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The Big Picture
- Netflix’s adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See is set to premiere in November, bringing to life the widely acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
- The historical fiction novel, inspired by real events and set during World War II, explores the resilience of the French city of Saint-Malo and the power of mass communication.
- The story follows two protagonists, Marie-Laure and Werner, whose lives intersect as they navigate the Battle of Saint-Malo and the role of radio in the war. The novel also highlights the impact of war on civilians and the complexities of heroism.
In April, Netflix unveiled the first trailer for its eagerly anticipated adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, which is slated to premiere on this streamer this November. First published in 2014, All the Light We Cannot See sold over 15 million copies and won practically every literary award in existence. Its 200-week stint on the New York Times Bestseller List was a monumental feat and a testament to how profoundly author Anthony Doerr‘s work affected readers around the globe. Almost a decade since its release, Netflix’s limited series is helmed by director Shawn Levy with a teleplay by Steven Knight, and stars Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, Louis Hofmann, and industry newcomer Aria Mia Loberti.
Although it takes place before, during, and after the events of World War II, All the Light We Cannot See is a work of historical fiction. Doerr invented the novel’s dual protagonists, but their individual arcs and the European setting were heavily inspired by and structured around real events, specifically the pivotal Battle of Saint-Malo. This French city’s historical resilience, combined with an overheard conversation on an everyday train ride, planted the seeds for Light’s rivetingly humanist story.
What Inspired ‘All the Light We Cannot See’?
Anthony Doerr spent 10 years developing All the Light We Cannot See. A train ride in 2004 sparked his initial idea. In a 2014 interview with NPR, Doerr recalls how angry a stranger was about his losing cell phone signal. “He got kind of angry, a little embarrassingly angry,” Doerr said, “unreasonably angry. And I just remember thinking, what he’s forgetting — really what we’re all forgetting all the time — is that this is a miracle. He’s using this little receiver and transmitter, this little radio in his pocket, to send messages at the speed of light rebounding between towers to somebody maybe thousands of miles away.”
The incident stuck with Doerr and rabbit-trailed. If he wanted to highlight the magic of technology, he needed to set the story during an era when mass communication was still a novelty. Doerr also had an accompanying seminal image: the author told Powell’s Books, “I had a boy trapped somewhere and a girl reading a story to him [over the radio].”
Roughly a year later Doerr visited Saint-Malo, a coastal French city. He was intrigued by how such an ancient town survived a military onslaught. As Doerr described to HuffPost in 2015: “You walk its cobbled lanes, you smell the tides, you hear the echoes of your footsteps, and you think: this city has survived for well over a thousand years. But Saint-Malo was almost entirely destroyed by American artillery in 1944, in the final months of World War II, and was painstakingly put back together, block by granite block, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That a place could so thoroughly hide its own incineration, and that my own country was responsible for that incineration, fascinated me.”
Who Are the Protagonists of ‘All the Light We Cannot See’?
From there, Doerr’s idea crystallized. The two young protagonists would converge during the 1944 Battle of Saint-Malo, a month-long campaign that was part of the Allied forces’ mission to liberate France from Nazi control. Doerr knew the boy and girl were trapped inside Saint-Malo as the battle for its freedom raged around them on all sides. The girl would be reading a book as the boy listened via radio. The invention and popularity of the radio presented a natural opportunity to examine how European resistance fighters weaponized this technological miracle against the Nazis while Germany used it to spread Third Reich propaganda. (Allied radio operators had one of the war’s most vital and life-threatening jobs.)
In All the Light We Cannot See, the girl Doerr imagined is Marie-Laure LeBlanc (Loberti) and the boy is Werner Pfennig (Hofmann). Marie lives in Paris with her father Daniel LeBlanc (Ruffalo), a locksmith employed at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Germany’s invasion forces them to flee Paris and stay with Daniel’s brother Etienne (Laurie) in Saint-Malo. In Germany, Werner is a technological wunderkind with a gift for repairing equipment, specifically radios. The Nazi military recruits Werner for his skills, and he becomes a soldier responsible for locating and eliminating resistance broadcasters.
What Happened at the Battle of Saint-Malo?
Because Saint-Malo was a town along the English Channel with a large port, German forces seized control in 1940 and used it as a key naval base during the French Occupation. It was part of France’s Occupied Zone and one of the cities that made up the Atlantic Wall, Germany’s effort to hold off potential sieges from the United Kingdom. They built extra fortifications onto the city’s defenses, including fortresses stationed with loyal Nazi commanders.
On June 6, 1944, Allied soldiers landed on Normandy’s beaches and commenced what remains the largest sea-based war campaign of all time. The battle to liberate Saint-Malo lasted for roughly a month — August 4 to September 2 — before the Allies liberated the civilians. At the time, almost 80% of Saint-Malo’s architecture was destroyed.
Anthony Doerr conducted immense research during his 10-year writing process. He revisited Saint-Malo to get a true feel for the city. He read personal diaries and incorporated incidental details about era-accurate furniture and equipment he found in old Sears catalogs. The propaganda broadcasts transcribed in the novel “are real excerpts from real speeches,” he told Powell’s.
Is the Sea of Flames Real?
All the Light We Cannot See also has a MacGuffin object propelling its plot and themes. Nazi soldier Reinhold von Rumpel (Lars Eidinger) pursues a diamond called the Sea of Flames, a supposedly cursed relic capable of making its owner immortal at the cost of that person’s happiness. Marie-Laure comes into possession of the Sea of Flames, which leads the two onto an inevitable collision course.
“The closest analog [to the Sea of Flames] is in the British Natural History Museum,” Doerr said. “It’s a sapphire that people have believed is cursed for a long time.” Instead of a real object, Doerr’s inspiration for the fictional diamond was more generalized: harrowing images of Louvre employees racing against time to pack priceless art before Germany invaded. “There are some incredible photographs of Rembrandts being crated up and the halls of the Louvre becoming packing yards with straw and twine and crate,” Doerr said. “Then I started thinking about the Museum of Natural History of Paris. What kind of treasures were there?”
Remembering History Has Never Been More Important
When it came to writing fiction about a historical atrocity that the media has already routinely examined, it was important for Doerr to illustrate something new. Given that almost the entire World War II generation has passed away, he asserted that storytellers have even more responsibility not to paint history into simplistic “black-and-white” narratives. “My attempt in this novel is to suggest the humanity of both Werner and Marie-Laure,” he told HuffPost, “to propose more complicated portraits of heroes and villains; to hint at, as World War II fades from the memories of its last survivors and becomes history, all the light we cannot see.”
Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See premieres on November 2.
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