Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

 

Cloud Cuckoo Land is an achingly beautiful story of characters across vast periods of time, from the fall of Constantinople to a future where Earth has been devastated by climate change, who are united in their love of a simple, whimsical tale from ancient Greece. Anna finds an ancient book in an abandoned monastery, and uses her rudimentary Greek to share the story with her sister. Zeno learns that the book, now reduced to 24 crumbling leaves, has been recently rediscovered; he sets out to translate the story and share it with the bored fifth graders stuck in the public library after school. Konstance, in isolation on a space ship, scribbles the fragments of the story her father used to tell her on scraps of sacks.

 

The parallels between the three stories are undeniable. Constantinople, the library, and the Argos are all under siege, and in each setting there is a sense that the world as the characters know it is ending. The future is terrifying in one way or another, but the ancient story, whether in told through a damaged book, translated and out-of-order leaves, or fragments of memory, comforts and guides the characters.

 

The tale in question is a farcical tale about Aethon, a shepherd who wants to be turned into a bird so he can fly to Cloud Cuckoo Land, a paradise in the sky where there is no want or suffering. A series of mishaps sees him turned into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow; but although he finally arrives in paradise, he finds himself longing for the simple pleasures of his old life. We (nor most of the characters) never learn how the story ends, but it becomes apparent in the way the story affects each of them to stop fearing the future and instead choose the flawed world around them rather than a paradise -- promised riches, a far away city, Bishop's camp, Beta Oph2 -- that may not even exist. 

 

This is an important lesson for us; we cannot avoid the growing consequences of climate change by ignoring the problem entirely or pretending we can find another place to live. But we also cannot allow the situation to sink us into despair and hopelessness, or worse yet cause us to resort to violence. Nor does this lesson just apply to the environment. For Zeno, the battle is far more abstract; he is mired in a life of regret and missed opportunities, and must learn to finally act. 

 

I could talk about this book for ages, but I don't want to spoil it anymore than I have. Read it! It is a glorious paean to stories, libraries, and above all, hope.

 

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

 The Cloisters is a thriller set in the library of New York City's Cloisters museum (a beautiful place; I've been twice), amongst medievalists and researchers who are trying to piece together the occult history of tarot cards. Although it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on, it was a fun, interesting read. Normally I'd give it a quick blurb in one of my round-up posts, but underneath the murders and secrets lies an interesting discussion of fate and free will that inspired me to write more.

The two main characters, protagonist and antagonist, represent two sides of an age-old argument about how much control people have over their lives. Because of a tragedy in her past, the protagonist, Ann, has come to believe that unchangeable, unavoidable fate rules life; the antagonist, on the other hand, believes in free will, that people make their own fate. This is an interesting inversion of the usual dynamic in this sort of story; usually it's the hero who advocates for free will and the villain who couches his nefarious plans in the language of fate and inevitability.

The tragedy in Ann's background, which I won't spoil here, is what has caused her to believe a person has no control over one's life, but while her thought process is understandable, it's also deeply flawed. Yes, little, inconsequential choices made on a fateful day led to a terrible event, but it's a mistake to think that negative consequences invalidate the existence of those choices in the first place. Sometimes our choices will be bad, and sometimes they will lead to something bad through sheer luck or bad timing, but we still made those choices, and we will continue to make more (not least in how we choose to respond to tragedy!). 

This issue of fate versus free will obviously ties in to the use of tarot cards to predict the future, which is the McGuffin in this story (and I would have liked more about the tarot deck in question, despite not believing in them as divinatory devices), but it was interesting to see it play out in an unexpected way.