Book review: Held explores echoes of trauma
If you’re looking to cozy up and get lost in a ripping yarn this holiday season, Held by Anne Michaels isn’t the book for you. But if you’re up for confronting life’s biggest questions, it might be your cup of tea.
The novel opens in 1917 with John, a severely injured British soldier reminiscing about his lover, Helena, from a First World War battlefield. The narrative jumps to 1920, where he reunites with her and reopens his photography business. It follows their lives and their descendants, including their daughter, Anna, her husband Peter, and their daughter Mara. Like her grandmother, Mara is a nurse in a field hospital, much to the dismay of her war- journalist lover, Alan.
Held, which recently won the Giller Prize, defies convention. There are no recognizable character arcs or tidy plots with satisfying resolutions. It unfolds in fragments, giving it a dreamlike quality. Characters flit in and out. Time shifts between past, present, and future.
Michaels challenges us to engage with this structure. She leaves space between the fragments for us to fill. Like memory, the novel avoids linearity. Past intrudes on the present. Pieces disappear, lost to time.
War binds the narrative, manifesting in John’s lasting injuries, the ghostly figures in his photographs of war widows, and the anxiety connecting Peter and Alan across generations. This motif reinforces the novel’s exploration of how trauma echoes through time.
But so too does love, which appears as both counterpoint and companion to war’s devastation. In a touching passage, coastal womenintentionally knit errors into the sweaters of their husbands to identify them if they drown at sea. These mistakes are a message sent “into darkness” hoping for a safe return – a metaphor that captures the novel’s central preoccupation with love’s persistence beyond death.
The opening line asks, “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” Can the dead truly be gone when they leave an imprint on the world? Does the fact something can’t be seen, heard, or felt mean it doesn’t exist?
Michaels pulls at these strands. Ghosts appear in John’s photos of war widows. Marie Curie, whose pioneering work with radiation revealed invisible forces shaping our world, appears later in the novel. Her presence reinforces the book’s central metaphysical question: how do we measure or understand that which cannot be seen? Both Curie’s science and John’s ghost-laden photographs suggest that reality extends beyond what’s immediately visible. Ultimately, we are left with only questions, not answers.
While many fragments shimmer with beauty and insight, the novel’s experimental structure comes at a cost. The characters often feel more like vehicles for philosophical pontification than fully realized humans. Their dialogue can be stilted and unrealistic, weighed down by the heavy ideas they’re meant to convey. The book might have been more effective if these existential questions emerged naturally from believable interactions.
The dialogue reads like philosophical treatises rather than conversation. Characters speak in aphorisms: “Terror can spring from what’s most ordinary,” says Marcus, to which Sandor responds, “Just as love can.” Even John’s political musings, “No political system operates without free will’s submission,” feel more like lectures than natural speech.
Despite this shortcoming, Held is an ambitious and moving meditation on love, memory, and the visible and invisible bonds connecting us across time. Michaels refuses simple divisions between science and spirituality, life and death, past and present. Like the intentional errors in those coastal sweaters, the novel’s fragmented structure becomes its own kind of message sent into darkness – challenging readers to find meaning in the spaces between.
Chris Greer is the co-owner of Nottawa Cottage Bookstore. He grew up in Creemore and has a degree in English from the University of Toronto.
