R&V Reflections: Cloud Cuckoo Land

One night when I was in college, I started reading a Christian romance novel about a prostitute who was rescued by a devout young farmer outside of San Francisco during the era of the California Gold Rush. I couldn’t put it down. I stayed up all night to finish the tale of Michael Hosea and Angel, captivated by this incredible story of love and rescue.

The book was Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers. It sent me deep into the Old Testament to find the origins of her story, a story that resonated so much with Rivers that she was compelled to write a whole novel about it. What I found there in the book of Hosea struck a chord with me, too. I could relate to that ancient woman and her wandering eyes and her longing heart, but even more than that, I wanted to believe the voice of the God who wooed her, the God who promised to give her back all she had lost and restore her.

The best stories have power. They transcend time and survive because they are good and real and true and beautiful. They hold up because they give us hope. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

That’s ultimately the word Doerr has for readers of his masterpiece, Cloud Cuckoo Land: don’t lose hope. No matter how tragic, flawed, and desperate the situation may seem, there’s more to the story, so much more beyond this one moment. The mundane, seemingly random, and arbitrary decisions that make up each day all add up to something far greater than we can imagine.

And isn’t that fantastic?

Cloud Cuckoo Land stretches across time and space, from Constantinople in 1453 to Idaho in 2020 to some far distant, unknown future, to understand what survival looks like when everything seems to be falling apart. These three storylines are linked by a much older tale, “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” a fictional story attributed to a first- or second-century author invented by Doerr. The tale is a companion to Homer’s Odyssey and other epics that follow heroes along grand adventures in search of a kind of paradise.

In many ways, Doerr’s novel is a series of apocalypses across human history. The world in Constantinople looks like it is going to end. The world on the verge of a pandemic looks like it’s going to end. The world in the far-distant future looks like it’s over. And for all intents and purposes, the world as the characters know it is over. Nothing will ever be the same.

For a people living in an age of apocalypse, surrounded by doomsayers on the left and on the right, Doerr’s tale promises that there is hope at the end of suffering. Really.

It can be hard to believe here in the land of dissent and polarized political times. No matter which news service you tap into, people are saying it feels like the world is about to come to an end. There’s suffering in the Middle East. There’s suffering in Ukraine. There’s suffering in Africa. There’s suffering in pockets of every community in every country on every continent. 

I try to keep my mind off all this suffering. But simply trying to distract myself doesn’t do away with the awful reality of pain, hunger, violence, and war in the world. Suffering insists on being seen. If we are truly at a breaking point, the world as we know it will never be the same. When I feel overwhelmed by the world’s hurt, turning to stories like Doerr’s help me see the hope in this moment.

The truth is that the world as we know it is always changing, and yet it is also always the same. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun,” says the Teacher in Ecclesiastes (1:9 NIV). “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” (Ecclesiastes 3:1 NIV).

These changing seasons and their lack of newness provide us with hope because life goes on. All things pass away, but faith, hope, and love remain.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel that embodies the faith, hope, and love of Christ without ever uttering the name of Jesus. In this way, it’s kind of like the book of Esther in the Bible. The most profound stories of human resilience are able to communicate the truths of God’s love and the realities of our universal human experience without ever using God’s name. It’s true, even if it is fiction, because that faith, hope, and love are incarnate in its characters. 

The best stories show us how interconnected we are, how even the most tragic stories don’t end in tragedy but resurrect in hope, how even when we feel alone, we are not alone. The world ends and begins again, a golden thread of love stretching through and connecting every single life in this grand, all-encompassing narrative. And we get to be part of the story.