Held

By: Anne Michaels

Location: FIC MIC

Genre: Fiction, Literary Fiction,  Historical Fiction

Shortlisted for the Booker prize 2024.

Review

If I don’t make this brief, I’ll go on till next week. When a book leaves me breathless and smashed, shattered and hopeful, enters my dreams, epic it seems, I just can’t stop praising and raising it up for all eyes, to see, to touch, to hear, to succumb to its delicate beauty, woven with universal themes, of what it means, to be human, in life or demise. What you believe, it’s here in these pages, it took me ages to turn its leaves, I read every passage and then read it again. And again. However much agony, you survive, you die, but “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” And that’s just the start. Even the white spaces damaged me, in all the best ways. It’s a lot. Like all Anne Michaels, you are changed by her story. I think I’ll go back, and begin the book again.

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion. 

REVIEW FROM GOODREADS

This is gorgeously elusive and yet manifest as, in prose with an internal beat and rhythm, Michaels conjures up a spiritual vision of life that is bound by love without a trace of sentimentality.

Moving through time and space from an injured soldier in a WW1 battlefield to Finland in 2025, this creates a kind of chain of love as characters live through grief, loss, memories and desire.

The image at the heart of this piece is that of being held in care, whether by human love, a kind of spiritual universe or the material memories of ghosts of parents and lovers.

This feels like a very careful piece that has probably been worked on extensively to pare back the extraneous and cut to the core of Michaels' vision. It is consoling and nurturing in tone, spiritual without the limitations of any doctrinal religion.

It's not a book to read when distracted, like while commuting: this invites - and deserves - concentration and quiet, time to embed yourself within the almost hypnotic, meditative rhythm of the prose.

The thing that didn't work for me is the fracturing of the bond between reader and characters: I felt involved with John and Helena in the first two sections and that personal absorption seems to be deliberately diluted to the spiritual aesthetics of the text. I can understand that but it did leave me floundering a bit as I never came to care so much again.

Nevertheless, a quiet book whose profundity comes from the peace it creates.