Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels

History lays its shadow over the present.


Reading Anne Michaels' prose is like experiencing a flood. You'll probably know what I mean only by reading her work, because if I say anything about packed metaphors, or if I use words like poetic, imagistic, intense, or unflinching, I will risk sounding trite. She is, anyway, one of those creatures whom we call Poet even when referring to her novels.



Fugitive Pieces is a poem. It is a lamentation concerned with no less than war, suffering, rescue, love, redemption. And what is the bold first line of such a poem? Time is a blind guide.

This tremendous opener gives a sense of Michaels' subject. She is concerned with time, with history and how history lays it shadow over the present. Her protagonist, Jakob Beer, 'bog-boy', surfaces from the mud during an archaeological dig in Nazi-occupied Poland, after witnessing the deaths of his mother and father. Athos Roussos, the man who discovers the boy, smuggles him home to a Greek island and guides Jakob in the world of learning. Through this new world obsessed with the discoveries of Greek geology and the metaphysical excavations of poetry, Jakob begins to dig up and study his own history, filled as it is with horror and suffering.

The author's most devastating gift is for ripping open the mundane to reveal the historical immensity beneath. In admiring the appearance of his lover Michaela, Jakob sees in her face 'the loyalty of generations ... the devotion of a hundred Kievan women for a hundred faithful husbands, countless evenings in close rooms under the sheets, discussing family problems ... In Michaela's eyes, ten generations of history, in her hair the scents of fields and pines, her cold, smooth arms carrying water from springs'; and the converse to this, a way Jakob is able to protect himself from the crush of personal history: by writing about his past in English, 'a language foreign to their happening.' He feels that 'English could protect me; an alphabet without memory.'

In this sense, Michaels' prose itself is a kind of excavation, bringing up clumps of the past that are difficult to remove from the creases of one's hands, the underside of one's nails. History adheres to the cracks and lines of the present in this way, filling it out the way memory fills out the mind.

In the second part of the novel the perspective shifts to Ben, the child of concentration camp survivors, who begins a search for Jakob's journals after the latter's death. This part continues in a similar vein, snatches of memory interweaved with Ben's search in the house Jakob shared with his wife Michaela. The weight of history squeezing the present day almost out of all recognition.

But it is difficult differentiating Jakob from Ben. They narrate with identical poetic language, similar references. In fact, for a long time I wasn't even aware that a perspective change had taken place at all. The sameness between characters is disappointing.

This novelistic stumble should not, though, be given great attention. Her novel is a poem, to me, before it is a novel. And while I feel that the prose trembles on the edge of sensationalism at times, and find myself wishing that one of the characters might at least crack a joke once in a while, the profundity of Michaels' subject lends itself beautifully to her form of expression here. For instance, I was shocked on numerous occasions by some of the acts she describes as taking place during the Second World War: German soldiers throwing babies out of windows so that the soldiers below can catch them on their bayonets, or tearing them from their mothers' arms and throwing them in the air to be shot clay-pigeon style. Such difficult material requires a touch of gravitas, one feels - a tone of elevated seriousness.

In Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels searches for redemption in war and its aftermath. She certainly finds a poetic beauty there, and an astounding purity of expression.

pp.294.
Published: Bloomsbury, 1997.