Where are their screams now?
Michael Hulse
FUGITIVE PIECES by Anne Michaels Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp. 294 Awidely-shared prejudice holds, in the teeth of contrary evidence from Goethe to Michael Ondaatje, that poets' novels are pretentiously written, poorly plotted, and peopled with cut-outs. Fugitive Pieces, a first novel by one of Canada's finest poets, proves once more that this is nonsense. Poetic virtues of image, cadence and phrase it most certainly possesses; it delights a la Masefield in 'Peruvian balsa rafts' and 'Polynesian straw boats', in `Ghana high life, pygmy music, the sea shanties of Genoa longshoremen'; but it also tells a story, and a powerful one at that.
Seven-year-old Jakob Beer is hiding in the cupboard when German soldiers kill his parents and abduct his sister Bella, whom he never sees again. He hides in the fields and forests of Poland until a Greek geologist and archaeologist, the man he comes to call Athos, takes him home and keeps him concealed on the island of Zakynthos till the war is over. Athos then takes a university position in Toronto, and the boy grows to manhood, in his New World displacement, with an unusually rich sense of time, memory and exile. The `dreckiger Jude' (the only words he can think to call himself by when he first meets Athos) becomes a poet and translator, and a haunted man.
Haunted and, in a fine reversal, haunt- ing: 'I was haunting my parents and Bella with my calling, startling them awake in their black beds.' Anne Michaels' novel explores the latter-day generations who were not the immediate victims of Nazi genocide but who live with memories and knowledge that have passed to them as part of their condition in the world. Even Jakob Beer's poems are described by a friend as ghost stories. His is a life that cannot feel fully possessed: To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?' In Fugitive Pieces there are tongues in trees and memories in stones. Michaels has chosen her sounding-board of geology with a sure instinct: `To go back a year or two was impossible, absurd. To go back millen- nia — ah! that was . . . nothing.' The world of Jakob Beer is one in which the dead are always present, and his understanding of this gives the novel its archaic majesty: It's no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon, chronometer, the Geiger counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock 50,000 years old.. . . Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now?
Beer marries the 'dishearteningly per- fect' Alex, whose 'eagerness, strength and energy' come radiantly off Michaels' pages in one of several technically brilliant portraits; but he does not find the home- coming of a redeeming love, the one salvation promised by the novel, till he meets a second wife late in life. The final third is narrated after the poet's death by Ben, the son of Holocaust survivors and the editor of Beer's notebooks, and shows the moral osmosis of grief and loss at work again, as Beer's tender care for life passes into Ben's custodianship, and with it the most important lesson he can learn: 'I see that I must give what I most need.' These are the words on which Anne Michaels chooses to end a moving and imaginative accomplishment, a first novel schooled on Berger and Ondaatje, to be sure, but with a lightness in its gravity, and a sensuous grace for all its moral weight, that are entirely the author's. Fugitive Pieces is essential reading, both for its exceptional literary craft and for its exemplary and inspiriting humanity.
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