Held

Helena is just a young woman when she first meets her future husband, John; she falls asleep on a train and accidentally gets off at the wrong station, and when she senses a “fairytale” destiny in their meeting, this sentiment introduces the novel’s motif of fate. Though she feels close to John throughout their brief marriage, she remains ignorant of the full depths of his postwar trauma, which her love is never quite able to heal. Discovering her talents as an artist, she paints idyllic backdrops for John’s photo portraits, and this endeavor serves as an expression of her yearning for the fairytale intimacy of their first meeting. However, John’s depression and spiritual confusion are stoked by his scheming assistant’s fraudulent photos and create a barrier between husband and wife, and his sleepless anxiety and anger make her begin to doubt his love.

Three decades after John’s suicide, Helena, who has never remarried, begins posing for a famous artist whom she meets in the bookstore where she works. Offended by his slippery manner, she tells him picturesque falsehoods about her past as a form of revenge for his propensity to lie about the “essence” of himself—something that she views as a far worse sin than lying about “details.” Resolved to show her true self to the smug artist, she convinces him to let her paint him and feels “ravenous” to have a paintbrush in her hand again after so long. Threatened by her obvious artistic talent, the artist drops her as a model. As Helena basks in this new revelation of her abilities, she absentmindedly sketches John’s face on a notepad and later feels that this action has “freed” him from imprisonment. As she talks to her grown daughter Anna on the phone, she resolves to paint the beautiful orange that Anna describes to her, after which she plans to give up painting altogether. Art, for her, will not be a career but a brief means of communing with faraway loved ones, both living and dead.

As the daughter and only child of John and Helena, Anna is a medical worker who spends much of her time in conflict zones that lie far from home, tending to soldiers and other victims of war. One day, feeling the “air change abruptly” (123), she finds herself back home in England, but the house is strangely empty. As Lia observes later in the novel, “When someone dies, the very air changes” (160). Uncannily, the water in her daughter’s paddling pool splashes by itself, and she hears her daughter’s disembodied voice and realizes that the young Mara is oblivious to her presence.

The cause and timeframe of Anna’s death is never specified in the novel, but Michaels implies that Anna died overseas on this very day in 1964, when Mara was still a little girl playing in the pool. Either Anna has returned home as a ghost, with no memory of her death, or her homecoming is a dying reverie. (Because Michaels later uses Peter’s memories to reveal that the Saturday morning scene at the pool is a real event, the former scenario is more likely.) In any case, Anna’s demise exemplifies the book’s vision of death as a gradual, almost imperceptible passage, like “night falling.”

Peter is Anna’s husband; he grew up in Italy, where his grandfather was known as the “best tailor” in Piedmont. Peter apparently never knew his biological father, a photographer whom his widowed mother Lia slept with during a chance encounter in France. In Italy, his mother’s second husband taught him to make hats, which became his specialty, and the family prospered, especially with the demand for smartly tailored uniforms during World War II. Peter eventually sold his share of the family business and went to London, where he befriended Anna after coincidentally meeting her in the audience at two separate concerts.

For years, Peter and his daughter Mara must reconcile themselves to Anna’s long absences whenever she works in field hospitals in faraway countries. After Anna’s death overseas, Peter raises Mara by himself and watches with trepidation as she follows in her mother’s footsteps, selflessly aiding the wounded in various war-torn countries and hellish refugee camps. He fears that his own past “obsession” with injustice, Marxism, and Gramsci has rubbed off on her, and he now feels guilty about this, just as he felt guilty in his youth when considering his family’s lucrative trade making army uniforms for the Fascists.

As Anna and Peter’s grown daughter, Mara feels passionately drawn to places where she is “needed most”—primarily Middle Eastern trouble spots and war zones, where she works as a doctor in ramshackle and often dangerous hospitals. Whenever she returns to work in the UK, she feels alienated from her colleagues, whom she sees as frivolous and spoiled; and the safety and comforts of home make her restless to go abroad again. As she tells it, not an hour passes without her wanting to “put [her] fist through a wall and scream at people to open their eyes” (112). She meets her future husband, an investigative journalist named Alan, in the still-smoking ruins of a shattered building, right after the nearby hospital has been destroyed by a bomb. (By chance, she left the hospital to tend to an injured child.) The horror and brutality that she sees in these desolate places fill her with rage and make her ever more determined to stay and do whatever she can to help—even if the maimed child she meticulously stitches back together is killed only minutes later by a bomb.

On Mara’s visits to England, she insists on living close to her father—perhaps due to his loneliness and constant worries about her—and this factor complicates her romance with Alan. When she leaves for the airport to serve abroad yet again, “one last time, before [her] baby comes” (132), both Peter and Alan are devastated. However, Mara cannot bring herself to get on the plane and soon returns home, to the men’s relief and jubilation. Her unexpected homecoming—in which she returns safe and alive—serves as a mirror image to her mother’s ghostly return after her death years ago. Likewise, the child “floating” in Mara’s womb will be named for her mother, creating yet another layer of interwoven lives and narratives. In a way, Mara and her unborn child have restored Anna to the mourning Peter.

Alan, a British foreign correspondent who covers Middle Eastern wars in the 1980s, meets and falls in love with Mara after a hospital bombing leaves the two of them stunned and forlorn amidst the charred ruins of a building. Back home, after some months of agonized hesitation, Alan confesses his passion to her in a letter, feeling that she warmly embodies the last hope he has in the world.

Part of his loving bond with Mara is the terrible, shared knowledge that comes with their work: the horrors of modern warfare and its ruthless, indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Tormented by his failure to capture in words the incomprehensible carnage and human misery that he witnesses, Alan soon gives up his profession. However, although Mara is now pregnant, she insists on going back one last time, a prospect that terrifies him. After her departure, Alan tells Peter and his friends about the long-ago decline of his father, who had Alzheimer’s and seemed to lose all of his memories, no longer recognizing his son or anyone else. However, a portion of his father’s lucidity miraculously resurfaced several times, amazing Alan, who began to see the man as a ghost of himself, likening his father’s brief moments of clarity to séance-like visitations. Soon after Alan shares this story, the doorbell rings and Mara returns from the airport, as if his words of miracles and hope have conjured her out of the air.

A relatively young widow living in Sceaux, France, in 1910, Lia has a lively mind and an interest in Darwin and theology, which she owes partly to her father, who was a teacher. Her grounding in science and philosophy helps her to connect with a middle-aged photographer whom she meets one day in a wintry forest. Lia is fascinated by Darwin’s notion that nothing in life is fixed and that everything is in flux, with one creature or shape dissolving or merging into another. She finds an analogy for this idea in her new friend’s description of his long-exposure photographs, in which people vanish into blurs because they cannot remain still.

Lia, who tenderly held her late husband Peter through the last stages of his illness, misses him every moment of her life. As she debates with the photographer about the nature of evolution, she feels deep within herself a ghostly “permission, no, entreaty, to leave her loneliness behind” (162). Urged by this feeling, Lia lets the discussion of Darwinism and the struggle for existence yield to a sexual encounter with the photographer, and this interlude creates a child to replace her husband, a boy whom she will name Peter: “the name [her husband’s] ghost carried” (164). This child, raised by Lia and her new husband in Piedmont, Italy, will be the father of Mara.