Held (2023)
Why this one?
I’m reading all the books on the 2024 Booker Prize Shortlist. This is my last one, which I actually finished a good couple of weeks ago but am only just getting around to having the energy to write about.
Anne Michaels (1958- ; active 1985- ), was born in Toronto, Canada. She attended the University of Toronto, where she is now a faculty member in the department of English. She is known foremost as a poet - beginning her career writing mainly in that medium, with collections The Weight of Oranges (1986) and Miner's Pond (1991) winning numerous awards and establishing her as one of the foremost Canadian literary talents.
Fugitive Pieces (published 1996) was her debut novel, born of a sense of "bumping up against the limits" of poetry and needing to make connections on a larger scale. It won numerous international awards, alongside the second Women's Prize. It took her nearly a decade to write, and its follow-up, The Winter Vault (2009) took another thirteen to arrive.
Elsewhere though, she has continued to publish relatively regular volumes of poetry, as well as writing for the stage - including a collaboration with John Berger, Vanishing Points (2005), and a libretto for an opera - and published her first children's book, The Adventures of Miss Petitfour (2015). She became the poet laureate of Toronto in October 2015.
Thoughts, etc.
Held is a very difficult book to summarize in a short paragraph. In some sort of roundabout fashion, it’s a ‘grand historical sweep’ and a family saga, two things I usually very much enjoy. It begins in the trenches of the First World War, before we follow fairly logically into its aftermath, with the return of a soldier to something approaching ‘normal’ life in an early photography studio. In that same section, it takes a leap towards the supernatural, as the faces of his subjects’ loved ones begin appearing in his images. From here, things begin (deliberately) to fall apart, as the ‘novel’ (in as much as it is one) becomes progressively more fragmentary as it travels though the twentieth century and beyond, encountering along the way several generations of descendants of the original characters and the occasional famous figure like Ernest Rutherford or Marie Curie.
I won’t dwell further on the plot, as there isn’t really one in the traditional sense. Like Fugitive Pieces, this is very clearly the work of a poet, and meant to be taken in its entirety, with rewards no doubt there for those persistent enough to repeatedly re-read and make connections between its disconnected parts. On a first read, it’s hard to make anything much of it using the traditional anchors of plot and character, though in the early and middle parts there are some promisingly intriguing characters introduced (before, sadly, being swiftly moved on from). Behind all of this is clearly a very well-constructed piece of writing, by a poetic master. The writing is as beautiful as you expect, and when it’s allowed to develop towards something approaching storytelling, it really soars and captivates. But - and even as someone who loves minimal writing - it’s for the most part (particularly in its second half) made up of such elusive fragments that it doesn’t really hold the attention in the same way throughout.
It’s full of gnomic utterances about life and death, memory and family (amongst other things), some of which land in the moment but occasionally have the feeling of striving rather too obviously for profundity. Amongst these points are a handful of self-referential examples, which reference history as being made up of fragments, and a character who enjoys stories that begin in the middle. OK, we get it. This is not a traditional novel. For that, it will doubtless have many fans. Michaels is not revered for no reason.
The Booker has rarely gone to books of this kind. It tends to reward the more traditional markers of novelistic quality that I’ve mentioned above, and thus only very occasionally ticks the boxes of those who prefer their fiction a little more experimental. Having said that, it’s worth remembering as ever that the judges read each finalist a minimum of three times, which will undoubtedly give them a better perspective on a book like this than mine.. I’m not typically inclined to re-read books that don’t land on the first pass though, and I’m not convinced many other in the wider reading public do either (though there are likely a good number of honourable exceptions to this rule - who I greatly respect). With the Booker making a big shout of picking a winner that will resonate with a wide audience this year, I’d be surprised as a result if this got the nod.
Score
6
These reviews are always my personal opinion and I’m sure this book will have many fans. I was hopeful in the first half of this one that I’d like it much more than her Women’s Prize-winning debut, but I was hoping for some meaningful resolution to those rich and promising early plot-lines rather than an accumulation of fragments that require a puzzler’s instinct to connect.
Next up
Catching up on some more recent, and upcoming releases, I think!
