Guardian book club: Anne Michaels on the slow emergence of Fugitive Pieces
At the core of Fugitive Pieces is an inquiry into faith - faith in the most general sense of the word; the question of whether it is possible to feel any sort of belief after the worst thing; and if so, what this faith might look like, what it might feel like. An examination of large questions of history, how we think about events, how we remember. And to somehow find a relationship with the fact that "there's nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another".
Long before I began writing Fugitive Pieces, I was haunted by the protagonist, a child whose only chance of survival is the digging of his own grave. The terror, the unspeakable abandonment that would teach a child such a necessity. His flight across a river in darkness, his body in the ground as sunlight crawls across the forest floor. With this boy came to me a man, a Greek man, with his own history, who pulls the boy from the mud. This man's decision, a painful, pure act of hope, was part of the haunting - inextricable - and agonising to the boy because it does not allow him even the release of despair. And with these characters, a third man who, decades later, witnesses this rescue.
Along with these characters - what they knew, the history they carried - also came, instantly, a knowledge of the impossibility of telling their story. Everyone who has seriously written of this history has grappled, futilely, with this knot: the impossibility of its telling. It is a history that, despite being researched, analysed, taken apart and examined in any number of ways - philosophically, psychologically, politically, militarily, emotionally - despite one's absolute surrender to certain facts - will, in a fundamental way, never yield its incomprehensibility: the magnitude, quality, and profundity of its horror. I waited almost five years before beginning to write; during this time, I sank into this history.
The characters would not release me; they haunted with an intense insistence. They guided me into territory I would have found intolerable "on my own". They knew things, and saw the world in certain ways; they knew geology, archaeology, the Greek landscape. This research required a daily inner resolve, for I did not know whether I would emerge intact on the other side, or if indeed there was any place to emerge into. One cannot continue to enter this territory without feeling there is something uncompromisingly, personally, at stake. It takes time for meaning to be extracted from facts, and for connections to find their way. And then to imagine - as much as possible - below the conscious and unconscious analysis, below conscience, past any sort of personal defence or agenda (again, whether philosophical, psychological, political, emotional) to a place of undefended thought and feeling. One afternoon, in my study crammed with piles of books, photographs, maps, notes, I read something so horrific I could only, for a very long time, sit weeping. The August sunlight was strong and hot through the window, an indescribable despair. I stood and closed the door behind me. I did not return to the book for many months. I was completely silenced. This utter silencing would happen several more times during the decade of thinking about and writing this novel.
Only a very few images, very carefully chosen, would be used in the book.
One could use brutal language to express events of such violation. But this seemed to me to be a kind of lie. Nothing can recreate the horror of certain events; a brutal language would not be capable of expressing this, yet it would pretend to do so. Instead, after much thought, I turned to another way of telling, language that I hoped would bring both myself and the reader very close to events in another way; bring us to that moment just before one turns away; a moment of intense thought and feeling. And also to find a language that I hoped could - again, inextricably - express an intense tenderness, part of the proof that we must make love "necessary". An idea does not truly take root unless it also takes root viscerally. And that is why, and how, language can serve an ethical purpose. Morality is a kind of muscle which must be exercised to remain strong. It is not enough not to do harm, one must do good. Memory itself is a moral issue: "What we save, saves us."
The response of readers has helped me to understand something I did not understand when I began writing this book: that in the end it is not the writer or Athos who pulls Jakob from the mud, but the reader. I cannot even begin to express how important this has been for me - as a human being, as a mother.
When I began writing Fugitive Pieces I did not believe it possible that the illumination of grief is also the soul of hope. The last line of Fugitive Pieces led me into a new novel, The Winter Vault, which is, among other things, an inquiry into forgiveness between two people. The Winter Vault is also again an inquiry into historical events, though the questions are different questions, the history a different history; and I hope that readers will trust my language and my intentions, and come with me into this new book. We all have a relationship to history and it is a personal one. The technology that undoes us is also the same technology that can salvage. Loss, grief, shame - these are not the end of the story, they are the middle of the story.
Next week John Mullan looks at readers' responses.