Book review: Held opens with a wounded soldier on a World War I battlefield. He is moving in and out of consciousness, drifting back to his ancestors, fishers who stitched deliberate mistakes into their ganseys (jerseys) so people lost at sea could be identified and returned to their family. He remembers meeting his artist wife, Helena, who seeks warmth in a pub after getting off at the wrong train station. “How could events of such fragile chance feel exactly like inevitability,” he thinks, dazed. “In the distance, in the heavy snowfall, John saw fragments of her – elliptic, stroboscopic, Helena’s dark hat, her gloves. It was hard yet to tell how far away she was.”
It is an extraordinary opening from Anne Michaels, the equal of the opening pages of her bestselling 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces. In that, a young Holocaust survivor is rescued as he stumbles out of his hiding place in a bog.
Held is a complex novel. Its structure is fragmented, like particles of a story, revolving again and again around love, solace, memory and the persistence of love, perhaps even beyond death. If the novel was rearranged and plotted in a linear fashion it would be a family tree through four generations.
But the tale moves back and forth in time, each chapter marked by a place and date. We see Helena and John, the wounded soldier and photographer, who cannot understand the ghosts he sees in his photos. Their daughter, Anna, is a doctor married to a hat maker, whose conception is told in another fragment. Anna’s daughter, Mara, is a nurse wondering whether to leave her husband, a shattered war photographer, for one more time at the front.
Sometimes we see a family member, sometimes we see them through their loved ones, and sometimes we are left to piece together where the fragment fits. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There is Madame Curie escaping her notoriety in Paris with her friend Hertha Ayrton, a physicist; a musician couple escaping the Soviet Union after composing insufficiently socialist music.
Michaels sews this together by motifs that run through the stories: photographs, glimpses of a room in Paris, woods, hats, chemicals, X-rays, snow. They provide the weave of the novel, but perhaps Michaels is also hinting at something else – that, like scientists, readers, historians and lovers, we are always trying to discern a pattern through scraps and moments.
For a novel that starts in war and has constant echoes of it, Held is lovely in its quietude. The judges who shortlisted it for this year’s Booker Prize said they had “surrendered” to its quiet. Characters lie in bed together, talk, muse, touch. Michaels is remarkably good at gentle conversation. There is a beautiful scene of male friendship when old friends gather in a snowstorm with the power out, to comfort one whose daughter has left for war.
The novel is rich in language and ideas, posing questions of humanity and science as much as telling the story; it is profound and intimate. But what might divide readers is what one expects from the tale in a novel. When Fugitive Pieces was published, it was considered a novel of poetry. Held goes further. At times the reader is borne along by the power of her words but adrift from the characters. I was surprised when re-reading Held to find chapters I couldn’t recall, though I remembered the language.
In the end, Held moves into the future. It is the next year, in the Gulf of Finland with Aimo, probably the son of the Russian composers kicked out of the Soviet Union, following a woman he has a connection with through a city. They meet, they part, they turn back to look at the other. “Who can say what happens when we are remembered,” muses Michaels.
Held, by Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury, $33), is out now.
