Held

More than three decades after John’s suicide, Helena still struggles to overcome The Challenges of Coping With Loss, and she therefore clings to his memory and even fantasizes an alternate history for them both in which they carried on a long, passionate affair in London. In Held, much of the “unseen” world that lies beneath the visible one consists of memories, dreams, and fantasies, and these undercurrents are sometimes more vivid and momentous than the events that occur in real time. When a famous artist lures Helena into his atelier, inviting her back into the world of visual expression that she abandoned soon after losing her husband, their subsequent encounters—however unsatisfying—force Helena to reckon with the vestiges of her grief and reclaim the parts of herself that she has lost or ignored. Ironically, although the artist, Graham Rhys, is determined to “read” her secrets by painting her nude, he remains cagey about revealing himself, and Helena notes wryly that he constantly lies about the “essence,” if not about the details—while she does the precise opposite. Finally, Rhys hands her a paintbrush and allows her to paint his portrait, fully anticipating that she will expose more of herself, in the process, than of him.

Ultimately, this encounter proves to be yet another example of a negative or deceptive interaction that nonetheless yields a moment of revelation for the central character. Just as Stanley’s fake “spirit photography” showed John a radiant truth, Helena’s encounter with the slippery, predatory Graham Rhys leads her to rediscover her own artistic power. In the subsequent scene, she talks to her daughter on the phone, feeling deep “longing” and absentmindedly sketching her late husband’s face. Unlike her dead-end fantasies of the life they might have shared in London, this artistic invocation of him is an unconscious act, perhaps serving as John’s answer to her repeated prayer: “Find me, John” (95). By “rising” from the paper—as if he is emerging from the River Esk or materializing like the forged photographic revenants in Stanley’s “spirit photography,” John now seems “freed” from a long imprisonment, and the act of sketching his face liberates Helena as well. After 30 years, Helena sees John again as he was, not as he might have been had he lived, and she realizes that a form of closure is finally within her grasp.

As the narrative dramatically shifts 33 years later to describe the homecoming of Mara (Helena’s granddaughter) to her father, Peter, her risky profession as a medical aid worker echoes John’s earlier experiences with The Intergenerational Impact of War and Trauma. Even before that connection to the earlier narrative becomes clear, however, Michaels once again invokes the recurring motif of water to articulate the sense of crossing a boundary, as Peter owes his marriage and his daughter to crossing the English Channel and living in London, where he met Anna. Additionally his and Mara’s ritualistic game of calling out the different times for foreign cities—a way of invoking the memory of Mara’s late mother—also alludes to boundaries (in this case, time zones) and acts as a metaphorical method of summoning the presence of the dead. 

In many ways, Mara’s story functions as a palimpsest of the novel’s earlier passages, as many of her experiences echo the all-important “essence” of her ancestors’ lives. Now, Mara reveals that she too has fallen in love with a man she met overseas, after waking up to see his face amidst a smoking ruin. This moment, which bears a passing resemblance to Sleeping Beauty, is designed to mirror her grandmother’s “fairy tale” encounter with John at the inn, which only occurred because Helena fell asleep and disembarked at the wrong train station. Mara and Alan’s love affair (like many in the novel) flourishes on a borderline, like a flower growing from a cracked rock; immersed in a war-torn landscape, they meet in a hazy half-world between life and death, right after a devastating bombing that nearly killed them both. Lying side by side in the dust, they bond over their anguished inability to counter the wider public indifference to human suffering. Later, Mara shares with him her intuitive sense of a more porous border, that of the spirit world, which often gives her “signs” from her late mother, even in the direst of circumstances. In a world where intricate human communities are casually annihilated by war, leaving not even a living memory, Mara and Alan’s shared experiences indicate that a spectral connection to the past and to the dead survives nonetheless. Notably, Peter feels that Anna has “never stopped” guiding Mara, who is now following in her mother’s footsteps, even at great risk to her life; this is Mara’s way of keeping her mother’s memory alive. What survives death, Mara believes, is always the best part of those who are gone: “the love that burns free of the corpse; always love that tries to escape the human terror” (115).

The narrative’s ethereal, interwoven threads are emphasized when the next passage is set 20 years earlier, and features a young Mara splashing in a backyard pool on a Saturday morning, asking Peter where her mother is. In reply, Peter points to where the sky is “burning.” On that day in 1964, Anna’s own love burns free, and Chapter 5 retraces her ghostly return to her family. Like the moving figures in a long-exposure photograph, Peter and Mara are invisible to Anna’s questing spirit. However, the pool’s water “splashing by itself” (123) signals her daughter’s presence. In Held, water—as with electricity and sound—is the surest conductor of ghosts and memories.