The shepherd Aethon’s difficulties as donkey and fish, meanwhile, mirror the precarious lives of the animal characters: the twin oxen, Tree and Moonlight, and the godlike Trustyfriend, a great grey owl, whose existence quiets the mind of noise-besieged, autistic Seymour. These are the characters of the book, both humans and machine. Konstance spends a lot of time in the ship’s library – a library that exists digitally inside the vessel’s godlike AI, Sybil. Lastly there is Konstance, whom we meet at ages 10 to 14 on the giant exo-ship Argos, in the 65th year of its voyage of escape from a ruined Earth. But at the dress rehearsal in the public library, they are under threat from Seymour, the novel’s most worrying, touching and tenderly handled character – an angry young man who was a broken-hearted boy, a faithful soul easily beguiled by the forces of malice that lurk online. In 2020, he is working with local children, putting on a play based on the book. Late in Zeno’s life, when one of those lost books – you can guess which one – is discovered, he sets out to translate it. In Korea, Zeno learned ancient Greek from a fellow prisoner of war, a man who is later the author of a Compendium of Lost Books. One of the joys for the reader is in figuring out when Diogenes’s book will appear and what purpose it will serve Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour and Konstance: what trouble it might cause or blessing it might bestow. It is clear from the opening chapters of Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land that the novel’s characters, in their different time periods, will have something to do with this book inside a book, whether as champion, custodian or threat. By various mishaps and trickery, Aethon has to spend time as a donkey and a fish – a mistreated domestic beast of burden and a wandering, then trapped, wild animal. To get to the city and enter it, Aethon must be a bird and not a human, since humans are wreckers and ruiners expressly banned from this wonderful utopia. Aethon longs to travel to a rumoured paradise, a city in the sky populated by birds. It tells of a shepherd, Aethon, known by his neighbours as “a dull-witted mutton-headed lamebrain”. Antonius Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fabulous adventure story written by Diogenes for his niece, to beguile and console her during an illness. The story crystallises around a book within a book, the existence of which is imagined by Doerr, though its author is a real writer of the ancient world.
Following his Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a deep lungful of fresh air – and a gift of a novel. T here is a kind of book a seasoned writer produces after a big success: large-hearted, wide in scope and joyous.
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