As the first protagonist to be introduced and the one who features most prominently in Held, John is an English portrait photographer and World War I enlistee who suffers a near-fatal injury in the Battle of Cambrai in 1917. Well-educated, with both a scientific and philosophical bent, John launches the novel’s metaphysical, aphoristic voice with his ruminations on life, death, and memory as he lies wounded on the bank of the Escaut River in the novel’s first pages. After the war, he returns to his peacetime profession in England, still wounded in body and spirit. Two years later, he begins to notice ghostly images of what seem to be dead people in his portraits of customers. These inexplicable “spirit photos” muddle his scientific view of the world; combined with his tortured yearning for his recently deceased mother, these experiences begin to estrange him from his wife, Helena, with whom he is afraid to share his tentative faith in the afterlife.

Soon, his depression and trust issues escalate when he suspects that his assistant has been faking the photos. Eventually, he drowns himself in the River Esk. In his last moments of consciousness, he feels himself reunited with both his mother and Helena.