Cloud Cuckoo Land

 by Anthony Doer

This is a highly anticipated book by the author of All the Light We Cannot See, which I enjoyed.  I looked at some of the reviews/ratings for this book and they ranged from 1 star to 5 stars.  I can understand this.  This was a long book and a bit of a hard slog.  All the parts came together at the end but I am not sure it was worth it, in my opinion.

First of all, the author obviously values libraries and books, in fact he seems to bemoan the loss of anything written that has disappeared.  I am not sure all books are worth mourning....

The basic thread linking all the various lives/times in this book is a partial book that has been discovered Called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes.  It is the story of a Shepherd who seeks to become a bird and make it to a land in the sky Cloud Cuckoo Land which is supposedly a paradise.  As the man strives to make it there he meets gods who first turn him into a donkey, he is treated harshly by his masters; then he becomes a fish inside the belly of a whale; then he becomes a raven and makes it to CCL where he still isn't happy.  When he goes to see an Oracle he basically discovers that he wants to be back where he came from and goes home.

There are several stories that relate to the book

- A girl from 14th Century Constantinople and a young boy from a farm outside Constantinople.  The girl discovers the manuscript while scrounging for books to sell to booksellers during a siege of constantinople.  Eventually she flees from the city and meets up with the young boy who is leaving the seige and returning to his family.  They eventually marry and after she dies her husband returns the scrolls to Urbino where the story appears to have originated.

Another character is a gay man, who was a prisoner of war in the Korean war.  As an old man he is working with children at a library to act out the story.  While they are preparing the play a young autistic boy who is angry because the forest next to his mother's property was razed for development and the owl he loved has disappeard.  The boy has gotten into anti-establishment posts on the internet and decides to bomb a real estate office but as he cannot get into the real estate office undetected he decides to put the bomb in the library.  He has used the library a lot.  The bomb is discovered, in a panic the boy shoots a Librarian and the old man ends up dying when he runs out of the library with the bomb.

The first story is about a space ship leaving earth with a destination hundreds of years away.  One of the families includes a young girl, her father and mother.  The ship gets a virus, many people get sick, the mother disappears (has died or been quarantined).  The father tosses his daughter into a room with the main computer, Sybil, with supplies and locks her in.  Why would a father want his daughter to survive alone??  The girl also has been told the CCL story by her father.  The girl is able to access a library using 3D goggles, supposedly the library has all knowledge.  She is also able to go see parts of the earth in a snapshot like a googlearth shot of a street.  Eventually the girl realizes that Sybil and the library do not have all info or are not willing to give her access to all info.  She discovers that if she finds an owl icon somewhere she can actually break through the images to get active views of things and see the devastation, tragedy in the world.  Ultimately the girl suspects that she is  not really travelling through space at all.  She breaks out and finds a community on Greenland where she spends the rest of her life.  The company that planned the space ship had programmed the library to show their preferred views of the world.

The young bomber, while in jail, learns to translate the CCL story.  When he gets out he asks the children who were at the library when he bombed it to meet him.  When they come he gives them copies of his translation of the books.  We also find out that the young bomber was hired by the spaceship company to "edit" clips of reality for the library files on the ship.  He eventually starts to sabotage/edit the system, using the Owl icons to allow people to access the truth rather than the sterilized views of earth.

The book certainly stressed the value and power of stories to engage us.  It was interesting how the author wove the various lives together because of their involvement with the book.  However, I did find it a hard slog to get to the end.  This may have been an interesting, challenging, intellectual exercise for the author but my final thought was, you took us on this long journey, so what, for what?? The character in the main story, after his trials and tribulations decides he wants to be back home.

Book Jacket quote: "Dedicated to 'the librarians, then, now and in the years to come'. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship -- of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.  I am not sure it was all that redemptive, only one of the character, the Turkish girl and the spaceship girl seem to have ended with a happy life....