This book was recommended to me by a friend – partly because of the Viennese setting in the beginning, partly because I love a good mystery.
I was definitely not disappointed: The build up of the love story between photographer Ian and mysterious Marian Esguard is fast, passionate and leads to him destroying his married life and – in the final moments – everything that matters to him. And all of that out of an exaggerated, somewhat archaic sense of revenge and pay back, until he finally faces up to what he had tried to keep out of his mind out of self preservation: a car accident that had been his fault and cost an innocent woman her life.
I liked the flashbacks to the 1830ies, where a woman named Esguard apparently discovers photography a good 30 years before photography was actually perfected by a male scientist. This background-story which ensnares Ian and doesn’t let him go until he is destroyed is also the books only weakness. I’d have loved to find an explanation – a way of showing that either he was going slightly mad during his quest to find Marian again or he was being led on (but then what about the schoolgirl in an old school’s uniform he saw?) by his nemesis. – It seems as if my only complaint would be the book ended to soon!
review by amazon.com
If you’ve read any of Robert Goddard’s topnotch psychological thrillers (including Beyond Recall, Out of the Sun, and Hand in Glove), you know that he specializes in setting up an impossible situation and then showing how it is in fact diabolically possible. Caught in the Lightis no exception.
When photographer Ian Jarrett, on assignment in snowy Vienna, meets and falls in love with a mysterious woman named Marian Esguard, the sex is terrific and their future back in England looks happy. Jarrett walks out on his wife and 15-year-old daughter and goes off to await his new lover. But she doesn’t show up, and Jarrett decides to track her down. In the process he unearths an out-of-this-world mystery: Marian may well be a ghost from the past (and a ghost with a grudge). That would certainly explain why none of the pictures of Marian come out. During the 19th century, a woman of the same name claimed to have discovered the techniques of modern photography, but she never received the credit for it.
Quickly–perhaps a little too quickly–other people appear on the scene to explain the unexplainable. There’s the London psychotherapist who has been treating Eris Moberly (the woman who calls herself Marian Esguard); there’s a slick financier with a shadowy background and unknown motives. But despite these secondary characters popping out of the woodwork, Goddard is a master craftsman: he lures us into his fun house expertly, then guides us through the dark tunnels, cackling madly. An added bonus is a reverence for the history of photography, which lights up the story.
_________________________________The Bookworm 