Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is my choice for book #26 on my list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.” Although this book was published only two years ago, in September of 2021, it did win the 2022 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine (awarded to the best American novel translated into French that year), and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction, so it is not simply a completely idiosyncratic choice. While I’m at it, let me admit that several of my choices for this list of top 100 novels are books from within the past few years, and it remains to be seen how well they will ultimately stack up against the more venerable choices from fifty or a hundred or two hundred years ago. Time and changing fashions have a way of altering our perceptions one way or another. But at least at this point in time, m response to these recent novels upon reading them is as favorable as my responses to Bleak House or the Red Badge of Courage, or, for that matter, to A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And so for the present, these are my choices.
The novel was Doerr’s follow-up to his 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See. It is a spectacularly wide-ranging novel that alternates between contemporary thriller, historical novel, and speculative science fiction, that takes readers from fifteenth-century Constantinople to twentieth- and then twenty-first century America and then to a twenty-second century generational space-ark trillions of miles from the earth. One thing that unites these three time-lines is the fact that each of them boasts a significant library that serves as a place of comfort for the characters—and that a part of each of those libraries is a second-century comic tale by the ancient Greek author Antonius Diogenes called Cloud Cuckoo Land.
This is not the stoic philosopher Diogenes, the contemporary of Plato who wandered Athens with a lantern looking for an honest man. Antonius Diogenes was author of the (probably) second century Greek romance called The Wonders Beyond Thule. That text no longer exists, but surviving summaries of the book describe it as a muti-level narrative that mirrors the complexity of Doerr’s own novel. Doerr suggests that Diogenes wrote another lost book, Cloud Cuckoo Land. In Doerr’s imagined narrative, Diogenes dedicated his comic tale to his niece, hoping to entertain her during an illness with the story of a “dull-witted” shepherd named Aethon, who has heard of a paradisal city in the sky peopled by birds, which he imagines must be better than the world he is in. But to get into this paradise, Aethon must become a bird himself—since human beings, as creatures notorious for ruining things, are banned from this perfect land. Aethon is transformed into a donkey and then a fish and suffers far worse hardships than he ever did as a shepherd, before becoming a bird and making it into Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is really not that much of a paradise, as it turns out.
In fifteenth-century Constantinople, a poor young seamstress named Anna finds that she can make good money by raiding an abandoned monastery library for old manuscripts that she sells to a group of Italian scholars trying to find ancient Greek manuscripts they can take back to Italy before the inevitable fall of the Byzantine capital to the Ottomans. Meanwhile, in Ottoman Bulgaria, lives Omeir, a young village boy with a cleft palate whose only friends are a pair of oxen named Moonlight and Tree. He and his oxen are conscripted into the Sultan’s army, and they help to drag the new wall-smashing canon that will pummel the city walls. Anna meets Omeir fleeing the sack of the city—and she’s carrying Diogenes’ manuscript.
In contemporary Idaho, in the local public library, we meet the octogenarian Zeno Ninis, who is directing a rehearsal of a children’s play he’s written—a translation and dramatization of his own of an obscure romance by a certain Antonius Diogenes. But the rehearsal is interrupted by a young militant bomb-carrying eco-terrorist named Seymour Stuhlman. We learn more about the backstories of these two as the book goes on. Zeno was a lonely kid whose father died in World War II and who found comfort in the local library among tales of the mythic past. Later, he is a prisoner of war in Korea, where he forms a close friendship with a fellow prisoner, a classics scholar named Rex who teaches him to translate Greek, and for whom he develops a passion that remains unrequited in the closeted 1950s. The boy Seymour, another misfit, perhaps on the spectrum but misunderstood, forms a close friendship with an owl in a wooded area near his home, but when a developer destroys the owl’s habitat Seymour becomes an easy target for a radical online terrorist group.
The novel’s fifth protagonist is a teenaged girl named Konstance, a passenger on board the twenty-second century starship Argos—65 years into a multi-generational quest aimed at establishing a new home for the human race fleeing their devastated home planet for a new start on a distant planet called Beta Oph2. The Argos is under the control of an omniscient AI named Sybil, through whom Konstance can enter a virtual library containing the accumulated knowledge and experience of the whole human race—and in which Konstance can become acquainted with an obscure old text entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land.
The plot of the novel weaves the lives of these five protagonists into a glorious and colorful tapestry that, together with the story of Aethon and the land of birds, creates a novel so rich and varied that you’ll marvel at the author’s skill in keeping all the balls in the air without dropping a single one. I won’t go any farther and spoil any of the novel’s developments but I will say that if you’re thinking of reading this book, you’ll never be disappointed in it. It has a good deal to say to any reader—it celebrates the value of fantastic stories, especially for young people, and honors the role of libraries in keeping those books from neglect or disintegration: Byzantine Anna’s manuscript buyers remark at one point that “We know that at least one thousand [classical Greek plays] were written and performed in Greek theaters in the fifth century B.C. You know how many we have left? Thirty-two.” Thus Doerr’s book implores us to appreciate the ancient stories that have survived. What better choice for a list like mine, a list whose whole purpose is to appreciate the great stories of the past–whether that past be 1821 or 2021?
But the book also extolls nature and human beings’ tenuous relationship with our fragile world. Whether it is Omeir’s loving relationship with the oxen Moonlight and Tree, or Seymour’s love of his cherished owl, or Konstance’s interest in her father’s in-space gardening, Doerr underscores the necessity of loving the land and its creatures, and eschewing the destructive steps that ruin the environment and poison the earth, and make necessary a voyage like that of the Argos. But the novel also suggests that counting on a utopia like Cloud Cuckoo Land—or, perhaps, Beta Oph2, or Seymour’s ecoterrorist group in cyberspace—might be, well, cuckoo in the long run, since the only way to save our world is to work at it here and now. If our world is as delicate as an ancient manuscript, then it will take the heroic efforts of every Anna, Zeno, or Konstance out there to ensure its survival.