The key axiom underlying Canadian author Anne Michaels’s Held is that the world is akin to photographic paper, which when washed in the developer fluid, reveals objects coalescing into negative being, silver particle by silver particle. Indeed, this ontological metaphor is made explicit early on in the story. Going for a night walk by the river, John — the character who opens the story — thinks: “The moonlight — silver iodide. The photographic plate — a supernatural lake, waiting for a reflection.”
This conception is also reflected in the novel’s structure: each chapter is set in a specific year, not in sequence and perhaps even simultaneous, and with some slow-moving waterbody — the Escaut in France, the Esk in North Yorkshire, the Westbourne in London, the Orwell in Suffolk. It cleaves the narrative landscape and holds the characters together. Characters who appear, hold our attention, and then disappear. They are related but not always by blood. An interaction is sometimes just an interaction — for example, one character comes to pick up a hat made for her father; it isn’t turned into an encounter by having plot wheels grind to advance the story to some pre-determined outcome. But because we remember the characters and their backstories, the story acquires a certain haunted quality. We can sense the ghosts, even if the characters cannot. We know their dead mothers and grandfathers, the siblings who were never born, and the secret history of the objects the characters possess: a hat, a painting of a large orange, a set of photographs.
The role of error
Naturally, this is a ghost story. It could not be anything else. However, there is an interesting deviation from the genre’s expectations, and for me, it felt like an intended one. It’s no spoiler to reveal that there are several ghosts in Michaels’s novel, shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The book’s back flap divulges with quiet dignity how “the past erupts insistently into the present” as John develops his clients’ photos and unexpected strangers emerge from the emulsion. In a regular ghost story, John would have to get to the bottom of the mystery. This being a literary endeavour, however, the author feels no obligation to entertain the peasants. John is able to photograph ghosts, and that’s that. John merely proceeds to go for solitary night walks and get drippy about moonlight and silver iodide and such, thus managing to avoid thinking about his war trauma. It’s the sort of thing Iris Murdoch would have savaged in critique and then duplicated in her own novels.
In other words, Michaels’s novel does not need its Victorian ghosts. The story is already all misty and dreamy and disconnected and infused with death and loss. So what are they doing?
I believe they are deliberate imperfections. The reason we can take photographs using silver halide crystals is because the crystals aren’t perfect. Their imperfections are vital to the process. Michaels references the role of error in manifesting love, when she describes the women by the river Escaut in Cambrai, France, who weave deliberate errors into the sweaters of their menfolk. Why? Because the fishermen sometimes drowned. “…his widow could claim his beloved body by a distinctive talisman — the deliberate error in a sleeve, a waistband, a cuff, a shoulder, the broken pattern as definitive as a signature on a document.” The novel’s ghosts are, one might say, deliberate errors.
Author Anne Michaels | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Counting imperfections
The novel also has unintended imperfections. In the pursuit of elevated prose, the author sometimes piles hazy abstraction upon hazy abstraction: “…as if Alan had always been meant to arrive at their door, a stranger; he could not have formulated his need for this shelter in all its idiosyncratic exactitude and yet, in the broken world of generosity and dispossession, bereavement and blind luck, without any credit in the bank of belief, he had been found by them.” In other words, they made Alan feel welcome.
The novel has about half-a-dozen protagonists, but they all sound, think, feel and act alike. This is easily seen if we interchange who is saying what in the dialogues. They don’t exhibit “idiosyncratic exactitude”. As with Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, all the actors wear their creator’s face; they never achieve their freedom from their author. That too is a kind of death.
There are worse problems for a novel to have. It is not often that a novel comes along that so thoroughly reifies its central conceptual metaphor. Such a book requires a reader willing to offer that rare sensibility, to be the text’s emulsion, to be the medium through which the paper people come to life.
The reviewer is an author, most recently of The Coincidence Plot.
Held
Anne Michaels
Bloomsbury
₹499
Published - September 27, 2024 09:30 am IST
