A poetic gem on this year’s pleasingly eclectic Booker Prize Longlist, Held by Anne Michaels explores the many ways that the dead walk alongside us. Spanning time and space, her haunting and humane novel portrays four generations of one family and how their choices, traumas, and loves resonate through decades, if not centuries. From a World War I soldier hovering between life and death on the battlefield, to his granddaughter’s career as a war medic and her own bequeathal, Michaels threads their lives together in a meditation on mortality and inherited history.
A heads-up for readers: Michaels is a novelist with a poet’s heart (acclaimed for both verse and prose), and her lyrical tale takes a very loose, non-linear form, flowing between characters and eras; this is utterly absorbing once acclimatised to.
Her story opens on a French battlefield in 1917, where we find John, formerly a photographer, now a desperately wounded soldier. The snow is falling but he does not feel the cold. Somewhere out there, he thinks, his missing boots are waiting to be found, maybe even his feet. The blast has probably stolen his hearing too but his thoughts roam free and memories seep into his battered bones.
Visions of his mother’s apron, a glimpse of her weathered black shoes, unremoved as she takes to her bed at the shock of becoming a widow. Recollections crowd in of the early days of his relationship with his sweetheart, Helena, the feel of the velvet collar on her tweed coat. How many times, he wonders, had he felt that velvet when helping her into her coat.
‘A finite number. Every pleasure in a day, or a life, numbered.’
As John awaits death in this filthy field, he considers too the finite nature of life, and why it is that we accept this while believing that death lasts forever.
It’s a question that remains unanswered that day, as the Grim Reaper spares John, and when we next meet him, it’s 1920 and he’s living with Helena in Yorkshire, once again a portrait photographer. His studio is popular with homecoming soldiers, and their families, who are keen to believe that ordinary life has resumed, and grateful for John’s delicacy over obscuring disfigurements or amputations.
He perseveres, with war wounds both physical and mental, until the day a ghost appears in one of his photographs, (the late mother of the sitter), a ‘miraculous chemistry’ and to John’s mind, perhaps setting him a task he’s been chosen to undertake.
A contemplation of our scientific and material world in tandem with spirituality, Held weaves back and forth through time, from a 1903 Parisian dinner with Marie and Pierre Curie to The Gulf of Finland in 2025. The trauma of war is a predictable constant, but so too is love, surviving each generation, and gloriously evoked in a later passage, where a character intuits her dead father’s presence.
‘She knew that humans have felt this way always; as simple as seeing deer at the edge of a forest…no need to explain it any more than one needed to explain any of our senses- hearing, or tasting, or feeling the wind.’
Beautiful.
Held by Anne Michaels is published by Bloomsbury, 241 pages.
