Held

In an interview about the writing of Held, Anne Michaels cites the modern world’s “surrender of our ancient relationship with what can’t be seen,” and she also asserts her belief that “there is crucial meaning and value in what, necessarily, cannot be proven” (“Ann Michaels Interview: ‘Every Poem Is a Poem of Witness.’” The Booker Prizes, 2024). One of Held’s vignettes, set in 1910, counterintuitively uses a technology of the Industrial Revolution—photography—to hint at the existence of a spirit world that remains unprovable by science. Upon encountering a flaneur photographer on a stroll through the woods, the widowed Lia studies his photos of city streets and observes his “long exposures” that show only shopfronts, as the crowds of people never remained still enough to be captured on the film. This encounter leads to Lia’s sudden epiphany about an invisible world that teems with life and overlaps with reality but exists slightly out of step with the everyday world. This idea further complicates the author’s recurring suggestion that an absence, rather than a scientifically detected presence, can empirically prove the existence of what people already “know” is there.

Michaels continues to investigate these complex and poetic concepts as the photographer tells Lia that active people leave at most “a trace” on the film: “a clouding of the air, a thickening of the light, the breath of absence” (159). These descriptors align the photos’ unseen beings with the novel’s scenes of ghosts—or the “presence” of the dead—as when Anna is killed abroad in 1964 and visits her home in England as a spirit. In this ethereal form, Anna cannot see her family; she can only perceive traces, such as wet footprints or water splashing by itself, and these signs of a living presence parallel the smears of light in the flaneur’s long exposures. As Lia observes the flaneur’s photos, she recognizes the neighborhoods and is seized with a “melancholic” nostalgia for streets that have changed or vanished, making her wonder if people have any right to their tragic sense of “possession” of the past. As her feelings of widowhood and loss blend with her notion of an invisible realm that marches on beyond the limits of human vision, Lia connects the photos’ unseen people with the “spirit” that hides in matter and remains untraceable by science. Perhaps, she thinks, an impossibly long exposure (“eternity”) would make the dead reappear.

Minutes later, her dead husband does return—first, in her pained recollections of his illness and death, and then (with a thickening of the light) as an “inexplicable” feeling of “permission […] to leave her loneliness behind” (162). In this moment, she feels that her husband’s spirit has possessed her with his intense longing for the conception of a son; once again, the interconnected nature of the generations is highlighted when she names this child Peter, “the name [her husband’s] ghost carried” (164). Upon waking from a postcoital sleep, she sees the photographer’s tracks vanishing, ghostlike, in the falling snow, and this image suggests an implicit connection between the realms of the seen and the unseen—the living and the dead.

This sentiment is also hinted at in the novel’s opening as John lies wounded after the Battle of Cambrai and consoles himself with thoughts on the impermanence of death: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” (3) Aware of a “mystery” at the heart of things, he refuses to fill this emptiness with the limiting dogmas of religion or science. However, Michaels also suggests that science is central to this mystery because it can make this “absence” known by proving and defining everything around it, like the flaneur’s long exposures—even if such methods cannot penetrate the mystery itself. Regarding faith, John believes that absence “proves what was once present” (21), just as the light from dead stars continues to reach the Earth. When John asks, “Who can say for certain that those who no longer exist, our dead, do not also reach us?” (59), this sentiment forms the basis of the interplay between the living and the dead that characterizes the remainder of the novel.

Thus, decades later, Alan reaches similar conclusions when he feels the “overwhelming presence” of his dead father, which suddenly vanishes—thereby convincing him of its reality “not by a sensed presence, but by its sudden absence” (147). Michaels therefore suggests that the absent—or the unseen—can impress itself more powerfully on the consciousness than the visible or known, just as hunger weighs more heavily on the mind and body than satiety. In Held, feelings of loss, longing, and emptiness—not science or religion—are the surest catalysts for the sudden breach of the divide between the empirical world and that of faith. As the narrative states, this metaphorical “door opens in the hillside, in the field, at the sea’s edge, […] [or] in a café” (115). Significantly, as the younger Anna leaves a café in the last scene of the novel, she is suddenly “pierced” with longing and looks behind her for the ghost of her lover, who is “like something moving at the edge of a forest, not quite seen” (219). By concluding with such a liminal image, Michaels brings the narrative full circle while simultaneously preserving its ethereal, ambiguous quality.