For culinary tourists, eating an animal that could kill you can be a kind of flex — a show of power. This follows a strain of thinking that humans are superior to other life-forms and thus destined to rule over them. Those who subscribe to this view tend to see the world with humans at the center and everything else defined by its relationship to us. And so a jellyfish isn’t just protecting itself against intruders into its domain; it’s attacking us.
Part of the fear and the desire to dominate comes from confronting anatomy that in no way resembles our own. Jellyfish are creatures without hearts or brains, and thus cast as faceless, soulless killing machines. Likewise a shark, shooting through the water smooth as a torpedo, or a snake on land, rippling like muscle, or a spider and its scurrying legs. It doesn’t matter that a moray eel, with its beady eyes and gaping maw, is shy and just wants to hide in its cave, alone. We project malevolence. We imagine monsters.
On my 18th birthday, I was still very much a work in progress — not out yet, not really sure what my big plan was. But none of that stopped me, nor any of my other friends in the midst of their own formative phases, from eagerly making all sorts of mature, adult decisions. By which I mean, we were getting lots of tattoos. My peers were permanently inking their bodies with graceful butterflies, snakes, crosses, and other random symbols to which they would later ascribe meaning. And I, too, showed up to my high school graduation beaming ear to ear with a fresh tattoo: Remy the Disney-Pixar rat, wrapped around my left calf with a bunch of tiny carrots clutched in his paws.
That’s right. I just referenced the collective human experience. I waded deep into the primordial waters, and now I’m like Henry David Thoreau or Edward Abbey. Suddenly, I have strong opinions about how you should lead your life and I want to text them to you in all caps. That nine-to-five is a hamster wheel, man. Get out and break free! Release that fluffy, domesticated hamster somewhere it can truly thrive: the wilderness.
But, while we are in the company of his creation, Mr. Doerr pulls off the crucial trick that any novelist would have to execute to make such a testament to the power of stories more than just a literary public-service announcement. In “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” he writes a marvel of a story himself, filled with gorgeous language and distinctive characters. He sweeps readers in and gives us the enveloping experience of living in another world—a Cloud Cuckoo Land, if you will, of the imagination. Put simply, Mr. Doerr shows rather than tells us readers what a great story can do.
In terms of serious literary talent we now have Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat, a novel featuring a “novavirus” but also about so much more. It is a rending read, and all the better for that. The characters are so deftly done, in all their ambiguities, that the catastrophe is actually meaningful.
His humor is on full display with A Calling for Charlie Barnes, but so are his intelligence and compassion; it's a masterpiece that shines a revealing light on both family and fiction itself.