Held, the new novel by Anne Michaels, is a haunting meditation on our need to find meaning, to rediscover hope after deep loss, to rationalise the past and shape the future. Michaels’ prose is luminous and crystalline, a reflection of her equally brilliant poetry (she is a former poet laureate of Toronto).
Beginning with a First World War battlefield near the River Aisne in 1917, where a soldier lies injured in the snow, the narrative is fragmentary, moving backwards and forwards in time and generations through war and peace and as far into the future as 2025.
Against a backdrop of themes such as the development of photography, Marie Curie’s discoveries, the struggle for women’s suffrage, Darwin’s radical ideas, different characters play out their individual lives.
Like photography, the focus alternately widens and narrows, sharpening and delineating, softening and broadening, moving between the intricacies of day-to-day existence, and the force fields of history. Like a transformative poem, or a song, it’s a book that needs to be read and re-read to fully absorb the intense inner life of the words on the page.
As in real life, there’s a sadness that underscores the ostensibly ordinary lives of the characters but also a sense of exhilaration that life will always transcend death. A question asked by one of the women characters continues to resonate with me, a question that seems particularly topical and one we must go on asking ourselves: ‘Do you think it’s possible … for good to survive long enough to outlast, to wait, to endure, while evil consumes itself?’
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHORAnne Michaels’ books have been translated into more than forty-five languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas.
She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice longlisted for the IMPAC Award. Her novel, Fugitive Pieces, was adapted as a feature film. From 2015 to 2019, she was Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her new novel, Held, will be released in November 2023.
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