I've only just finished this, and it's far too early for me to have digested this book and taken from it what it has to offer. This is a poetic, evanescent story. Well, stories. It begins with John, lying wounded on a WWI battlefield. Then memories and thoughts take us to his first meeting Helen, hs wife: and to their love, their struggles and to some of his career as a photographer. We move many times in this book - not just geographically, but in time - to Estonia, to France, to various places in the British Isles, from the late 19th century to a couple of years into the future: here, there, back and forward again in place and time. We meet John's antecedents and those who come after him, perhaps belatedly realising what the relationship with John is. It's a bit of a kaleidoscope: an image realised quickly disappears to be replaced by another. All seem to be linked by trauma, by pain, because being in war zones is a common thread throughout the book - the book is held together by recurring motifs. This book is fluid, luminous, and I'll need to read it again to begin to understand it properly. And I want to. ( )

If you are looking for a plot-driven narrative with a simple timeline, settings and character development, this book may not be your cup of tea. Instead, it is a novel of ideas that suppresses those traditional narrative elements in favor of a more lyrical approach to a meditation on the nature of existence. Michaels uses bits and pieces of linked stories laid out in random order as her vehicle to develop her ideas. While the lack of a more traditional structure can be an effective means to explore metaphysical ideas and evoke a mood of mystery, it leaves one with the daunting task of putting the elements together into a coherent whole. However, coherence may not be what Michael is really after here.

However, if one does make the effort to unwind Michaels’ elliptical narrative into something more coherent (I’m not suggesting that this is necessary or even advisable to fully understand or appreciate this novel), the settings and plots are as follows. We have four generations of women living between 1902 and 2025. Helena is an artist married to a photographer, John, who was wounded in WWI. They live in Yorkshire following the war. Anna is her daughter. She is a combat physician married to an Italian hatmaker living in Suffolk. Mara, Anna’s daughter, also is an international crisis worker married to a war correspondent. And a second Anna is Mara’s daughter. The settings are mainly in Britain, but also include the trenches in France, Northern France, Brest-Litovsk, Paris, and Finland. Marie Curie and Earnest Rutherford also make cameo appearances. None of these characters is particularly well-developed and the plots are anecdotal at best, delivered in nonchronological order, and only connected elliptically. These are not necessarily flaws, however, since the writing is quite lyrical, and the narrative reads more like a long poem than a traditional novel.

Central among the loosely connected themes in the novel is the notion that the dead may persist with the living in some form. “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” Michaels evokes this idea with multiple images including messages woven into drowned sailors’ sweaters by their wives, mirages of the deceased in developed photographs, x-rays, the eerie light emitted by Marie Curies’ purified Radium, dreams, and supernatural visitations. ( )

This novel is a mystical novel. “Attunement, boundaries, boundaries crossed. A bare micrometer.” From the first verse of the eighth chapter, whose character, Paavo, seems surely based on the contemporary classical composer of mystical and sacred works, Arvo Pärt. “The precipice of one word placed next to another, one note next to another.” The poet, the composer; imagine an invisible “l” inserted into “word”: the mystic.

One world next to another and the invisible boundary between them. Other than the mystic, suspect to science and the modern rational world, who is most attuned this locality? The lover, perhaps. The one left behind in grief, seems likely. Persons occupying these roles are the characters of Held, and they move in and out of the novel, related through family over time and space, their absence in one chapter proving their existence in another.

For “it is absence that proves what was once present,” Michaels writes, chapter 1. Here's a mystical experience: “He felt a presence, a thermal current, a tremor across the entire surface of things, like a heat mirage. A deepening, not a darkening. He knew he’d felt it because immediately he felt something even more certain and powerful: its dousing.”

That’s how it goes with mystical experiences. Often a brief flash and then gone. Unprovable to anyone. Unmeasurable. Unbidden by extremity likely to be regarded as suspect, delusion; and indeed, we have to be aware of this possibility, of tricks played on the mind. In other circumstances, in love and grief, we have more sympathy, at least, no?

A bereaved son in chapter 6: “I walked down to the water. I felt an overwhelming presence, the place itself seemed alive with strangeness. I watched the lake take in the darkness of the sky. No stars. The sense of a presence grew almost overpowering. Then, suddenly, the place was destitute. The presence was gone, though nothing outward had changed.” The son concludes: “If my father could have chosen any way to convince me of the soul, it would have been exactly this way - not by a sensed presence, but by its sudden absence.”

Can science uncover the truth of these experiences or is there a boundary line not to be crossed in this novel that is thinking about crossed boundaries, both of the mystical and of parallels to it in the natural world? A chemist muses on periodic table element 85, astatine: “We don’t know much about it, because the instant a sample is large enough to see, it vanishes. It appears when uranium decays, its most stable isotopes exist for less than a second - just long enough to detect its existence.” Interesting, but still dealing with something scientifically measurable, however brief its presence. An analogy, at least.

Back to Paavo/Pärt:

“When we are moved, Paavo thought, when we feel something beyond us, it is the boundary, the limit of the body that allows us to recognise it. Limit is proof of the beyond. Not the self, but what lies beyond the self. He would not be surprised if physics made sense of it someday; but only because science is bent on proving it doesn’t exist. Scientists will rip us to shreds looking for it, but it will not be found where they are looking. He remembered a joke, about someone who’d lost something and was searching across the street, under a street lamp. Why are you looking for it there? Because the light is better.”

The science/faith dichotomy and relationship is an interesting topic, but now I'm perhaps suggesting it to be more of a focus of the novel than it actually is. This is not [b:Transcendent Kingdom|48570454|Transcendent Kingdom|Yaa Gyasi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1571925550l/48570454._SY75_.jpg|73528567]. It is more poetic and mystical, perhaps broaching science simply because it can be a blockage to accepting certain experiences, and one may need to find a way around. “When we grew eyes did others of our kind believe us mad for what we saw?” Michaels, chapter 11, verse 3.

“Our machines govern our behaviour, thought Hertha, but they will never teach us meaning.”

This novel is a mystical novel. ( )

Poetic, impressionistic, beautiful, sad.

See also: Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness

Quotes

We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever? (3)

What we give cannot be taken from us. (15)

Impossible to name the exact moment night falls, elusive as the moment sleep overtakes us. (16)

Would he know the moment of his death or would it be like night falling. (18)

...the regrets of one generation passed down as hopes for the next, the germs and spores of limitation and expectation we absorb from the social atmosphere. How a bird struggling against the wind can appear motionless. (31)

This was a new world, with new degrees of grief, many more degrees in the scale of blessedness and torment. (56)

Perhaps we are sent only exactly the kind of proof we can believe. (58)

How can we conflate invisibility with inexistence? (75)

....without any credit in the bank of belief, he had been found by them. (129)

Was rescue always a kind of love? Peter didn't know....but he did know, with certainty, that love was always a kind of rescue. (149)

"I think we remember someone by living. I think that's the way to remember." (157)

"Do we really need our own misery to teach us to be kind?" (201)

HIstory is liminal, the threshold between what we know and can't know.... (217) ( )

4.5⭐️

Held by Anne Michaels opens on a battlefield in France in 1917, where John, a soldier, lies injured after a blast leaves him floating in and out of consciousness. His mind wanders as he reflects upon the significant moments and people in his life. We meet John again in 1930, running a photography business in Yorkshire with memories of battle and the devastation and loss that followed haunting his every thought, even finding their way into the pictures he takes. Though married to Helen and attempting to lead a normal life – not an easy journey for a man whose physical and emotional scars serve as a constant reminder of how much he last lost. We follow John's family and those connected to them through four generations following the tragedies, relationships and challenges they face and the choices they make as they find their way in the world and how the past and memories of the people they have loved and lost leave an indelible imprint on their lives.

Written in elegant poetic prose, heartbreaking yet hopeful, blending fictional and real characters and significant moments from history spanning over a century, this novel is a memorable read. I’ll admit that it took a while to adjust to the fragmented non-linear nature of the narrative but when I began to connect the dots, I was immersed in this thought-provoking short novel that revolves around family, love, loss and fate, the invisible threads that connect people and the ties that bind the past, present and the future into a continuous saga of the human experience.

If you read this short novel with a bit of patience, allowing for moments of pause and reflection, this will prove a rewarding experience. There were parts of this novel I read multiple times and would love to read again. This was my first time reading Anne Michaels and I shall definitely explore more of her work.

Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the digital review copy via NetGalley. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. This novel was published on January 30, 2024.

“There are so many ways the dead show us they are with us. Sometimes they stay deliberately absent, in order to prove themselves by returning. Sometimes they stay close and then leave in order to prove they were with us. Sometimes they bring a stag to a graveyard, a cardinal to a fence, a song on the wireless as soon as you turn it on. Sometimes they bring a snowfall.” ( )