Booker Prize review: In ‘Held’, the moments of transcendence that bind us to one another

Anne Michaels is certainly not a case of the poet “best met in poems,” for that would be a hasty verdict. The world seems to be callously divided over her newly Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Held. Some have gone so far as to reprimand her for failing to comply with an author's “responsibility” to engage their readers. The case in point is not as simplistic as modern readers’ aversion to abstraction. It is a much broader and peppery phenomenon – that of a poet-novelist, who considering the pace at which things are moving, deserves a separate academic discipline.

Michaels publishes a novel every 13 or 14 years, and the most recent one first and foremost poses a question: How does one bear witness to both the visible and the unseen forces that shape our lives? She writes, “We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known…The past exists as a present moment.” She invites us into a liminal space, a realm where memory, history, and love coexist.

In today’s literary world, the role of a poet-novelist, like Michaels, is a unique one. Often, writers are expected to stake their claim on a particular narrative whether through stark realism, biting political commentary, or immersive fiction. But for a poet-novelist, the work is not so much to capture life in snapshots but to allow it to blur, to create space for the reader to step in and feel rather than be told and Michaels embodies this role with a deep sense of responsibility.

Fleeting and eternal life

Held begins in the year 1917 on a battlefield near the River Escaut, where the protagonist, John, lies paralysed, caught between the present and fragmented memories of his wife Helena. Meanwhile, their daughter Anna, a doctor, is continually drawn away from home for work in war zones. This separation echoes into the next generation with her daughter Mara, who, unlike her mother, has a different choice to make.

From the haunting echoes of war, the narrative stretches across four generations, over more than 100 years and consists of 12 parts that feel almost ephemeral – love, loss, scientific discovery, and the moments of transcendence that bind us to one another. Michaels does not rush to tie these strands together, rather, she lets them drift, asking us to sit with their ambiguity. This is a novel that thrives on the edges of understanding, where human connection, like the ghosts that emerge in John’s photographs, is equal parts fleeting and eternal.

“The elusiveness of the form is the form,” declares John as though he and Helena are trapped in an eternal moment, enacting something predetermined. When we try to fully detach from the stories that shape us, we don’t achieve purity or objectivity but rather fracture our connection to life’s complex, intertwined realities.

Michaels challenges the traditional view of history as a series of grand events, instead suggesting that our inner lives, what we hope, what we fear, and what we love are just as monumental.

The poet-novelist’s voice

There’s a certain echo of Canadian literary tradition in Held. This is not the first time that a poet-novelist has reimagined history and has given precedence to lived experience over facts. Much like the poetic prose and historiography of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient or Margaret Atwood’s meditations on Canadian Survival, Michaels uses war, language, and the act of bearing witness to explore what it means to endure.

Canada, with its history of “postmodern disunity” and undefined identity, seems to be a fecund ground for a species like Michaels. Another Canadian poet-novelist Robert Kroetsch, too once described Canada as a postmodern country, where unity is created by the very forces that seem to unravel it. Michaels taps into this cultural undercurrent and uses fragmentation not as a source of chaos but as a way of finding connection – “Fear so tirelessly attached to hope, it was hard to tell a difference between them.”

The poet-novelist's voice in contemporary literature often acts as a countercurrent to the age of immediacy. Where modern readers may crave definitive answers and swift resolutions, Michaels’s Held pushes them towards uncertainty. This is perhaps most evident in her exploration of invisibility in Held, not just the physical invisibility of electrons and x-rays that science manipulates, but the emotional and spiritual invisibility of the forces that move us, forces like empathy, memory, and grief. Science may govern the invisible world, but it cannot erase our ancient relationship with what we cannot prove.

The structure of the book reflects this exploration. As we meet different characters, across generations we sense that their lives cannot be neatly summarised and they often resist the confines of a linear story. This refusal to "sum up" a life seems like a deliberate choice. The poet-novelist refuses to simplify, to reduce life’s intricacies to digestible soundbites. Instead, she writes characters who remain unresolved.

Alternatively, the relationships between the characters in Held can also be seen as a meditation on the ways in which love persists, not only across time but beyond the confines of the individual. As readers, we become witnesses to love’s durability, its capacity to reach beyond a single life. Michaels reminds us that even in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, there is hope in simply bearing witness, whether to history, to another’s gaze, or to our own inner lives. And in doing so, we become part of a greater continuum, one that transcends the limits of time and space. In many ways, Held challenges the reader to rethink what it means to belong to a world in flux. It meditates on connection, on the ways we are held together, molecularly and otherwise, even when we feel most alone.

The notion of being “held” takes on multiple meanings throughout the book, moving from the personal to the universal. We are held by time, by relationships, by the histories that precede us and the futures we imagine. This sense of being bound, whether we acknowledge it or not, forms the emotional core of the book. It asks us to consider: what holds us, and what are we holding on to?

In one of her poems “To Write”, she declares, “words are secrets passed…because everything political is personal and not the other way around.” This line speaks to the essence of Michaels’ work: the idea that personal experiences are intricately tied to the political, and this relationship is never reversed. It’s not the grand systems of power that define us; rather, it’s the lived, intimate realities that shape the political – which is quite a refreshing take.

Through Michaels’ lens, poetry is both a personal rescue and a political act. It reminds us that, in moments of dispossession whether by tyrants or time, we are not alone. The poet-novelist's task, then, is not to simply mourn but to offer space for healing, to create something mended where once there was only rupture – the curious cameo of Marie Curie being one instance. And this process will inevitably fall into the realm of abstraction, and delightfully so, in the case of Held. By extension, it will occasionally feel like a book already written, already read, yet the form warrants a reader's attention and scrutiny. If there is a fault, it lies perhaps in its occasional retreat into a kind of academic experimentalism that can feel detached.

Held testifies that the poem and by extension, the novel becomes a form of witness. It is through this act of witnessing that we resist the tyranny of amnesia, the erasure of lived experience. To write from the wound (as in a poem) is to blur the line between the personal and the political, but to write from the scar (as in a novel) allows the reader to enter their own experience, rather than staying trapped in the poet’s. The rigour of waiting until the tears have dried reflects the responsibility of bearing witness, not just for oneself, but for the solidarity of others. The failure to “hold” on a modern reader's part therefore, if scrutinised, is perhaps an “error of love that (has) proved its perfection.”

Held, Anne Michaels, Bloomsbury.