Held

“But pleasure was also countless, beyond itself—because it remained, even only in memory; and in your body, even when forgotten.”

Savoring his sensual memories of his wife Helena, John reflects that although these experiences are finite, the pleasure that they give him cannot be quantified, as this pleasure will live on in his body as a sense memory long after the details are forgotten. This moment of contemplation serves the novel’s broader argument that clearly defined boundaries between events, emotions, and even life and death are largely illusory, and that an experience’s true essence endures long beyond its arbitrary details.

“Each village with its own stitch; you could name a sailor’s home port by the pattern of his gansey, which contained a further signature—a deliberate error by which each knitter could identify her work.”

John recalls that in his father’s coastal village, women knitted the sailors’ ganseys (woolen sweaters) with a distinctive pattern so that the men’s drowned bodies could be returned to the village. After the sailors’ faces are erased by the sea, this more durable signature staves off anonymity and loss for a while longer. Weaving and knitting therefore function as symbols, for the narrative itself weaves past and present together in new forms and explores the theme of ever-flowing continuities that remain unbroken by boundaries or divisions. In this context, the village women who knit also invoke an image of the Fates of ancient myth, and fate itself becomes an overarching theme in the novel.

“It is absence that proves what was once present. We can understand without proof, he thought, we can prove without understanding.”

Circumstances maneuver Helena into a meeting with her future husband, John, when she falls asleep on the train and disembarks one station too early. This accident now feels like a “deliberate error,” and she believes that fate itself has brought them together. This conviction leads her to a Wordsworth-esque epiphany about faith: that an intuited “absence” can strike a contrast with what used to be present, rendering that missing presence all the more evident. The notion of “understand[ing] without proof” also highlights the novel’s dichotomy of empirical science versus a person’s faith in theoretical essences that cannot be seen or measured.

“For seven eternal minutes, all anyone could hear was the rushing sound of the flames, as the Zeppelin drifted down to crash into a cornfield near Eastbridge, one skeletal end thrusting out of the ground, looking not like something that fell to earth, but like a whale breaching the surface of the sea.”

The passage compares the crashed Zeppelin that killed John’s mother to a whale jutting out of the sea, thereby repeating the novel’s habit of deliberately blending opposites—particularly, conflating the sky with the land or with the surface of the water. This scene also reprises the novel’s copious water imagery, which functions as a symbol for the ebb and flow of time and the skein of life and death that unites all things.

“There are images that can, like certain rhythms, dismantle us, the way soldiers marching in step can take down a bridge. Maybe some images can take out parts of our brain, black them out, extinguish, obliterate parts of us.”

John’s metaphor alludes to soldiers’ practice of breaking stride while marching over a bridge, lest their footfalls create a resonance that destroys it. The martial analogy recalls John’s war injury and trauma, which have partially dismantled him, inside and out. The passage also reinforces the novel’s contention that change, loss, and erasure are piecemeal, incomplete, and impermanent; just as patients can emerge briefly from the oblivion of dementia and a loved one may momentarily return in some sense from death, so too is human consciousnesses “blacked out” by degrees, leaving other parts intact and lingering.

“And beside him, semi-opaque but perfectly distinct, an older woman, well dressed, pearl buttons, her fine head and lustrous hair, and her expression of intolerable longing.”

While developing a photo portrait of a young man who has recently lost his mother, John discovers the ghostly image of a woman standing beside the subject. This “spirit photo” creates a crisis of faith for John. The vivid particulars of this spectral image (the pearl buttons and “lustrous” hair) recall the power of photography to capture and accentuate physical details that the naked eye often does not register. This aspect hints at technology’s ability to reveal the hidden—even things that might have been regarded, in an earlier age, as supernatural impossibilities. Held regards this ability as something that is not altogether good, since it intrudes on the ancient domain of faith.

“He saw now what he had missed. That, in the young man’s photograph, the longing in the mother’s face was beautiful. That it was the image of something true even in its corruption, despite its corruption.”

In his last moments of consciousness before drowning, John regrets his suicide, realizing that he has misplaced his faith. Though his “spirit photos” may have been faked by his scheming business partner, the resplendent “longing” on the “ghost’s” face was purely authentic: the mirror of his own mother’s love. This “message,” which John feels was meant for him, renders the forged origins of the photos irrelevant. With this passage, the novel once again heralds the primacy of “essence” over details, suggesting that truth and beauty may be revealed by way of strange and circuitous paths—even those steeped in lies and greed.

“Helena soon learned that he never lied in detail, but in essence; and so, she felt free to lie in detail but not in essence, believing his falseness to be, by far, the greater.”

Helena, who has agreed to pose for Graham Rhys, a famous artist, soon intuits Rhys’s dishonesty, which shows itself in his manipulative manner rather than in misstatements of fact. In return, she regales him with picturesque lies about her past, believing that to lie in “essence” is the greater sin. When she later proves herself to be just as capable an artist, her talent for capturing the “essence” of things serves her well in a moment that finally allows her to reconnect with an ethereal remnant of her late husband.

“It took some explaining, but eventually Mara understood: when it was morning where she was, it was afternoon where her Mama was. When she ate her dinner, her mother was going to sleep. Soon Mara knew the time zones and could measure her ache for her mother with pinpoint accuracy.”

Anna, who often works abroad in war hospitals, frequents a different time zone from her young daughter, Mara, who eventually orients herself to this strange incongruity. The young Mara’s struggle to comprehend this quirk of reality finds an echo in other characters’ longing for their deceased loved ones, who continue to be a distant but deeply felt presence despite belonging to a different “zone”—the realm of death—which is perpetually out of step with the living world. This passage also revisits the novel’s theme that time is fluid, and that multiple “times” can exist in any one moment, just as the past always finds a way to manifest in the present.

“Peter knew it was his fault as much as Anna’s that their daughter chose refugee camps, field hospitals, the most dangerous places. His obsession, injustice, bloody Marx, bloody Gramsci. He should have raised her to selfishness.”

Peter, a hatmaker who was raised in Italy, regrets having passed on his leftist politics to his daughter Mara, who follows in the footsteps of her mother, Anna, and spends much of her working life in dangerous “trouble spots,” aiding the victims of violence and injustice. Having raised her on the teachings of Marx and the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, Peter now pleads with her to “stay where you’re needed most”—with him—and his entreaty reveals that he is newly conscious of the value of the personal over the political.

“When neighbourhoods were bombed into oblivion, when entire worlds vanished—the living network of shops, schools, street life, families, and the organisation of systems and memories in a single body and soul—Alan knew that everything he wrote was from knowledge so inadequate, so liminal, it was like describing the complexity of a molecule from the vantage point of the moon.”

Alan, a journalist, questions the impact and relevance of his work, which can only fail to tabulate even the merest fraction of the loss of war. One of the novel’s concerns is the loss of memory, and in this context, Alan’s reportage cannot hope to replicate the war victims’ memories of their intricate communities, which have died with them. The passage therefore evokes the Talmudic saying that “he who destroys one life has destroyed an entire world.”

“She liked books that seemed to begin again at the middle, the way life so often did, the way a day or an evening or a conversation or a song or a long, worthwhile idea so often did. The way love so often did.”

Mara reflects that human experience does not follow the pattern of a conventional story, with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The novel itself reflects this concept in its fragmented narrative and frequent time shifts that allow past and present events to bleed into each other, thereby replicating the effects of memory and history on lived experience.

“How strange, the sound of Mara’s voice and, flashing in the sunlight, shining mid-air, the water in the pool splashing by itself.”

Anna returns from one of her postings to find the house seemingly empty but full of the signs of human presence, such as voices, wet footprints, and water “splashing by itself.” Michaels’s implication is that Anna has just died overseas and has come home only in spirit. The novel’s instances of characters sensing the brief presence of their dead loved ones are here balanced by a ghost sensing the presence of her living family. Like the moving people in long-exposure photos, her living family has become invisible to her.

“The sense of a presence grew almost overpowering. Then, suddenly, the place was destitute. The presence was gone, though nothing outward had changed.”

As Alan, Peter, Sandor, and Marcus discuss the resurgence of memory and of the dead, Alan shares his experience of returning to a riverbank where he and his father used to swim; immersed in the memories of this place, he momentarily sensed his dead father by his side. This experience echoes his father’s brief moments of lucidity during his last days of life, when the man would momentarily emerge, swimmer-like, from the black depths of dementia. Like the spectral return of Anna in the previous quote, these visitations are usually associated with water: a symbol for the timeless ebb and flow that absorbs all beings and erases all boundaries, uniting everything.

“And that one could make a long exposure—say, thirty years of married life, or family life in a kitchen, infants growing to adults—and all that the photographic plate would show was an empty room. But it would not be empty, instead it would be full of life, invisible and real.”

Peter’s mother Lia, on the day her son is conceived, meets a photographer and ponders the idea that long exposure photographs capture only the empty settings of life, not the living themselves, for people’s continually active, ephemeral nature renders them invisible to the lens, which can only perceive that which remains static. This idea touches on the limitations of technology in detecting the presence of “invisible” phenomena (such as manifestations of the dead), which Michaels portrays as ebbing and flowing just as the living do. In a sense, the very invisibility of people in a long exposure reveals their presence as living beings. As Helena concludes in a different scene, “It is absence that proves what was once present” (21). These genuine photographs that erase the living also allude ironically to their opposite: Robert Stanley’s faked “spirit photos,” which purport to show the dead.

“Perhaps, she thought, a son. Peter, her husband’s name, the name his ghost carried.”

Lia, whose chance meeting with the photographer in the woods evolves into a sexual encounter, intuits from the strength of her hope and “longing” that she has conceived a child with him. Later, she puzzles over a photo that he has taken, which seems to show a bridge from an impossibly aerial perspective. The photographer, who wants “to document everything before it [is] gone” (162), has in some way channeled the presence of her husband, completing Peter’s work of giving her a child—as implied by the bridge in the photo, which connects two planes on opposite sides of a river.

“Paavo could put a version of that melodic line in the mouth of a singer in a concert hall—if he erased the poet’s words, changed the order of the notes to obliterate the suggestion of a hymn, changed the rhythmic values; that is, if he changed everything. A revision, in every note unrecognizable from the original: satire.”

Paavo, a covertly anti-Soviet composer who lives in Estonia in 1980, imbues his choral music with the “melodic line” of a forbidden hymn sung to him by his wife, while carefully disguising the tune’s origins. Like the ghost of a loved one, his song retains the “essence” of a hymn while fogging the details. Unfortunately, his compositions soon run afoul of the Soviet apparatchiks, who expel him and his wife from the country. Paavo’s musical activism obliquely alludes to the “Singing Revolution,” a late-1980s movement that challenged Soviet hegemony over Estonia and other Balkan states, partly through the mass singing of patriotic songs.

“Scientists will rip us to shreds looking for it, but it will not be found where they are looking.”

Watching the Soviet enforcers rummaging through his belongings at the Polish border, Paavo ponders the human body’s instinctual notion of preternatural boundaries—for “what lies beyond the self” (180). He surmises that the scientific mindset will never locate this sense, since it does not reside in any bodily organ or physical evidence. The enforcers’ fruitless search of his luggage for contraband serves as metaphor for this failed quest, since Paavo’s political dissent was communicated solely through feeling—the emotional tenor of his musical compositions—rather than through words or tangible action.

“That evening, I could not comprehend that the wildflowers you’d picked for us had outlived you.”

The unnamed mother of Sandor and Marcus mourns her late husband, Eugène, who died suddenly and unexpectedly just hours after gathering flowers from a meadow on a beautiful spring day. The “singingly clear, cold water” (189) in his flower vase reprises the correlation between water and death, and this imagery also draws implicit parallels to the affinity between Paavo’s “singing” and the ineffable essence of the songs he creates. The wildflowers also echo the death of John, who, in Chapter 2, gathers a jar of wildflowers for his wife before drowning in the river.

“Langevin had written to the papers in her defence, fought duels to restore both their honour, but it was too late, always too late, the moment wolves taste blood.”

Years after the death of Pierre Curie, his widow Marie Curie began an affair with the couple’s friend and colleague, Paul Langevin, causing the two of them to be pilloried by the press and by the French government. The attacks on Marie branded her as a homewrecker and a usurper of her husband’s work and referred darkly to the “racial malignancy” of her rumored Jewish ancestry. Like Helena, Peter, Lia, Alan, Helen, and others, Marie is “haunted” by a deceased loved one, but in a far different sense than the rest of Michaels’s characters, for her husband’s worldly fame has cast a shade over her. This issue is further exacerbated by the press, which—as Alan observed about his own journalism—can no more capture the true essence of a loss than it can “describ[e] the complexity of a molecule from the vantage point of the moon” (111).

“They want us to make that bargain, always that same bargain, against ourselves—one part of us at the expense of another. Of course we must prove them wrong. And if we fail, it is still the right thing to do.”

Hertha Ayrton, a real-life mathematician and close friend of Marie Curie, consoles Marie in the wake of her scandal by reminding her that women have just as much right to happiness as men do. Seeking happiness, she says—far from being a form of selfishness or disloyalty—is tantamount to a moral duty, even if it fails. In this context, quixotic acts of love, although perhaps doomed to failure, are like the “absence that proves what was once present” (21). As Hertha tells Marie, “It was because you’d known happiness that you could believe in it (204). Similarly, both Mara’s life-saving surgery on a child who dies just minutes later and Alan’s doomed attempts to convey the loss of war through words are never futile; instead, Michaels suggests that these acts are precious votives to the sanctity of human life, however fleeting it may be.

“When we grew eyes did others of our kind believe us mad for what we saw? Perhaps it simply begins like this: always, just as she reaches the same turn of the path where it bends into the trees, his hand finds hers.”

A character named Helen James, who feels the presence of her dead father whenever she walks their favorite path, thinks about the gradual evolution of humans’ sensory organs. She reflects that the development of eyes, for instance, unveiled commonplace realities that might once have been dismissed. Likewise, her musings suggest that the hidden realities of the spirit world remain beyond the scope of human perception. Helen’s thoughts on this point echo those of John and Paavo, who reflect upon the inadequacy of the sciences in quantifying the spirit.

“But sometimes history is simply detritus: midden mounds, ghost nets, panoramic beaches of plastic sand. Sometimes both: a continual convergence of stories unfolding too quickly or too gradually to follow; sometimes, too intimate to know.”

In this passage, the author considers the ever-shifting tides of history, the most essential drifts of which may be as invisible or incomprehensible to the human mind as the spirit world. The contemplative tone of these reflections implies that everything, however small or seemingly commonplace, could be profoundly significant, and hence precious.