“Cloud Cuckoo Land”, by Anthony Doerr

 

640 pages, Scribner, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1982168438

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is an historical and speculative fiction novel that centers around a (fictional) Ancient Greek codex likewise called “Cloud Cuckoo Land” that links characters from 15^th Century Constantinople, 20^th Century Idaho (I think) and a 22^nd Century starship. Yeah, there’s a lot going on. So who are these characters? Well, we have Anna, a young seamstress living in Constantinople, and Omeir, a village boy conscripted (along with his oxen) into the Ottoman army who are preparing to storm the city; Zeno, a Korean War veteran who works in a library in Idaho translating Ancient Greek texts (and whose translation of “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is found scattered throughout the book), and Seymour, an autistic young man who gets caught up with a group of ecoterrorists; and Konstance, a young girl aboard the Argos, a Generation Starship, heading for a planet called Beta Oph2. These five people are connected to one another by “Cloud Cuckoo Land” that they all discover and find solace in.

While the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” referenced throughout this book is, in fact, fictional, the author of the book, Antonius Diogenes, was an authentic 2^nd Century Greek writer and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky; in his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds – Cloud Cuckoo Land. While these five characters appear to have nothing in common, they are each in fact outsiders in their respective places and times, with this singular book that they all come to know acting as the thread that links them all. The book travels across time and space, starting with the (supposed) author, Antonius Diogenes, who tells his niece that he didn’t, in fact, write it, but instead transcribed it from tablets found in a grave – in a sense, then, the book wasn’t written, but was something that always…Was.

From there, one copy survives in a ruined library from where it is stolen (rescued?) by Anna and thence carried away from the sacked city and hidden in a hollow tree; it is then deposited and promptly forgotten in another, famous library and much later recorded as lost, so that when it is found again it becomes an enormously exciting object, reproduced in facsimile and distributed digitally; Zeno turns the story into a play with the assistance of the children who will perform it, while later still it is reassembled from that script, printed and then digitized; this copy in turn is hidden where it waits for the person who will need it in order to do more than just get to the end of the game. All along its journey and throughout its changes, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is read to the young, the old, the sick, the healthy and those recovering from their myriad wounds, to their bodies and/or to their souls.

A character in the book likens Constantinople to Noah’s Ark, only instead of being stocked with animals it was stocked with books; and the flood that Constantine’s city is floating upon is Time: “Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world”. And so the one constant of Cloud Cuckoo Land is that the preservation and dissemination of knowledge is an act of piety; piety for knowledge, piety for culture, piety for civilization and even piety for one another. Or, as one precocious child tells Zeno: “What really matters is that the story gets passed on”.