In 1974, philosopher and literary critic Hayden White caused a small furore with his magnum opus Metahistory. In the deconstructionist spirit of Jacques Derrida, White challenged the “objectivity” of historiography, drawing attention to its dependence on narrative to convey meaning about the past.
Ever since, novelists and scholars have been approaching the historical novel with a heightened concern for its subjectivity.
Review: Held – Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury)
Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels has been experimenting with blends of fiction and history as far back as her critically acclaimed debut poetry collection The Weight of Oranges (1986) and her Orange Prize winning novel Fugitive Pieces (1996). A deep philosophical exploration of the subjective nature of historical knowledge and memory runs through her smart and poignant new novel Held.
Composed over a period of almost 15 years, Held does not resemble a conventional social realist novel. Rather than focusing on large-scale dramatic happenings, it quietly and discreetly focuses on the internal lives of its characters.
The novel ambitiously spans more than a century. It moves from Cambrai in 1917 to North Yorkshire in 1920, London in 1951, Suffolk in 1984 and 1964, Sceaux in 1910, Brest-Litovsk in 1980, Paris in 1908, Dorset in 1912, back to Suffolk in 1910, before concluding in the Gulf of Finland in 2025.
The result is rich, poetic and formally complex. Each of the novel’s 12 chapters is brief, fragmented and full of erudite meditations on the nature of history, memory and humanity. Each is set in a water-lined location, giving a sense of continuity to the novel’s sweep through time.
Michaels comments, meta-fictively, on the nebulous form of Held when she has a character reflect on the “sea, where, like memory […] the elusiveness of the form is the form”.
Women hold the line
Held depicts four generations of one family held together by four strong, intelligent, earnest women.
The family line begins with Helena, a self-doubting but prodigiously talented artist. She runs a photography studio with her husband John, who has returned injured from World War I. Their daughter Anna is introduced with her husband, a Marxist hat maker from Piedmont. We then encounter Anna’s daughter Mara, a doctor, who is, like her grandfather John, drawn to conflict zones, serving in field hospitals in France during WWI. Finally, there is Mara’s daughter Anna, named after her maternal grandmother.
Helena, Anna, Mara and Anna share a tendency to agonise over the ways in which they inhabit and find meaning in their historical situations, whether through art, raising children, or politics and social justice.
Their careful deliberations connect them to identifiable historical counterparts. In chapter nine, for example, the physicist Ernest Rutherford and the renowned chemists Marie and Pierre Curie appear. Rutherford and the Curies are gathered in Paris in June 1908 at Paul Langerin’s house by the Rue Gazen to celebrate Curie’s doctorate. The conversation quickly turns to the prominent medium of the day, Madame Palladino.
The discussion reflects the conflict at the heart of the novel. At the centre of Held is the dichotomy between a scientific worldview and the more elusive forces that shape life. In grappling with this theme, Michaels adheres to the principle the Serbian-American poet and editor Charles Simic outlined in The Life of Images (2015), where Simic argues that “all the arts are about the impossible predicament” and that writing is a “rough translation from wordlessness into words”.
As a character in Held reflects while standing beside the River Orwell in Sussex in 1984, “it impossible for words to fully witness and describe what the world was”.
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Aftermath and image making
Like Michaels’ earlier novel Fugitive Pieces, Held begins with a young male character grappling with the ramifications of war. It opens in 1917 on a battlefield in France, near Cambrai and the River Escaut, where John lies wounded beside a younger and also badly wounded soldier. The snowy battlefield is drawn in concise but vivid images: “the shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird.”
Michaels crafts a series of beautiful, annihilating lines that imbue the setting with a hyperreal wash and a rich sense of atmosphere. She relies on the resonance of imagery and objects to evoke emotions in a way that recalls the concept of the “objective correlative”, which was coined by the American painter Washington Allston in 1840 and later applied to literature by T.S. Eliot in his essay Hamlet and His Problems (1919).
In the description of the mist that “smouldered like cremation fires in the rain”, there is the looming sense of an ending. John’s reluctance to accept the reality of the young man’s death is woven through the imagery. We bear witness to “how alert the dead soldier looked, how absolutely, utterly awake”.
Yet to focus purely on the artistry of Michaels’ image-making betrays the intellectual rigour of the aphoristic reflections scattered through this nimble novel: “faith uses the mechanism of doubt to prove itself”; “loneliness is not emptiness but negation”. In these moments, Michaels’ forces the reader to slow down and savour the gravitas of these observations.
In the fashion of Michael Ondaatje’s postmodern masterpiece The English Patient (1992), the stillness of John’s wounded body frees his wandering mind. Michaels burrows into John’s past, carefully rendering his consciousness. Through the mist settling on the battlefield, he has a vision of his wife: “fragments of her – elliptic, stroboscopic – Helena’s dark hat, her gloves”.
In Held, the past is always lurking in the present moment. Michaels superimposes the recollected images of Helena onto the visual backdrop of John’s surroundings, merging images of past and present to capture the sensation of fading in and out of consciousness.
As a series of thoughts, images, feelings and philosophical reflections pass through John’s mind, we discover he is intelligent, precise and mathematical. He is deeply introspective and uses adjectives like “Lagrangian”. He is the kind of person who “did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something to be absolutely precise”.
John’s stream of consciousness moves from intimate memories of the early days of falling in love with Helena to recollections of his childhood, his late mother and his father, who gave up being a sailor for the life of a farmer. He imagines drowning at sea. The longer he lies there, the less the war seems like a concrete reality. It becomes a symbol of the haunting inevitability of loss: a reminder of the transience of life that imbues the narrative with an intensified sense of beauty and meaning.
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Poetry and the novel
Held is a book of symbols, metaphors, vivid imagery and motifs. All the pleasures of poetry flourish in the weave of Michaels’ concise prose fragments. Her formal experiments reveal the possibilities of the historical novel when it combines qualities of poetry. Behind the subjective worlds of the characters’ inner lives, Michaels’ research into history and the science of knowledge is felt, but it never detracts from the unity of the work.
In many respects, Michaels has written the novel Virginia Woolf prophesied in her essay The Narrow Bridge of Art (1927). Outlining her vision for The Waves, Woolf predicted that in the future we will be forced to come up with a new name for a new kind of book, one that “will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry”.
The organisational logic of Held feels more akin to that of poetry than the novel. Michaels’ subordination of plot to her more meditative and abstract concerns is one of the many reasons. The narrative is more spatial than linear, the novel cohering around thematic links and symbolic repetitions, rather than causal plot connections.
But commenting on the elusiveness of the form seems almost redundant in a work so invested in dissolving its own boundaries. Held is a novel in which the impermanence of things outweighs concrete and temporal distinctions. The lyricism closes gaps in time: “a field becomes a battlefield; becomes a field again”.
Like Michaels’ poetry, this tender but fiercely truncated novel combines its sense of loss, silence, history and identity with a desire to grasp the unquantifiable. The balance of tenderness with technical mastery is enthralling. This profound novel begs for a slow and careful reading to peel back all its layers of raw intelligence and beauty.