Ever since her early poem “Lake of Two Rivers,” Anne Michaels has navigated multiple rivers in her poetry and fiction, from the Humber River in Fugitive Pieces to the St. Lawrence in The Winter Vault. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that her third novel, Held, is structured around several rivers that flow across centuries from France’s River Escaut to River Orwell in Suffolk. Floating chronotopes, her rivers flow both ways, offering at once a fugitive release, as well as a site of rescue. Indeed, as her titles indicate, she traces the tension between fugitive fragments of language and an implicit capture in vaults or whatever is held. Michaels’ rivers cross geographic borders as well as the boundaries between genres in prose and poetry while acknowledging an indebtedness to John Berger’s thinking about photography.
“Michaels’ rivers cross geographic borders as well as the boundaries between genres in prose and poetry while acknowledging an indebtedness to John Berger’s thinking about photography.”
Critics have characterized the subdivisions in the XII parts of this novel as stanzas ranging from single lines to longer paragraphs. From the outset, the narrator ruminates and speculates: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” And later in Held attempts are made to bring life back from the dead. In the next line, she shifts pronouns from we to he, and caesuras from period to semi-colon: “The shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird.” Shadows hover between life and death, the chiaroscuro of the mortal coil.
“Certain thoughts comforted him,” and each thought is contained in a line before blossoming to a series of “perhaps” statements: “Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven …. Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.” The tentativeness of “perhaps” appears in a pursing of lips, close-open-close, pronunciation arrested in stationary action. The oxymoronic river of stationary action frames two negative constructions: “He did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphic or vague or a discrepancy, but a phase in us for something absolutely precise.” The narrator sifts through her protagonist’s consciousness between precision and vagueness, science and silence. “He did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration.” Amidst parallelisms, caesuras, and similes she concludes with atmosphere: “Mist smouldered like cremation fires in the rain.” Michaels’ mist of history casts a traumatic spell of soft erasure – “The mist erased all it touched.”
“Her protagonist John suffers from the trauma of World War I.”
Her protagonist John suffers from the trauma of World War I. Accordingly, she parses his senses through her elegiac lyricism: “It was possible that the blast had taken his hearing. There were no trees to identify the wind, no wind, he thought, at all. Was it raining? John could see the air glistening, but he couldn’t feel it on his face.” One of the shortest fragments – “Memory seeping” – not only points to John’s damaged state of mind, but hints at Michaels’ overall technique of releasing and capturing memory. And that technique is essentially photographic, coinciding with John’s vocation of photography.
The novel’s photography oscillates between snapshot and cumulative cinematography in its montage of fragments. Traumatic snapshots burst and fade in sounds of synaesthesia: “Through the curtain of his breath he saw a flash, a shout of light.” Rhythms hover between past and present in an atmosphere of holding and releasing. An English patient in France, John somnambulates through warlight. Poetic phrases measure characters’ movements: “In the distance, in the heavy snowfall, John saw fragments of her – elliptic, stroboscopic – Helena’s dark hat, her gloves.” Michaels’ lens captures the powdery yellow blur of the streetlamps, as fragments from France and England merge.
Similes abound in the mind’s drift between memory and momentary experience, the comparison of photograph to written word in a montage of hidden prints. “The sea, where, like memory – he had once written down – the elusiveness of the form is the form.” Which morphs into “Impossible to name the exact moment night falls, elusive as the moment sleep overtakes us.” Through the skin of sleep what is held is withheld in the photographer’s lexicon of negative ways. In the darkroom of developing experience, Michaels’ liminal lighting withholds and thresholds. “He felt a presence, a thermal current, a tremor across the entire surface of things, like a heat mirage. A deepening, not a darkening.” The reader is adrift at sea, in snow, and across John’s consciousness. “There would be other metaphors later – the chiasmata, the interchange, the crossing over. The cable crossing the wrong way.” Later the poet’s metaphors cross and bridge Brest-Litovsk, that hyphenated no-man’s land where philosophical musings and narrative meet.
Just as the second stanza of this canto catches the shadow of a bird, so the penultimate stanza recapitulates the Rorschach of that shaded flight: “The shadow of the bird’s folding and unfolding, like a silk scarf in the wind, wings against the sky like the turning of a page inside out, a message passing between them.” In these metafictional moments the lyrical impulse twists experience through fragments of photography and the photography of fragments. In atmospheric flow, lingering images are carefully measured along a bead of metaphors and synaesthetic framing of fragments. “Above the sea smoke, in the echo chamber of the cliffs, the persistent calls of kittiwakes, as if hoping for a different answer. All along the coast, the stone mirrors, listening.” After Virginia Woolf, the novel becomes a mirror along the waterways of consciousness.
The process of photography is inseparable from the writing of images – both are held, fixed, and developed: “He placed the negative in the developer and then into the fixer.” And photography’s process is akin to phenomenology: “The image in the fluid, like mist slowly parting the closer one approaches, began to emerge.” This photograph also contains Matthew Arnold’s Stanzas, a book within a book, “even the shadows of the letters embossed on the cover.” Like Rilke’s words at the centre of Held (“Every angel is terrifying”), Michaels’ intertextuality adds another dimension to her fiction. What is held in the camera: “The negative had been completely clean, John had placed the holder in the camera himself.” The experience of photography: “He searched the fixer with a single anguish of elation and disbelief, as if her image had been born of the fluid and had attached itself to the paper, as if there might be other images to be found in that clear liquid.” For every birth is a rebirth.
The novel’s title develops incrementally towards the end, as the focus shifts to other characters such as Alan: “The sight of the world stopped him: encased in ice, nothing forgotten, every detail seized and held and lit alive.” An Anglepoise appears in the next shift to Peter: “The Anglepoise leaned over him, like a surgeon, like a nurse, like a mother, and held him in a pool of light.” The novel’s holding pattern underscores the atmospheric polarities of captivity and fluidity, the latter in the spread of similes and metaphors.
In the seventh canto the focus shifts to Lia’s thoughts on photography’s long exposure: “Not still: held.” Towards the end of the canto “The translucent light, almost a kind of knowledge, held her all the way home,” in a long exposure that closes the canto. In the ninth canto that focuses on Marie Curie and a séance conducted by Madame Palladino, sentences elongate “to be opened and held.” The séance amid the surrounding science: “yet still Madame Palladino held the very air with her powers.” The dark room is vaulted with its slow evolution of perception, pinhole eye, and the precipice of one word placed next to another. As her characters are suffused in a lambent and plangent atmosphere, Michaels’ language holds the phenomenological novel.
Longlisted Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize • One of the and Mail’s Best Books of 2023
About the Author
ANNE MICHAELS is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours, she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation, and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart (Sept. 3 2024)
Language : English
Paperback : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 0771005474
ISBN-13 : 978-0771005473