It begins with very short sections, some only one sentence long, which take the viewpoint of John, a soldier lying wounded in Cambrai, France, in 1917, and thinking he is dying. These sections consist of the aphoristic thoughts that move through his mind – 'We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?' (This is the very first two-sentence section, which poses the central question of the book); 'We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known' – and memories of his lover, Helena, and his mother.
Clare said she liked the novel when she began it, since the preoccupations and the fragmented structure were suitable for the mentality of an apparently dying man, but the whole novel turned out to be structured and pitched in this sonorous way, and she quickly tired of it. There was unanimous agreement in the group. In this style, the novel moves non-chronologically between the years of the twentieth century and between European countries, picking up on moments in the lives of the war-surviving John and his wife Helena, of Anna, the daughter Helena conceives before John commits suicide, of Anna’s daughter Mara, who, like Anna before her, is a doctor working in war zones, and of those with whom they connect, sometimes only briefly, including also in its sweep others unconnected with them: Eastern European dissidents on the run and a period in the life of Marie Curie.
The problem was, we found, that in spite of this theoretical sweep, it was hard to distinguish between the characters: every character thought and talked the same, asking each other and themselves over and over the same question about life and death posed at the beginning. In fact, every character talks and thinks as the author writes. People complained that it was hard sometimes to tell whether thoughts were meant to be those of a character, or were simply those of the author, and it seemed to me that there was no real distinction, they were indeed conflated. This is perhaps a legacy of Anne Michael’s prior and parallel practice in poetry, with its mode of direct authorial address. There is also much that seems arcane and abstruse, perhaps more admissible in poetry which requires a more contemplative mode of reading than does a novel. There is constant reference to scientific theories that potentially pose the possibility of unknown dimensions, not all of it the kind of science that is commonly known. On the second page of the novel, the wounded John (or perhaps the author?) contemplates:
Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.
Even when he had no tears left, he would have tears for Anna.
Nearly every critic praising the book has mentioned its ‘beautiful prose’ – a suspiciously vague term in itself – but we found the prose simply pretentious. We also found the whole thing static, repetition being its essence, with its movement forward and back in time without any obvious further insight to the same central question, and with the lack of differentiation between the characters - even the names are passed down the generations, increasing the effect
Critics have pointed out that the book proposes love as the crucial antidote to the horrors of war with which it begins, and which Anna and her daughter Mara experience as doctors. But as I said to the group, in reality things are not so clear-cut and binary. Relationships and people are far more complex than the idealised versions presented here, and it is indeed the same human flaws that complicate personal relationships (and which novels classically examine) that also lead in the wider context to war. Apart from which, the horrors of war are not truly tackled in his book: they are not directly depicted. Although John does eventually commit suicide (prompted by a realisation that he has not in fact captured proof of the afterlife in his professional photos), at the beginning we are party not to his physical pain or the horrors he experienced prior to the moment, but to his somewhat removed thoughts and memories. Some of the horrors Mara and her war-photographer lover Alan have seen are recalled, but only as the thing from which their love does indeed cushion them. We are meant to believe that they have been war-traumatised, but there is little evidence apart from a certain disillusion about life on Alan’s part, greatly eased by their love. And, as I said to the group, their memories of the moment of their meeting seriously romanticise the explosion in which they are then involved:
In the ruins, the smoke chafed the back of her throat, but it was dry and quiet and she slept like a stone. When she woke, she saw him sleeping next to her. Later Alan would tell the story of how he had found her. But she would never forget the feeling that she had found him, simply by opening her eyes.
Ann and John both noted similarities in the solipsism of this book with that we found in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The group as a whole pondered the fact that this book has received such lavish praise, and Ann said she felt it was a similar instance of the emperor's new clothes. I noted that some of the reviewers had caught the soulfulness of tone and impenetrability of meaning, the Sunday Times declaring that 'Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality', which made everyone laugh. Margeret said roundly in conclusion that if she'd wanted to ponder at length whether life goes on after death, she'd have gone to church.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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