Held by Anne Michaels review – a kaleidoscopic family saga

The Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels is still best known for her 1996 first novel, the multi-award-winning Fugitive Pieces. That title could serve as a description of this new book, a novel made up of scraps of storytelling and essayistic fragments.

Towards the end of Held in terms of pages, but near the beginning in terms of chronology, we find ourselves in Paris in 1908, in very distinguished company. Ernest Rutherford, pioneer of nuclear physics, is dining with Marie and Pierre Curie. It is a hot summer night. The party moves out into the garden to take coffee by the light of a new-fangled lantern – an irradiated copper tube. Talk turns to Madame Palladino, the celebrated medium. Pierre Curie, who has been unable to prove Palladino is a fraud, says: “Science must never foreclose what it does not understand.” There seems to be a correspondence between the eerie light and the equally strange idea that the dead might coexist with the living, remembering us as we remember them.

The Curies are peripheral to the main narrative, but science, hauntings and the way love complicates the linearity of time are themes that recur insistently in this episodic novel. If opened out and rearranged as a sequential narrative, its story would be a four-generational, female-centred family saga. First comes Helena, an artist who never fully trusts her own talent, whose husband is wounded in the trenches in 1917 and subsequently kills himself; then her daughter Anna, a doctor, who marries a Marxist hatmaker from Piedmont, now settled in Suffolk, but repeatedly breaks his heart by leaving to work in war zones; then their daughter Mara, another doctor, also duty-drawn to killing fields, but eventually choosing loving kindness over self-sacrifice; finally, another Anna.

These lives could have been the stuff of a century-spanning, continent-spanning epic, but Michaels chops them up and rearranges them to make something odder and more formally interesting – a kaleidoscopic narrative in which memories, dreams and supernatural visitations are as integral to the patterning as real-world events.

We are carried back and forth in time. Each section introduces new characters, different settings. Readers will pick up echoes. The lovelorn man called Aimo who is following the second Anna in Finland in 2025 (Michaels’s time slippages allow her access to the future as well as the past) must be the child whose musician parents we saw being expelled from Estonia for thought crimes in 1980. The baby conceived when a Frenchwoman out collecting firewood in 1902 meets a photographer in the forest will become the first Anna’s husband. At one level these tenuous personal links hold together the disparate stories out of which the novel is constructed. At another – the level of thought and theme – the links are stronger.

We begin by moving in and out of the dazed mind of a wounded soldier. He thinks: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?” Pause. Line break. Asterisk. The narrator says: “The shadow of a bird moved across the hill, he could not see the bird.” Pause. Line break. Asterisk. This is typical of the way Michaels works. She is a poet, and when writing prose fiction she still uses poetic strategies. The juxtaposition of resonant thought with telling image takes priority over character or plot.

Those first gnomic paragraphs initiate a pair of extended meditations plaited throughout the narrative. One is about mortality. The other, closely connected, is about photography and other forms of image capture. The first is couched in aphoristic dicta that sometimes seem profound, sometimes just obscure: “Truth, where regret begins, is a slightly paler shade of dark than defeat.” I prefer Michaels’s writing when it is more concrete; when she dwells, for instance, as she repeatedly does, on knitting. In the railway station at Brest-Litovsk an elderly female border guard searches a suitcase and hesitates over a baby’s sweater, fine and lacy, its intricate patterns a code for love.

Held is full of lacunae – great gaps of time in which characters die or give birth or are exiled or despair. Like one of those elaborate knitting patterns, it is largely made up of holes and absences. Its stories are told in glimpses. It is for the reader to join the dots.

Mara likes reading books that “begin again at the middle, the way life so often did”. Michaels begins and ends and begins again repeatedly. Around the central women other lives spiral. The lives of their parents and lovers, but also people far remote from them in time and space, appearing like the emblematic figures in the margins of a medieval manuscript: Darwin, circling his garden on a “thinking walk”; the priests who remained alone in Babylon after it fell, watching the heavens “until eventually, the stars and planets revealed a mathematical order”.

Michaels is exceptionally open to the beauty of science. Readers are expected to understand what it means to say that “perhaps death was Lagrangian”, to be familiar with the word “asymptotic” and to know about the “acoustic mirrors” – massive stone pre-radar listening devices set up along the English coast during the first world war. But Michaels’s intellectual toughness coexists with a tender heart. This book is hard, but there is a great deal in it about love.

“Sometimes history is simply detritus,” writes Michaels. Her book is an assemblage of truncated stories and floating ideas, but its fragmentation gives it flexibility and resilience. She demonstrates that fugitive pieces can make up a structure as strong and as meaningful as a finished monument.

• Held by Anne Michaels is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.