Anne Michaels, Held

- In brilliant and poetic prose, this new and relatively short novel from celebrated Canadian author Anne Michaels offers us a quite challenging meditation on what it means to be human. There's a deep, underlying mysteriousness to all of our journeys and the connections we have to nature and to each other, the ‘…ideas of the visible and invisible, and the rules of space and time’. 

- The novel is a paean to love in many ways, particularly family love, and the homes, careers, belongings and memories that bind us together. Interestingly, all the couples featured over four generations are deeply in love. There are no divorces or separations, and friendships are lasting. 

- Quite surprisingly, however, a major theme in the novel is war. I've not read a more powerful description of the ugliness of war than this: 

To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. Snipers, barrel bombs. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body....A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb, a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre. 

- Michaels' characters often reflect deeply on other contentious issues that characterised the 20th century and still do today - refugees, oppressive authoritarian regimes, and the struggle for women's equality.  

- This superb review of the novel by Leah Kaminsky in The Age is worth reading.