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Caught in the Light

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On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett falls in love with a woman he meets by chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he leaves his wife and goes to meet Marian, only for her to vanish from his life as mysteriously as she entered it.Searching for the woman for whom he has sacrificed everything, Jarrett comes across a Dorset churchyard full of gravestones of dead Esguards. He also meets a psychotherapist, Daphne Sanger. She too is looking for a someone: a former client who believes she is the reincarnation of Marian Esguard, who may have invented photography ten years before Fox Talbot. But why is Marian Esguard unknown to history? And who and where is the woman Jarrett met in Vienna?
Jarrett sets out to solve a mystery whose origins lie amid the magical-seeming properties of early photgraphy. But at the end of his search a trap awaits him. He is caught in a web of deception, woven between the enigmas of the past and the revenges of the present. And there is no way out.
Photography is in many ways a magical medium. Remote communities are recorded as reacting to it with fear and suspicion, believing the camera had captured their souls along with their images. Even in our present-day society, where it’s become commonplace, it preserves an eerie edge, thanks to its facility for preserving fragments of time. This is particularly true of pictures from the early decades of photography, which often have a ghostly quality for purely technical reasons. And it’s this quality I tried to evoke in Caught in the Light.
The tantalizing fact is that photography could have been invented many decades before it actually was. We might easily have had photographs of Nelson or Napoleon. But it wasn’t to be. Not until William Fox Talbot started his experiments at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire in the 1830s was photography born. Fifty years earlier, however – yes, fifty years – Elizabeth Fulhame, wife of an Edinburgh doctor, Thomas Fulhame, was using photographic techniques to print patterns on cloth, only to abandon her researches in the face of the misogynistic indifference of the scientific establishment, as she recalled in her book, View to a New Art, published in 1794.
Sadly, we know very little of the life of Elizabeth Fulhame. The character of Marian Esguard in Caught in the Light is, however, in many ways a tribute to her. What if someone really had perfected the technique of photography before Fox Talbot? And what if the photographs they took had survived, hidden away somewhere, to the present day? It’s a genuine and fascinating possibility.
Such photographs, were they to exist, would, of course, be worth a fortune. And where’s there a fortune there are always fortune-hunters. That’s what turned a speculation about the early nineteenth century history of photography into a late twentieth century thriller: Caught in the Light.
'A literally spellbinding foray into the real-life game of truth and consequences'
The Times
'When it comes to duplicity and intrigue, Goddard is second to none. He is a master of manipulation…a hypnotic, unputdownable thriller'
Daily Mail
'This is his best book yet'
Daily Telegraph