"Held" by Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels’s Held contains a series of oblique glimpses into the lives of World War I survivors, early British photographers, and present-day globe-trotting doctors to illuminate the devotion, heartache, and abiding love between mortals. Held is a book- length elegy, written in refined but robust language, which achieves striking effects while showing an elegance almost never seen in a piece of this length. It’s superb.

Different sections of this novel portray fraught moments in for people as they yearn for the touch of a loved one, or dream nostalgically, or shed tears of joy with the love of their lives. Characters shine in their moment, whether brightening, illuminating, or vexing. There are cogent, convincing passages here, that show these episodes in high relief. One example: when married, loving doctors Mara and Alan contemplate the newly pregnant Mara’s impending sojourn to a war zone:

We no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we  live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other—the apartment block, the school, the nursing home—citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash.”

Then, momentary character Lia, one of the intelligent, seeking women in these pages, meets an artist in a wood in winter in France in 1910. The artist, a photographer, tells her if you leave the shutter open long enough, anything that moves will disappear.  

She thought several things then. That a photographer’s entire life’s work would add up to only a few minutes of time. And that one could make a long exposure—say, thirty years of married life, or family life in a kitchen, infants growing into adults—and all that the photographic plate would show was an empty room. But it would not be empty, instead it would be full of life, invisible and real."

Such reflections feature prominently in the female characters of this book. An ultimate female character of deep reflection and renowned ability, Marie Curie, appears at a fraught moment toward the end of the book, when she has fled Paris for southern Britain, to escape a storm of controversy, unjustly fomented against her.

But this is not a polemic, or it is polemical only in the fairest and most even-handed of ways. The men who love the women in this book are emotional, fanatically loyal, deferent, and devoted.

It’s a hard book to characterize, except in the depths of the emotion displayed. Its diction is of the highest level—and this aspect never flags. Poetry abounds through the sentences; the very ordering of words draws us along so that, even if we never encounter the character again, we’re delighted with the vivid detail and the cogent  emotional content with which they are highlighted. We feel the ache of yearning, and understand through Michaels’s mastery, that it is a constant in human relations; she achieves this through her exacting use of language, her poetry.

This is memorable, heartbreaking, and hopeful. A small gem of a novel that will hold your attention with the author’s challenging concept and her unerring execution.