Held by Anne Michaels – Hanging On Tight To Ideas

Held is a 2023 novel by Anne Michaels, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s a loosely linked collection of stories, starting with the wandering thoughts of a soldier wounded during the First World War, then moving back and forth, via family generations and recurring themes, through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Photography is a big thing, with a linked excursion into the early history of X-rays, providing various metaphors to describe permanence and transience. The first story sees the injured soldier resuming his peacetime career as a photographer, only to find his images capturing the ghostly presence of dead people. In a later story, the long exposure times of early cameras depict empty streets, since anything that moves does not remain in one place long enough to register on film. All the people who were really there only exist as ghostly absences. This is typical of the book’s enigmatic concerns.

Held, as a title, seems to refer to approaching life with a light touch, as opposed to a firm grip that tries to restrain something defined by movement.

Held is certainly interesting, but when you are reading it, there is an up front feeling that this is meaningful stuff. There is no sense of a beguiling story that seems straightforward and entertaining but has hidden depths. The depths here are those of an open-cast grit quarry. Personally I prefer a story where the meaningful is less overt, which just seems a bit politer to me, as well as being closer to real life, where the profound material is not likely to be making itself known at breakfast. Some of the plotting felt like a creaky frame around which the author could expound on science and history. Maybe, in the terms of Held, the story held on too tight, grasping at its ideas rather than letting them develop more naturally through characters and events.