Book Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (Scribner, 2021)

I’m not sure what happened. I loved Anthony Doerr’s previous novel, All the Light We Cannot See. I’m pretty sure we all loved it, up to and including the Pulitzer Prize Board. Doerr’s new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, uses a similar format, going back and forth among different key figures caught up in something much bigger than themselves. His writing is as beautiful and evocative as ever.

Yet I didn’t love Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Doerr’s latest novel expands his scope considerably—rather than just covering characters in different places during a world war, it takes us from 15th-century Constantinople to 20th-century Korea to modern Idaho to a spaceship many years in the future. And in every era, the lives of the characters are affected by a tale from ancient Greece, stretching things even further back into the past. That simple but colorful old story irrevocably alters the lives of each of our main characters—a Greek teenage girl and an American teenage girl, a boy conscripted into the Saracen army, an embittered environmentalist, a lonely Korean War veteran—and connects them in ways that not all of them understand or even realize.

Perhaps it was just all too much for one novelist to try to cover, even an exceptionally talented novelist. Or maybe he could have covered it all more effectively if he just hadn’t made the book so long. Of course, there’s a lot of information you have to get in there if you’re trying to take your audience through several millennia. But as we bounce back and forth among eras, each section of each story is so packed with detail and plods along so slowly that we never seem to be getting anywhere. As young Omeir marched with the Saracens to attack Constantinople, it seemed like we had to witness every single step taken by the tired oxen he was driving. Before long I found myself starting to identify with those oxen.

It doesn’t help that, despite plenty of room for them, none of the characterizations are strong. Each main character has one or two recognizable qualities and that’s it. That’s what’s supposed to keep us following them. But most of the time, it wasn’t enough to make me feel deeply for them, even as they were placed in some truly heartrending situations. Doerr observes his characters with a sort of dry clinical tone that gives the impression he’s hovering just outside them rather than really getting into their heads. And the biggest epiphany we get is packed into two sentences. I’m not exaggerating—it takes literally two sentences, in the last 60 pages of the book, for Seymour in Idaho to experience a change of heart that transforms his whole life. It’s a good epiphany, I will say that, but even though it causes him to take some actions that are pivotal to the plot, in terms of character development it’s too little, too late.

I would chalk it all up to the novel’s being more plot-driven than character-driven, except that the plot moves so achingly slowly that “driven” doesn’t seem quite the word for it. Maybe setting-driven would work better? Neither of those is a criticism in itself; novels that concentrate on elements other than character can work very well (Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, for example). But unfortunately, this one just doesn’t.

The frustrating thing is that you can see the bones of a great book here, so to speak. Something about the concept of a single ancient tale traveling through centuries, connecting and changing lives as it goes, has the potential to be breathtaking. If only that germ of a great idea hadn’t been trampled by so many details and dragged out to more than 600 pages, Cloud Cuckoo Land could have been another book I loved. Instead, I’m afraid it was a book I was relieved to finish.

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