyond Thule, written in Greek by Antonius Diogenes in the second century BCE. Finally there is also a link to The Golden Ass, by Apuleius, written in Latin in the second century CE, in which a traveling man, hoping to experience being in the body of a bird, takes a witch's potion and turns into a donkey. 

And so the overlaps, the convolutions, the 'stealing of stories' adds to the complexities of this story, and echoed through the real history, real early literature. Doerr capitalises on this to create a complicated and wide-reaching novel that touches on precisely what being human is all about.

Anna and Omeir are teenagers living in the 15th-century. Omeir is a farm worker with a cleft lip.  His two beloved oxen, Moonlight and Tree, are dragooned by the Sultan, Mehmed the Conqueror. His great army is on its way to lay siege to Constantinople, where Anna lives, an orphan with a dying sister who spends long days doing needlework for the church. Someone teaches Anna to read Greek, and so, when a manuscript written more than a thousand years earlier comes into her hands (she is stealing from a water-logged tower library to help pay for her sister to have quack treatment) she is able to decipher it as the fantasy of Cloud Cuckoo Land. After her sister dies, Ann flees the city as it falls, taking the precious, seemingly magical, book with her. She meets Omeir, also fleeing from conscription after the death of his oxen. They return to Omeir’s farm where they live out their lives together. 

Zeno, a veteran of the Korean war, learned ancient Greek from Max, a fellow prisoner of war, a man he falls deeply, unrequitedly, in love with. After Alex’s death, he learns that Cloud Cuckoo Land, discovered in Italy, is being put up, codex by codex, on the internet. He begins to translate it into English. By 2020, we find him, now an elderly man, putting on a play based on the book, working with enthusiastic local children

In the same place and time – Lakeport, Idaho, 2020 – we meet Seymour, a teenager bullied and distressed by his neuro-diversity,  He has become obsessed with the losses of the natural world to climate change and is groomed by an internet climate terrorist. He enters the library where Zeno is holding his dress rehearsal for Cloud Cuckoo Land,  bringing a backpack full of explosives and with him.

Konstance is equally young as Anna, Omeir and Seymour. She is a passenger on the Argos, a spaceship which left the Earth 65 years before with the parents and grandparents of its passengers. They are headed to a new, healthy planet, to form a new colony after global devastation has decimated the Earth. Konstance spends a lot of time in the library that exists digitally inside Sybil, the computer. By walking a treadmill, clearly designed to keep the passengers active, she can walk an updated 'Google Earth' which not only takes you around the world, but through the ages. It is now 2146, and Konstance is now the only person still alive on board the Argos and there are hundreds of years travel ahead. How will she survive?

Reading this almost 600 page-long novel is sometimes a bit of a push. There are times when I was so terrified for the characters I hardly wanted to read on. And there are times when I wondered if Doerr actually knew where he was heading; would  all these disparate stories really come together as one?  There are a lot of characters and plot to keep tabs on, and if you decide to embark on this novel you might find this webpage of use; https://www.marmaladeandmustardseed.com/bookguidesblog/cloud-cuckoo-land

Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is the golden thread that stops the reader from becoming lost in this labyrinthine story. Written in ancient times, stolen from a ruined library in Constantinople, hidden in a hollow tree until Anna’s death, as I read I kept wondering how the ancient book would turn up in Italy, in  ‘a place books can be safely kept’…another library…rediscovered and digitally distributed, ready for Zeno to translate.

Years later, Seymour will help create Konstance’s treadmill library for the Argo. Employed first in prison and then in the lab, he uses secret codes to hide disturbing truths.  Kostance discovers she is the great grand daughter of one of of the 6th-graders who are working with Zeno on his play… and other things, which may save her life.

Throughout the story,  Diogenes’s book heals, keeps safe and bring joy to those that are sick, lost and troubled. And as the story ends, and the clever twists fall into place one after the other, my tears burst through with the delight of it all.

Anthony Doerr. Photograph: Deborah Hardee/The Observer