Featured photo – Author Gretchen Shirm
‘To take a good photograph, there are three main things to keep in mind. Composition- what is inside and outside of the frame. Focus, which determines where the viewer focuses their eyes. And, most important, you have to pay attention to where the light falls.’
So says Andrew, the photographer protagonist of Gretchen Shirm’s debut novel, WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS.
Andrew feels compelled to return to Australia from Europe, where has been living for many years, to confront his past. Kirsten Rothwell, the woman responsible for his fleeing Sydney, in essence, to escape her, is missing, presumed drowned in Canberra’s Lake George.
Plagued by guilt that his departure may have caused Kirsten’s apparent suicide, Andrew attempts to assuage his culpability by talking to her family and mutual friends.
‘His mind was trained that way, at rushing towards catastrophe. For him it was the closest destination.’
His fame as a photographer comes from his framing and focus on fractured subjects, a palpable psychological legacy from the sudden and premature death of his father and the silence of that incident perpetrated by his mother.
Andrew’s trip back to his homeland is not just a search to see where the light falls on his liability to his ex lover, but to excavate relics of resentment towards his mother.
Shirm’s novel is a slow burn development of a journey of re-evaluation of a past in order to progress into the future. Back in Berlin, Andrew has a new lover, Dom, a relationship he cherishes, but is compelled to put at peril in order to lay the ghosts of his earlier life.
In the midst of this soul searching comes a serendipitous meeting with a young girl who becomes the subject of a new inspiration to his art, further delaying his departure and putting stress on his relationship with Dom.
True to her thesis on good photography, Shirm shows a flair for narrative composition, deftly describing what is inside and outside of the frame, maintaining a strong focus on story and character, directing our attention to where the light falls.
WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS by Gretchen Shirm is published by Allen & Unwin.