Spoilers! And please excuse the length.
So I just finished All The Light We Cannot See. I know, I'm way behind everybody, my book budget is tiny and I had to borrow it. I think it's amazing, mostly. Incredible prose, a wealth of detail that you can see so vividly, a lot of wild invention and close observation and just reverence for the world and life, it's very beautiful. At the same time I had one big problem with it. I've seen it summed up in only a few reviews this way: "the meeting of the two main characters was brief and unsatisfying."
That's the keyword, unsatisfying. Now admittedly I have very specific opinions on this b/c I subscribe to Robert McKee's plotting philosophy, but the philosophy only tells me why it's unsatisfying, after I feel the actual dissatisfaction. If he had pulled off something that broke the McKee rules and was satisfying anyway, I wouldn't go "oh you broke the McKee rules"--hey if you can do it, great, nothing succeeds like success.
Anyway this rule I speak of is basically this: your climax needs to make a definite statement and a permanent change. It needs to say something about life that the beginning didn't say. It's sort of like two views of life are warring throughout your novel and due to the choices made in the climax and their results--for instance someone takes a risk, perhaps, according to the view of life he chooses, idealistic or cynical, and then we see how that works out for him--show us which side the author comes down on. I may not be explaining this very well b/c I can already hear lots of people saying "naw, stories don't need that" but I've noticed the best stories do have it. It's not like they tell you what to think, but you know more about how the author sees life at the end than at the beginning.
As far as I can tell, the ending of this novel says "keep your eyes open and see all the light you can before you die." "Value the complexities and beauties of life and try to deal bravely with the bad things." It's not a bad message but it was already there at the beginning. The only real change is Werner's choice about whether to finally stand up and protect somebody instead of caving to the Nazis and helping them destroy (however indirectly.) And that's great, but we already knew what being a decent person entails, we're just glad he did it, and then... besides saving Marie-Laure*, nothing came of it.
* This is a very big part of the problem actually. That guy did not come there to kill her. He came for the diamond. If she had done what she contemplated and gone out and handed him the diamond, he wouldn't have killed her. She was blind, she couldn't identify him! I originally thought she had to keep the diamond from him b/c if it really was cursed it would make the Third Reich invincible, but by the end it's super clear that due to his cancer he wanted to keep the diamond for himself. That's all that would've happened, he'd have been cured of cancer and his family would've died, the creep. The characters don't know this but it's true.
There are so many threads connecting Werner and Marie-Laure with all that radio business, there is all this business of the diamond, there is all this sense of destiny, and then it peters out. He dies, I guess he dies as a better person, but his death is meaningless, an accident (does anybody think it was suicide btw?) and obviously if they ended up really Together it would be unrealistic, but he doesn't even go live differently b/c of her. Nothing has really changed at the end, except that some survive and some don't and it's just war, everyone has trauma afterward and it's bittersweet and it's nice to know things turned out OK for Jutta and Marie-Laure and, well, turns out the diamond is in the sea, but it's very unclear what that means.
Option A: It was the right thing, because the diamond was cursed.** Which means magic and gods exist and there is destiny. And given all the weird connections, this means Werner and Marie-Laure were destined to meet. But apparently they weren't destined to do anything else except him step on a land-mine and her have a kid with someone she wasn't into for the long-term. Besides, the whole ending is at odds with this. No meaningful connections are made, not even between her and his sister.
Option B: The diamond was a rock, a geological curiosity. Which is suggested by the page from its "POV." Therefore, putting it in the sea was an act of superstition and it probably should have been returned to the museum, or perhaps sold by Werner to make sure Jutta lives in comfort and some orphans have a better life than he did. But for some reason he put it back in the sea instead, because that's what you do when you're a decent person who's been given the key to a secret diamond cache without any explanation. For some reason. Oh well.
I mean bittersweet life-goes-on-and-can-be-so-sweet-though-we-have-trauma endings are fine and the stuff of litfic, but they Do Not Mix, IMHO, with cursed diamonds and big buildups where characters with strange secret connections come together. In those, you expect a McKee-style plot that has meaning at the end. (And really I'd be happier if you did it in litfic too, but I understand the meaning of a lot of litfic is that there is no meaning, etc.)
So, great book, honestly, really great book, but I want something more at the end. A lot more.
**ETA: Except that of course, for being in the sea, the diamond is really in a very shallow part of the sea in a totally accessible grotto that people know about where it's almost guaranteed to be found eventually. So if it was about removing it as a cursed force for evil, c'est pas très réussi as the French say--not a big success.
So I just finished All The Light We Cannot See. I know, I'm way behind everybody, my book budget is tiny and I had to borrow it. I think it's amazing, mostly. Incredible prose, a wealth of detail that you can see so vividly, a lot of wild invention and close observation and just reverence for the world and life, it's very beautiful. At the same time I had one big problem with it. I've seen it summed up in only a few reviews this way: "the meeting of the two main characters was brief and unsatisfying."
That's the keyword, unsatisfying. Now admittedly I have very specific opinions on this b/c I subscribe to Robert McKee's plotting philosophy, but the philosophy only tells me why it's unsatisfying, after I feel the actual dissatisfaction. If he had pulled off something that broke the McKee rules and was satisfying anyway, I wouldn't go "oh you broke the McKee rules"--hey if you can do it, great, nothing succeeds like success.
Anyway this rule I speak of is basically this: your climax needs to make a definite statement and a permanent change. It needs to say something about life that the beginning didn't say. It's sort of like two views of life are warring throughout your novel and due to the choices made in the climax and their results--for instance someone takes a risk, perhaps, according to the view of life he chooses, idealistic or cynical, and then we see how that works out for him--show us which side the author comes down on. I may not be explaining this very well b/c I can already hear lots of people saying "naw, stories don't need that" but I've noticed the best stories do have it. It's not like they tell you what to think, but you know more about how the author sees life at the end than at the beginning.
As far as I can tell, the ending of this novel says "keep your eyes open and see all the light you can before you die." "Value the complexities and beauties of life and try to deal bravely with the bad things." It's not a bad message but it was already there at the beginning. The only real change is Werner's choice about whether to finally stand up and protect somebody instead of caving to the Nazis and helping them destroy (however indirectly.) And that's great, but we already knew what being a decent person entails, we're just glad he did it, and then... besides saving Marie-Laure*, nothing came of it.
* This is a very big part of the problem actually. That guy did not come there to kill her. He came for the diamond. If she had done what she contemplated and gone out and handed him the diamond, he wouldn't have killed her. She was blind, she couldn't identify him! I originally thought she had to keep the diamond from him b/c if it really was cursed it would make the Third Reich invincible, but by the end it's super clear that due to his cancer he wanted to keep the diamond for himself. That's all that would've happened, he'd have been cured of cancer and his family would've died, the creep. The characters don't know this but it's true.
There are so many threads connecting Werner and Marie-Laure with all that radio business, there is all this business of the diamond, there is all this sense of destiny, and then it peters out. He dies, I guess he dies as a better person, but his death is meaningless, an accident (does anybody think it was suicide btw?) and obviously if they ended up really Together it would be unrealistic, but he doesn't even go live differently b/c of her. Nothing has really changed at the end, except that some survive and some don't and it's just war, everyone has trauma afterward and it's bittersweet and it's nice to know things turned out OK for Jutta and Marie-Laure and, well, turns out the diamond is in the sea, but it's very unclear what that means.
Option A: It was the right thing, because the diamond was cursed.** Which means magic and gods exist and there is destiny. And given all the weird connections, this means Werner and Marie-Laure were destined to meet. But apparently they weren't destined to do anything else except him step on a land-mine and her have a kid with someone she wasn't into for the long-term. Besides, the whole ending is at odds with this. No meaningful connections are made, not even between her and his sister.
Option B: The diamond was a rock, a geological curiosity. Which is suggested by the page from its "POV." Therefore, putting it in the sea was an act of superstition and it probably should have been returned to the museum, or perhaps sold by Werner to make sure Jutta lives in comfort and some orphans have a better life than he did. But for some reason he put it back in the sea instead, because that's what you do when you're a decent person who's been given the key to a secret diamond cache without any explanation. For some reason. Oh well.
I mean bittersweet life-goes-on-and-can-be-so-sweet-though-we-have-trauma endings are fine and the stuff of litfic, but they Do Not Mix, IMHO, with cursed diamonds and big buildups where characters with strange secret connections come together. In those, you expect a McKee-style plot that has meaning at the end. (And really I'd be happier if you did it in litfic too, but I understand the meaning of a lot of litfic is that there is no meaning, etc.)
So, great book, honestly, really great book, but I want something more at the end. A lot more.
**ETA: Except that of course, for being in the sea, the diamond is really in a very shallow part of the sea in a totally accessible grotto that people know about where it's almost guaranteed to be found eventually. So if it was about removing it as a cursed force for evil, c'est pas très réussi as the French say--not a big success.
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