What about the structure of the novel, split between Jakob's narration and Ben's? Readers often regret the shift from the former to the latter.

The women are not saviours or angels they are simply being seen through these men's eyes. 'The answer is so simple that I'm almost ashamed to say it.' It is because the narrators are male. This was clearly something that the author had been asked about before. 'They are less developed and they tend to be idealised.' The female characters seemed to be there to reveal things about the two central male characters. A reader who said that she herself 'loved the book' observed that some had criticised its depiction of women. She went on to ask about the female characters in the book. 'Thank you for this novel, which I love - despite writing my PhD about it,' began the first questioner of the evening. The intentness with which the novel was discussed suggested that it had become for some an object of study.

'I found myself extracting sentences and jotting them down after I had finished the book.' An admirer fails to understand such accusations: 'Anne Michaels's prose is humble, clean and incredibly beautiful.' A reader at the book club caught what enthuses or exasperates readers when he spoke of the novel's 'prophetic' or 'priestly' manner. One blogger to the book club website complains of the author 'strangling the life out of her story' with her 'overwrought metaphors'. Where did she get the stories of individual horrors in the book? Was it from her family, from witnesses, from scholarly books? 'Most of the stories in the book are in fact made up.' It seemed 'wrong' to use real events.Ĭritics have been divided about the 'poetic' manner of the novel's narration. Yet this research was not exactly there in the novel.

as earnest as that sounds.' Invited by a reader to recall how absorbing the writing of the book had been, she spoke of having spent a decade writing it, and of how the research that she undertook had on occasion 'silenced' her. Michaels, however, experiences her own novel, more than a decade after its publication, as intensely as any first-time reader.Ī member of the audience detected what she called a 'sense of mission' in Michaels's work, and the author was happy to agree. Some authors can appear a little embarrassed by the significance that fans might attach to their fiction. It might have seemed incongruous to be analysing this story of a traumatised Holocaust survivor in such a pastoral setting, but Michaels enters into debate with an intensity undistracted by her surroundings. On a balmy May evening at the Hay festival, Anne Michaels came to talk about Fugitive Pieces. For the first time, the Guardian book club's monthly discussion with our featured author took place away from home.

Fugitive pieces