“A True Story,” to a 1925 Robert Graves poem (“ Kingfishers, when they die, To far Cloud-Cuckoo pastures fly”), to the 2014 LEGO movie. In the centuries since, a ‘cloud cuckoo land’ has been used to describe any number of fanciful worlds, employed in works from Lucian’s second-century A.D. In “The Birds,” two heroes, Trustyfriend and Goodhope, decide to leave Athens because it has become too corrupt, and-with the help of the world’s birds-build a better city in the sky, halfway between the realm of humans and the realm of the gods. But instead of binge-watching Ted Lasso or power-snacking, Doerr has written Cloud Cuckoo Land, a massive, extraordinary book about five characters trying to find a reason to live when facing extinction.Īnthony Doerr has, like many of us, clearly been doing some heavy thinking about the end of the world.A: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ ( Νεϕελοκοκκυγία) was a phrase invented by the comic playwright Aristophanes’ 2,400 years ago in “The Birds,” one his few plays that survives to this day. In 1453, a 14-year-old orphan named Anna is caught in the Siege of Constantinopole, while on the other side of the city’s walls, a young oxherd named Omeir is stuck working for the invading forces. In 2020, in a small lakeside town in Idaho, Zeno Ninis, an elderly veteran, faces the end of a life of frustrated desires, while Seymour Stuhlman, a high school student, casts himself as an avenger of the dying planet. And in the future, another 14-year-old girl named Konstance escapes the burning Earth for a planet 4.23 light years away.Īll of these characters are united through the centuries by a story-Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fable written by Antonius Diogenes in ancient Greece about a shepherd who stumbles upon a play and, mistaking the city of the gods on stage for a real place, sets out to find it and live there. (In actuality, Doerr invented the story, taking elements from Aristophanes and from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.)Īll of the characters have something else in common as well: they’re facing their deaths. Anna can expect, once the invaders breach the city, that they will rape or kill her. And they will-this is history, and it already happened. Omeir, born with a cleft palate, is meant to be one of the countless bodies left in the mud behind the marching army. Zeno survives a Korean War POW camp only to face a death at the hands of Seymour, who wants to detonate a pair of homemade bombs to protest climate change. Finally, Konstance discovers that she’ll die without ever seeing the world that’s supposed to be her salvation.īut the story of Aethon, the shepherd who becomes a donkey, then a fish, then a bird, manages to lift each of them from their grim circumstances, and into an imagined world. It becomes a lifeline, even as time and decay and loss threaten the story itself. Some of Doerr’s fans from the wildly bestselling All The Light We Cannot See-and some critics-might have trouble following him on this long journey. He fills it with with detours and tangents, and includes big chunks of his invented Greek fable, as well as a spaceship, which tends to throw some readers.ĭoerr still manages to make it all look easy. It would rob the reader of some of the joys of the book to say too much about how all these disparate threads come together, but the novel reads like it’s half its actual length. Doerr has packed it dense with what are clearly hours and hours of deep research-the chapter on the building of the biggest cannon in the ancient world is just one example–and yet it flies. It helps that Doerr’s prose is extraordinarily clear and clean. He effortlessly mimics a half-dozen different voices, ranging across junior-high English assignments, academic jargon, and YouTube videos, while his narration occasionally drops in a devastating aside or beautiful piece of description. Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, to which people are already comparing it, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a blend of invention and history, science fiction and fable, romance and war story. But in contrast to Mitchell’s sometimes cold and cerebral detachment, Doerr’s novel hums with sympathy for all his characters, even the most unpleasant one. Seymour, in the hands of another author, could easily be a cliché, a Trenchcoat Mafia wannabe who a steady diet of shady Internet videos has radicalized.
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