Robert Goddard
Caught in the Light
London: Bantam, Corgi, 1998. Pp. 445. CAN $8.99
Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel

What do harried academics read for relaxation when their literary tastes are too well-developed to allow them to digest trash but when anything too well-written becomes a candidate for a course syllabus or a scholarly article? One answer is British mystery writer Robert Goddard, winner of the first W. H. Smith “Thumping Good Read” Award for Into the Blue.

His new novel, Caught in the Light, is just such another good read. It all begins when photographer Ian Jarrett is on assignment in Vienna. There he meets an intriguing, if enigmatic, woman with whom he has a brief but torrid affair. They agree to return to England separately to jettison their respective moribund marriages as a prelude to a permanent reunion. Back in London, Jarrett duly informs his wife Faith that he has fallen in love with another woman and wants a divorce. This task is rendered less painful because their marriage has been on shaky ground ever since a car accident five years previously in which Jarrett unintentionally killed a pedestrian, an event that triggered serious repercussions, beginning with the revelation of his clandestine affair with a female journalist who was present in the car with him at the time of the accident. The hardest aspect of his task is informing his fourteen-year-old daughter Amy.

No sooner has Jarrett dismantled his marriage than the mystery woman, who calls herself Marian Esguard, telephones him at their rendez-vous resort to inform him that she cannot see him ever again. Moreover, all his pictures of Vienna come back from the lab blank. Thus begins Ian Jarrett’s quest for his lost love-a quest that takes him on a journey through both space and time. Goddard is good at evoking geographical sites, and Jarrett’s search takes him back and forth across Britain, from Dorset to Guernsey and Norfolk to Sussex. His quest takes him to the woman’s psychoanalyst, who informs him that her patient’s real name is Eris Moberley, and that Marian Esguard is the name of a woman who may have invented photography a decade before Fox Talbot. Taped and written documents provided by the psychiatrist return the reader in postmodernist fashion to the society of Marian Esguard. The tapes suggest that Eris Moberley believes she is the reincarnation of Marian Esguard, a delusion that her psychiatrist interprets as schizophrenic, while Jarrett suspects there may be evidence to support the reincarnation theory, and he determines to find the photographs to prove it.

Photography is the underlying principle of Caught in the Light, including the structure of the four parts of the narrative, titled, appropriately, “Composition,” “Exposure,” “Development,” and “Exhibition.” Each of Goddard’s novels pivots on a background subject, such as architecture or the suffragette movement, that contributes to the narrative’s interest. As his narrator remarks in this novel, “the dawn of photography is just about the most magical period in history” (33). The murder of collector Montagu Quisden-Neve over the negatives of Marian Esguard’s photographs turns Jarrett’s personal quest into a public investigation. In addition to questing Eris/Marian, Jarrett is now himself hunted by police as a suspect in Quisden-Neve’s murder.

Meanwhile, a number of clues suggest to Jarrett that he himself is the focus of an elaborate and ingenious plot to dismantle his life, whose purpose and motive he cannot fathom: “In a sense, my life had become a photograph: a Fenton landscape in which I was the silhouetted figure in the middle ground, back turned to the camera, face unseen, purpose unknown” (429-30). It becomes imperative for Jarrett to solve this mystery before his life is literally lost. Goddard’s mastery of suspense and surprise keeps the reader turning the pages to discover unexpected developments that will transform the camera obscura into a camera lucida.

In sum, Goddard’s novels are well enough written to entertain the fastidious reader but not serious enough to qualify for a course syllabus or scholarly article. In short, they are just the thing for a relaxing and escapist “thumping good read.”