Held

Many of Held’s overarching themes are poetically spliced together by the trauma of war, focusing particularly on the events of World War I (1914-1918), the cataclysm that occupies the first third of the book and whose grim shadow looms over the narrative as a whole. World War I was history’s most devastating war at that time in terms of casualties, and the conflict was also uniquely brutal in its mechanized mass slaughter via artillery, bombs, tanks, poison gas, and machine guns. The sheer scope of the war’s destruction had a traumatic psychological effect on every participant, sowing a stark conviction that death—and therefore life itself—is godless and random. Moreover, the new advances in warfare were so lethally effective that there was often nothing left of the combatants to bury. As Michaels notes in an interview, “so many soldiers […] were literally dismembered into nothingness” that the traditional rites of mourning and remembrance suffered a terrible shock, spawning a resurgent faith in “ghosts” and a revival of spiritualism (Dundas, Deborah. “From the Ghosts of War to Science, Ann Michaels Considers Humanity’s Relationship to Invisibility in ‘Held.’” Toronto Star, 2024).

World War I was also, Michaels says, the first war associated with “shell shock” (the early term for what would eventually be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD), and the conflict thus resulted in the psychological carnage of the “walking wounded.” Held draws upon the myriad consequences of World War I—with its unprecedented upheavals to nations, families, faith, and the individual psyche—to link the interiority of her characters with the arc of history. For example, in the novel’s opening, the wounded soldier, John, reflects on the hereditary nature of grief and loss, musing that “[s]tories told on a battlefield […] [are] told to one who survives who will tell that story to a child, who will write it down in a book” (14) His thoughts are darkly echoed six decades later by Alan, the father of John’s great-granddaughter, who catalogs the atrocities of a Middle Eastern war on civilians and bitterly states, “The war being written in these bodies […] will be read as war has always been read: stranger to stranger, parent to child, lover to lover” (130). Thus, throughout the generations of Held, the repercussions of war and loss continue to ripple, leaving myriad wounds in the minds and bodies of each new generation. Through it all, Michaels’s ghosts, like the light from distant stars, defy the sundered flesh and severed lives, blending the succor of memory with the fragile act of faith.