Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a 2021 historical and speculative fiction novel by American author Anthony Doerr. It was first published on September 28, 2021, in the United States by Charles Scribner's Sons and the United Kingdom by Fourth Estate. The novel centers on an Ancient Greek codex that links characters from fifteenth-century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a twenty-second-century starship.

Synopsis

Cloud Cuckoo Land is the story of five characters spanning eight centuries, told in anachronic order. Their stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century, and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky. In his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds.

Anna and Omeir

In the fifteenth-century Byzantine Empire, Anna is an orphaned young girl living with her older sister Maria in Constantinople, where they work for a group of church seamstresses. Anna secretly learns to read Greek and, with the help of a local boy, takes out old books from a tower to sell to Italian collectors. Anna observes people fleeing as the city's defeat by the amassing Ottoman army becomes more likely. She discovers a copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land and keeps it with her.

Meanwhile, Omeir is a boy born with a cleft lip. He grows up in a remote cottage, where his grandfather teaches him how to live off the land. The family's cow births two strong twin oxen named Moonlight and Tree, and Omeir becomes skilled at handling them. Omeir is conscripted into the army, but the oxen die while helping build cannons.

Constantinople falls, and Anna flees with the codex. She comes across Omeir, now a deserter. The two return to Omeir's family's home and Anna eventually acclimates. In the next decades, Anna teaches him and their sons Aethon's story. After Anna's death, Omeir takes the codex to Urbino in hopes of preserving it.

Zeno

Zeno Ninis lives in midcentury Lakeport, Idaho with his stepmother and finds solace in the library. He volunteers for the Korean War but is taken as a prisoner of war. In the camp, he befriends and falls in love with Rex, an English classicist and fellow POW. Rex introduces Zeno to the Greek language; the two are separated after Zeno does not join Rex in an escape attempt.

After the war, Zeno begins working for the Lakeport library. He reconnects with Rex, who reignites a love of translation in Zeno. After Rex's death, the Cloud Cuckoo Land codex is rediscovered and Zeno attempts to translate the surviving fragments. In 2020, he befriends a group of fifth-graders who decide to put on the story as a play.

Seymour

Throughout the early 21st century, Seymour, a disturbed autistic youngster raised by a single mother, is attached to a wild owl that lives nearby and is increasingly dismayed by deforestation in Lakeport. Seymour learns about climate change and becomes caught up with a group of ecoterrorists. They convince him that he must blow up a business next door to the library to prove himself.

Seymour brings bombs to the library on the night Zeno and the children are putting on a dress rehearsal. Zeno manages to take the bomb away and dies when it explodes. Seymour is arrested and spends the following decades performing prison labor for the Ilium Corporation, which is developing the Atlas, a virtual map of Earth. Seymour is tasked with removing unsavory images from the Atlas, but eventually subverts this directive by hiding the true photographs of Earth's climate changed-induced decline under owl-themed items.

Decades later, Seymour gets back in touch with the now-grown children and gifts them copies of Zeno's translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Konstance

In the twenty-second century, Konstance is a young girl aboard the Argos, a generation starship heading for a planet called Beta Oph2. Konstance's father frequently read Cloud Cuckoo Land to her. After a plague strikes the ship, Konstance's father traps her in a vault with only the ship's artificial intelligence, Sibyl, for company.

Konstance spends her days exploring the Atlas in the ship's virtual library, eventually finding the Lakeport library. She decides to physically transcribe Cloud Cuckoo Land. Eventually, Konstance discovers the real images of Earth's decay that were disguised by Seymour. She learns that her great-grandmother was Rachel, one of the children saved by Zeno in the library, who had received a copy of the translation and passed Aethon's story on to Konstance's father.

Konstance investigates the Argos' origins and learns that it is not a starship, but an advanced bunker in Greenland. She sets a fire to convince Sibyl to let her out and finds the rest of the Argos abandoned. Years later, Konstance lives with a pre-industrial community in Greenland and tells Aethon's story to her son.

Background

Doerr stated in Cloud Cuckoo Land's "Author's Note" that his novel draws on several other books, most notably Antonius Diogenes's now-lost "globetrotting tale", Wonders Beyond Thule. The Cloud Cuckoo Land codex is a fictional book-within-a-book that Doerr wrote, but credited to Diogenes. Ideas for the fable come from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which Doerr says tells the story of a man turning into a donkey "with far more zest and skill than I do". Many of Zeno's experiences as a prisoner of war in Korea appear in Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War (2002) by Lewis H. Carlson.