Book review: Catching the Light by Joanna Horton

Catching the Light by Joanna Horton was an enchanting read that I didn’t want to put down. It’s a little outside my beloved crime fiction / thriller genre but in reality I realise many of my favourite books of the last few years are books like this – those that draw you in, keep you suspended as the story unfolds, before releasing you. Books you remember or plotlines that come to mind at random times weeks, months or years later. This is a beautifully written slow burn of a novel featuring prickly characters and complicated relationships.

When Sylvie, a single mother yearning for a creative spark, meets Michael, a renowned painter, she feels something she hasn’t felt in years. Impulsively she decides to uproot her life and move to Isaiah, an artists’ colony, with her teenage daughter, Alice.

To Sylvie, Isaiah seems to offer a second chance at the things she’s sacrificed—freedom, love and art—but her relationship with Michael begins to affect the closeness she once had with her daughter. Without her mother’s knowledge, Alice engages in an act of teenage defiance that will shape both their lives.

Years later, Alice, a PhD student, is sought out by Caroline, an art historian researching Michael for a retrospective of his work. As their conversations tease out long-buried memories, Alice grapples with her past and Caroline’s hidden agenda.

Sylvie’s decision to move to Isaiah seems to be a flighty one, but it’s obvious she’s unhappy in her life and struggling to get by and she’s seriously in Michael’s thrall. Nevertheless Alice’s anger with her mother is understandable and it’s a turning point in their relationship – Sylvie so obviously putting herself, and feelings for Michael, first.

And Michael who initially seems godlike—charismatic, talented, beatific—akin to a cult-leader without the religion, is really the quintessential tortured artist. Like Alice and others at Isaiah we see Sylvie’s desperation in trying to hold onto him, to contain him in some ways.

She has not stopped wanting Michael. Of course she wants the version of him she first knew, but she even wants this other version, the distant one. For the first time she realises how exhausting it is, to want and want like this all the time. Desire without end; desire like a rope running through her, tugging her this way and that. pp 209-210

We move back and forth from the past to present (just over a decade apart). In the present we meet Caroline who wants to interview Alice for her article about Michael, but it takes some time to learn why. We get to know a bit about Caroline towards the end of the novel and I perhaps would have preferred more up-front but I suspect Horton intends for us to be suspicious of her motives. It’s obvious that Michael is dead in the present but Horton ekes that backstory out brilliantly and sharing it through both the past and present.

It occurred to me that I didn’t particularly like any of the characters a lot. Sylvie frustrated me in both the past and present, as self-absorbed and seemingly contented to play the victim, while Alice comes across as petulant. As a 14 year old and a 27 year old. But it’s the story of their relationship that is the understated focus here. Their anger, their grief and their guilt. And I guess for me it also forced me to confront my own thinking about parent-child relationships in terms of my own expectations.

The other thing I really loved about this mesmerising book was the contemplation of ‘who’ owns our stories.

Alice let go of Sylvie’s hand and pinched the spot between her eyes. She wanted to say, It’s not all about you. She wanted to say, I was there too. Don’t you think I have a right to my own memories? p 173

Catching the Light by Joanna Horton was published in Australia by Ultimo Press.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.