This is another American novelist’s historical fiction set in France during WWII, this one largely in Saint Malo, off the west coast of Brittany. It is not the only one featuring this port city, but I cannot recall the other one I read set there. The title alludes to the remarkable skills of a young French teen who went blind at age 6. Like many deaf or blind folk, she has greatly heightened abilities in her remaining intact sensory organs, akin to synesthesia, the crossed input signals to the brain by which some people hear colours, see sounds and taste words. “She hears her father smile.” The title may also be taken as a reference to wavelengths used in radio communication.
The writing is lyrical, almost poetic with vivid observations, beautiful metaphors and quaint twists. As a troop truck travels down a road, “The canopies of cherry trees drift overhead, pregnant with blossoms. Werner props open the back door and dangles his feet off the rear bumper, his heels just above the flowing road. A horse rolls on its back in the grass; five white clouds decorate the sky.”
There is not very subtle insight into of the universal practice of military recruiters everywhere offering opportunities for youths to escape from a life of drudgery with the accompanying indoctrination into unquestioning obedience to authority, inuring young minds to cruelty. This typically is presented at a stage in life when one’s moral instincts are not fully developed, their education restricted to mandatory groupthink. In Werner’s case, it is the choice of a life as a radio technician and operator in Hitler’s army vs a life as a coal miner. It is humbling to think that, in an alternate universe, had I been the product of a German farm accident in the 1920s, rather than a Canadian farm accident in 1945, I might well have joined the Hitler Youth, not the Canadian Army Cadet Corps, to escape the hard work of farming.
There are few main characters but the plot is very complex and with thirteen parts subdivided into 117 short titled chapters it can be difficult for the reader to follow the chronology of events. The extensive use of time shifting between chapters does not help. All of the narrative is written in the present tense. Being very technophobic, I cannot attest to the accuracy of the technical details of radio communications in that era.
There are negatives. Adding an element of sci-fi, there is the overworked literary device of a futile search for a mysterious valuable gem that carries a curse, in this case a huge diamond stolen from the Paris Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle. The myth of allergies to goldenrod is perpetuated and yet another novelist describes veins, rather than arteries, pulsating.
Overall, this is an enjoyable read, more for the masterful use of words and appreciation of a remarkable imagination than for the minutiae of the plot. The teaser for the author’s latest book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, included at the end of this ebook edition did not entice me to add that to my list of books to find and read.
Thanks, Barb P.
The Passionate Reader 