Cloud Cuckoo Land: Inventive, But An Underwhelming Read

Anthony Doer, most known as author of the Pulitzer-prize winning book, All The Light We Cannot See, released his latest book Cloud Cuckoo Land with Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2021. You can find Cloud Cuckoo Land in the Brearley library and in New York City public libraries. The book is a multiple-perspective work of fiction that follows characters living thousands of years apart from the 15th century to decades into the future.

An incredibly ambitious project, Cloud Cuckoo Land, is at once a historical fiction, a contemporary, and a sci-fi. It recounts the fall of Constantinople through the eyes of Anna, a young orphan who works in an embroidery house, and Omeir, an enlisted Ottoman soldier. In the present day, Zeno and the children under his care rehearse a play when they are interrupted by a 17-year-old militant environmentalist’s attempt to bomb the library they are in. Years into the future, Kostance is a passenger on an interstellar ship that contains the last remaining humans who escaped dying earth. These seemingly disconnected narratives are all linked together by the ancient Greek text Cloud Cuckoo Land. This old story is discovered and rediscovered by the protagonists’, sparking their curiosity and bringing them solace in times of extreme hardship. 

The different viewpoints spanning several thousand years can be confusing at first, but the reader quickly becomes acquainted with each character as they are immersed in the world of Doer’s creation. For the most part, I enjoyed the alternating viewpoints, except for when new ones were introduced that chronicled the life of characters we had already been following, but in their past. These new perspectives added another layer to what was already a multi-faceted book, but didn’t seem to include any essential driving force to the plot. Overall, I found them to be a cheap way of cramming in character backstory that should have been made apparent in the present.

My personal favorite part was the fictionalized excerpts of the ancient Greek tale Cloud Cuckoo Land in between chapters, that recounts the story of Aethon, a humble shepherd, who embarks on a quest to find “the city in the clouds where pain never visits and the west wind always blows.” The fantastical, ridiculous elements in Cloud Cuckoo Land were a welcome contrast with the grimmer content of the rest of the book. Although Cloud Cuckoo Land may not be a real story, Anthony Diogenes, who is the supposed author of the story, is in fact a real writer from the 1st century. Influences from old texts can be clearly traced; for example, Aethon turns into a donkey at one point. This type of animal transformation is featured in well-known stories, including “Pinocchio” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

In fact, for me, the most impactful scene in the book is when the children who are performing the play Cloud Cuckoo Land, decide to change its ending. Originally, Aethon is believed to have never returned to where he came from, but the kids choose to send him back home. The readers had been following the students’ rehearsal from the very beginning to the end of the book so the build-up to this decision felt natural and made sense.

My biggest problem with Cloud Cuckoo Land was its lengthy, meandering writing style that I found unimpactful and a cause for waning interest. Doer is clearly a lover of nature and scenery, but his descriptions came off as stilted, rather than seamless. In merely the first few pages, a building is said to be a “high-gabled two-story gingerbread Victorian,” computers are characterized as having “screen-saver spirals twist[ing] in synchrony,” and a character is described as “an octogenarian in a canvas coat.” Oftentimes I reread passages made dense, not by content, but by a deluge of adjectives. 

I also struggled to fully connect with the characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I spent over 600 pages and a lot of hours inside Doer’s world, yet I always felt as though I was observing its inhabitants through a glass wall. I knew their innermost thoughts and feelings, I saw their actions, I even got to know their pasts. Characters experienced times of political turmoil, loss or separation from loved ones, dangerous circumstances, and mental or physical anguish. I felt towards them the way one might feel when they see something bad happen on the news that feels completely removed from their own life. Nothing invoked a strong emotional response, nor was I deeply attached or invested in the characters. The last hundred pages or so were faintly tinged with a melancholy, but only in the manner that all endings are sad. It was like saying goodbye to a bunch of people you had spent a lot of time with, but didn’t really like.

The dissonance that I felt with these characters was partly due to their unrelatability. They were all portrayed as basically good people. If they had flaws it seemed only to create the exterior of being “complex characters.” And funnily enough, they suffered from being too deep. Instead of talking like normal people, they spoke in inspirational quotes, their every word carrying a clear purpose and message. This also made it hard to allow room for further development, since characters began their journeys already seeming to possess fonts of wisdom, rendering character arcs obsolete. No one grew or changed, things just happened to them. 

That being said, Cloud Cuckoo Land is undoubtedly an extremely creative undertaking. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of research that went into making such a sprawling story so richly steeped in history. It’s well-researched and inventive, making for a pleasant read at times. Doer is truly a master of ideas, if not with words.

Here are some books that have similar aspects to Cloud Cuckoo Land, that I enjoyed much more. Frederick Backman is a contemporary writer whose books usually follow more than one character (Anxious People, Beartown, etc) and contain meaningful and engaging discussions about life. Additionally, I recommend Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin if you’re looking for a great multi-perspective historical fiction about an event that probably won’t be taught in history class. The different narratives of the book, like Cloud Cuckoo Land, are all connected by a single thing, that being the tightrope walk between the twin towers performed in 1947. Or maybe you’re craving the science fiction elements of Kostance’s storyline, in which case I’d suggest Andy Weir’s 2021 book release Project Hail Mary, about the sole survivor of a mission to save earth, which has received stellar reviews.