Anne Michaels has been Toronto’s poet laureate, so it’s no surprise that her latest novel, HELD (Knopf, 240 pp., $27), turns a multi-generational family saga into a lyrical puzzle of images and observations, a trigger for “the long fuse of memory, always burning”. It begins in the trenches of World War I with a soldier’s impressions of what is essentially a “450-mile grave” and ends in the near future as one of his descendants walks the streets of a town on the Gulf of Finland.
In between, Michaels’ narrative gracefully slides back and forth in time, from North Yorkshire in the 1920s to rural Suffolk in the 1980s and then to Paris in 1908. John, the soldier we first meet in 1917, he returns from the war to his wife, Elena, and his photography studio. Haunted by what he has seen (or not seen), he leaves a legacy that will send his daughter and granddaughter to other front lines, this time working in hospitals and refugee camps, “the most dangerous places.”
Each short chapter is filled with deftly sketched characters: a war correspondent tasked with writing “what no one could bear to read.” a widow who meets an unexpectedly kindred spirit as she crosses a snowy landscape. even Marie Curie, whose courage recalls one of her closest friends. Throughout, these stories spark both poignant connections and provocative divergences. Those whose lives follow John’s life must find their own way to survive in this “new world, with new degrees of tribulation, many more degrees in the scale of blessing and torment.”
Survival — and how far a man will go to achieve it — is at the heart of Ally Wilkes WHERE THE DEAD WAIT (Emily Bestler Books/Atria, 388 pp., $27.99), which her publisher aptly describes as “an eerie, atmospheric polar gothic.” William Day was a humble young fourth lieutenant when the death of his superior officers put him in command of a ship stuck in the Arctic ice. He returned to civilization, but appeared under the cannibalistic moniker “Eat-Em-Fresh Day.” Thirteen years later, his former second-in-command, an intrepid American named Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same area. Now, in the winter of 1882, the Admiralty orders Day to go find him.
Complications abound, both logistical and psychological. Day’s relationship with Stevens was intense, to say the least. And as the new expedition becomes trapped in the Far North, Day is haunted by the suffering of the previous team, presented in alternating chapters. Eating human flesh may not have been the only gruesome act committed back then, and new crimes could be uncovered in Stevens’ wake. Even the lost adventurer’s domineering wife, a spirit medium who travels with a “pet skull,” begins to question the wisdom of joining this ill-fated mission.
The ice “closed behind them like a graveyard gate,” leading Day’s crew towards a possible mutiny. Haunting visions and ominous signs leave no one’s sanity unchecked. What is the significance of a hideous mask made from the skin of a killer whale? His unearthing figure of a ship supposedly sunk hundreds of miles away? True to the novel’s title, there are many dead people waiting to be found. And it’s not just the light that’s “playing tricks out here.”
One of the shape-shifting rogues from Chinese folklore is the unlikely but compelling narrator of Yangsze Choo’s witty and suspenseful THE FOX WIFE (Holt, 400 pp., $27.99). Calling herself Snow, she crosses northern Manchuria and Japan in 1908 in female guise, intent on hunting down the man responsible for her young son’s death. Along the way, he illuminates the realities of a hidden society on the brink of change: “If ever there was a time for ghosts and foxes, it’s now,” when the last imperial dynasty is failing and uncertainty is everywhere.
For most of the novel, Snow’s pursuit of a Manchurian named Bektu Nikan runs parallel to another quest featuring Bao, a former teacher who has earned a reputation as an amateur detective. His attempt to investigate the death of a The courtesan will eventually lead him to Snow—and to the solution of a mystery from his youth, when he and his childhood sweetheart left offerings for the fox god on a makeshift altar.
Following various clues, Snow and Bao take the reader into the households of aristocrats and peasants, urban centers and rural villages. Their investigations soon involve them in the drama of a family of merchants who are convinced that a curse has doomed their son. Young men involved in revolutionary politics and a photographer with a penchant for extortion add complexity to the plot, as do a pair of foxes masquerading as attractive gentlemen. Shiro is the less delicious of the two, fond of romancing rich, bored women. Kuro, a novelist, is more honest, if more enigmatic. But this is Snow’s story, and while she loves being able to live as either a fox or a woman, she knows that “neither are safe forms in a world ruled by men.”