Held by Anne Michaels
Held achieved the Booker Prize shortlist in 2024 along with the novels: Creation Lake, Orbital, James, The Safekeep, and Stone Yard Devotional, with Orbital ultimately winning the Grand Prize. The Booker Prize judges described Held as a kaleidoscopic family saga with “broken stanza-like paragraphs and chapters that move between different members of the family across a century.” They stated that they ‘loved the quietness of this book: we surrendered to it. The large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of the details. Whether it is the mistakes that are knitted into a sweater so that a drowned sailor can be identified, or the rituals of making homecoming pancakes, or what it feels like to be scrutinized as you are painted, the novel makes us pause.’
It is evident from the beginning of Held that Anne Michaels is not only an accomplished novelist but also a gifted poet. Her first collection of poetry, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, receiving critical acclaim for its exploration of memory, sensuality, and the impact of the Holocaust. Her second collection, Miner’s Pond, appearing in 1991, received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award. In addition, Michaels served as the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019.
In writing Held, rather than focusing on events and actions or creating a tight plot, Michaels meditates on “the story of our inner lives, the force of our inner lives, what we believe in, what we aspire to, what our values are.” She states that she “wanted to really bring us to present moments in relationship to history that have to do with the power of that inner life.” [From an interview with Anne Michaels]
Held begins on the River Escaut in Cambrai France in 1917. The setting immediately places the reader in the chaos of World War I, establishing the physical and emotional damage that will haunt the characters throughout the novel. The character John lies injured and immobilized on a battlefield next to his dead friend Gillies. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, he reflects on his life. John’s fragmented thoughts are an early example of the novel’s style, which weaves together memories, reflections, and experiences.
The water he washed with stank in his helmet, a pool too filthy to hold a reflection. As if the dimmet itself were whispering, he could hear Gillie’s voice. At first, he didn’t know if Gillies was talking to himself or someone else, but soon John understood that Gillie’s words were meant for him. Somewhere along the way they had thrown in their lot together. John had learned the three kinds of twilight — astronomical, nautical, civil — from his father, but in that place it was as hard to tell the age of the dawn as to tell the age in a man’s face. [p. 16]
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All the women in the village wore their tippie and carried their knitting easy to hand, under their arm or in their apron pocket, sleeves and sweater fronts, filigree work, growing steadily over the course of the day. Each village with its own stitch; you could name a sailor’s home port by the pattern of his gansey, which contained a further signature — a deliberate error by which each knitter could identify her work. Is an error deliberately made still an error? Coastal knitters cast their stitches like a protective spell to keep their men safe and warm and dry, the oil in the wool repelling the rain and sea spray, armour passed down, father to son. They knitted shorter sleeves that did not need to be pushed out of the way of work. Dense worsted, faded by the salt wind. The ridge and furrow stitch, like the fields in March when they put in the potatoes. The moss stitch, the rope stitch, the honeycomb, the triple sea wave, the anchor; the hailstone stitch, the lightning, diamonds, ladders, chains, cables, squares, fishnets, arrows, flags, rigging. The Noordwijk bramble stitch. The black-and-white socks of Terschelling (two white threads, a single black). The Goedereede zigzag. The tree of life. The eye of God over the wearer’s heart.
If a sailor lost his life at sea, before his body was committed to the deep, his gansy was removed and returned to his widow. If a fisherman washed ashore, he was carried home to his village, the stitch of his sweater as good as a map. And once he was restored to home port, his widow could claim his beloved body by a distinctive talisman — the deliberate error in a sleeve, a waistband, a cuff, the broken pattern as definitive as a signature on a document. The error was a message sent into darkness, the stitch of calamity and terror, a signal to the future, from wife to widow. The prayer that, wherever found, a man might be returned to his family and laid to rest. That the dead would not lie alone. The error of love that proved its perfection. [p. 17]
Each brief chapter of the novel is filled with a variety of characters. One is Alan, introduced in Chapter IV: River Orwell, Suffolk, 1984. Alan is Anne Michaels’ vehicle for highlighting one of her favorite themes: the impact of war. She writes:
To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognize 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 micronized concrete, rigid as Ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. Snipers, barrel bombs. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in a hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child’s body, will be read as war has always been read: stranger to stranger, parent to child, lover to lover. And, even if it is possible to return to one’s city, even if one has never left, it will be a history told as it has always been told: far from home.
What was Alan’s task? To write what no one else could bear to read. What was anyone’s task? To endure the truth. To act upon it. But even empathy, compassion, was to feel and think in terms of separation. And Alan could only feel and think now in terms of entirety, of humanity as a single organism. A single entity of cause and consequence, the human union of breathing and being we are born to. [pp. 129-131]
While Anne Michaels’ novels and poetry often explore deeply melancholic or traumatic themes, there is such power and beauty to her writing, it should not be missed! In Held she depicts over and over how the interiority of an individual — their capacity for love and empathy — can transcend all external influences. As written in Quill and Quire: “Just as the characters are held by their love for others, readers are safely held in the utterly tactile and emotional embrace of this incredible novel. The imagery of cold snow and fog plays against the warmth of the human heart even when the world offers duplicity and destruction. To be held, whether literally or in memory, is to be alive.”
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