The stories of two other-worldly children caught up in war are at the centre of this Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Their distance from the affairs of the world is established in the one case by Marie-Laure’s blindness, and in the other by Werner’s prodigious mathematical and technical ability, and his obsessive interest in radio waves. While Werner’s exceptional talents mean that, to his increasing disquiet, he is drawn into the service of the Nazi regime, Marie-Laure’s blindness and consequent isolation provide her with the determination to oppose the Germans who have invaded her country. So it seems that these two are enemies, yet the narrative draws them closer and closer because of what they share.

And there is a third character, which is the world, its lusts, its sins and its incredible violence, symbolised by an intensely beautiful and fabulously valuable diamond, which no person fully in the world would dream of throwing away, hidden by Marie-Laure’s father inside the world-model he has created to guide her, so that she becomes the diamond’s keeper and, perhaps, the one who must determine its fate.

The Father is dead in Werner’s case, or lost in the prison system in Marie-Laure’s, abandoning the children in darkness to face the violent world, which bombards Marie-Laure’s city and crushes the intelligent life out of Werner’s friend Frederick, who loves birds, whose nature embodies the radio waves where Werner’s imagination lives.

Is the diamond a curse, or does it bring immortality? The diamond is both a natural object and an artifice, shaped by the diamond cutter. Repeatedly we are asked to consider: is it any more than a pebble? Should it not join the other pebbles under the sea, on which sea snails and other molluscs crawl, with which Marie-Laure becomes obsessed, and whose study she eventually makes her life’s work?

The diamond is desired for its imagined life-giving properties by the fairy-tale villain von Rumpel, whose advancing cancer gnaws away at his life with the same inevitability as the Allies advance across France towards his country. He is desperate to find the stone which he believes will save his life but, like Germany’s hopeless defence of its borders, he fails.

And what of the stone? Does Werner, who eventually rejects the world’s violence, return it to the sea? This, to my mind, is made quite ambiguous in the novel. Intriguingly, Marie-Laure is bequeathed a key by Werner, suggesting that she might choose to retrieve the diamond, even though she will never be able to see its beauty. As readers we can ask ourselves what we would do if we possessed the key to the beauty, but also to the violence of the world.

The post All the light we cannot see, by Anthony Doerr: a review appeared first on Interrogating Ellie.