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The hidden
'What is the purpose of photography? To bring the dark into the light. To make the hidden seen.' A photographer prepares an exhibition of her early work for her London gallery. As she sorts through the faded prints of photographs taken in Australia more than 20 years before, she is forced to relive the story she has carried alone all these years, the story no-one else knows, not even her beloved son. Years before, on assignment in Australia, she had fallen in love and swiftly married. She and her husband had gone to stay at his property, set in rugged bushland outside the little town of Rock Forrest. There, amid the harsh, alien landscape and hostile township, she finds herself increasingly drawn towards the wildness and beauty of the bush as a way of escaping from the increasingly disturbing behaviour of her husband. Searching for reasons for his actions, she stumbles upon a truth so horrifying she can barely contemplate it. But by then she is a part of it, and cannot escape its consequences... 'I have come to believe during my life that all of us have one story to tell - many have more, of course - but we all have one. It is a shadow we are born with and it shapes our destinies. This was my shadow ...'
185 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 8, 2024
3.5/5
Found this little hidden gem at a charity shop and I'm pleased with my purchase. Candida Baker's story really was quite a whirlwind of a time and I'm genuinely and pleasantly surprised at how much she was able to fit into only 185 pages. A thriller, a mystery, and a story with characters as real as the people I see everyday lent to my absolutely enjoyable reading experience. One thing I appreciated was seeing Australia from the perspective of a foreigner and how wild and vast this place does seem to be. How the place can sometimes feel like it's swallowing you whole in both it's nature and culture. I am also a foreigner and have lived in Australia (at the time of me writing this) for seven years. Carolines experiences of her views of Australia itself have reflected me own to such a degree it's shocking. Some days I'm baffled by the beauty of it all...a place truely unmatched and otherworldly. Then there are some days where I feel caged and like the vastness I described previously will cause the grounds to crack open and have me fall in and never release me. It's a surreal experience sometimes and hard to explain to actual Australians who have lived here all their lives. Sometimes you love it and sometimes it's so overwhelming it's unbearable.
On to the actual story itself, I'll start off by saying that Candida Baker's prose is absolutely stunning. She really knows how to set a scene and make tension and suspense so realistic and so thick you can almost physically touch it. As I said before her character writing is absolutely masterclass. Every person in this book felt so realistic and nothing seemed over the top or exaggerated. Like I was actually talking to Caroline (our narrator) face to face and she was relaying this story personally. All of this accumulated into a really nail biting, edge of your seat, hard to put down story that by the end of it I was so relieved because I had been so stressed out for our characters! It's really hard to pull those sort of emotions out of me with a book so I was extremely impressed.
However, one thing that really pulled away from this story (and severally hurt the pacing) is the constant breaks in between the chapters and sometimes even in the middle of the story to talk about photography and the science behind it. This reminds me a lot of a reading experience I had last year when I read "If We Were Villains" by M.L. Rio. Rio, who graduated with a degree in Shakespeare studies, from university made it a point to put so much Shakespeare jargon in her book to such a degree that it became eye rolling, cringeworthy nonsense. It was so obnoxious in fact that she would just have pages on pages of nothing put Shakespeare's on prose rather than her own. At which point I posed the question "At what point does something become plagerism?" and for her readers that aren't as versed in Shakespeare it came off as very condescending reading experience. I will say that, while Baker's descriptions about photography did remind me of this experience, it did not mimic it exactly.
Unlike Rio I don't feel like Baker was being condescending or trying to show off how absolutely artsy and intelligence she was. I genuinely got the feeling of her being passionate about the subject of photography and that's wonderful! Some parts of it were really fascinating but it really, really broke the immersion I was feeling at points. The plot itself was already scattered enough because it was being told by a character who was telling a story in a fashion that was realistic and made sense for her mind to be in that state. The photography bits though really threw me for a loop and at some points I just skimmed it rather than read it fully. These bits really added nothing to the plot and if she were to cut out all of these bits the story would be much more engaging and better paced. If it weren't for these bits this would have been an easy four star rather than the three.
Baker is an exceptionally talented character writer and her prose is so poetic and engaging I hope she chooses to take another swing at the literary genre. I think she could really make a name for herself!
Found this little hidden gem at a charity shop and I'm pleased with my purchase. Candida Baker's story really was quite a whirlwind of a time and I'm genuinely and pleasantly surprised at how much she was able to fit into only 185 pages. A thriller, a mystery, and a story with characters as real as the people I see everyday lent to my absolutely enjoyable reading experience. One thing I appreciated was seeing Australia from the perspective of a foreigner and how wild and vast this place does seem to be. How the place can sometimes feel like it's swallowing you whole in both it's nature and culture. I am also a foreigner and have lived in Australia (at the time of me writing this) for seven years. Carolines experiences of her views of Australia itself have reflected me own to such a degree it's shocking. Some days I'm baffled by the beauty of it all...a place truely unmatched and otherworldly. Then there are some days where I feel caged and like the vastness I described previously will cause the grounds to crack open and have me fall in and never release me. It's a surreal experience sometimes and hard to explain to actual Australians who have lived here all their lives. Sometimes you love it and sometimes it's so overwhelming it's unbearable.
On to the actual story itself, I'll start off by saying that Candida Baker's prose is absolutely stunning. She really knows how to set a scene and make tension and suspense so realistic and so thick you can almost physically touch it. As I said before her character writing is absolutely masterclass. Every person in this book felt so realistic and nothing seemed over the top or exaggerated. Like I was actually talking to Caroline (our narrator) face to face and she was relaying this story personally. All of this accumulated into a really nail biting, edge of your seat, hard to put down story that by the end of it I was so relieved because I had been so stressed out for our characters! It's really hard to pull those sort of emotions out of me with a book so I was extremely impressed.
However, one thing that really pulled away from this story (and severally hurt the pacing) is the constant breaks in between the chapters and sometimes even in the middle of the story to talk about photography and the science behind it. This reminds me a lot of a reading experience I had last year when I read "If We Were Villains" by M.L. Rio. Rio, who graduated with a degree in Shakespeare studies, from university made it a point to put so much Shakespeare jargon in her book to such a degree that it became eye rolling, cringeworthy nonsense. It was so obnoxious in fact that she would just have pages on pages of nothing put Shakespeare's on prose rather than her own. At which point I posed the question "At what point does something become plagerism?" and for her readers that aren't as versed in Shakespeare it came off as very condescending reading experience. I will say that, while Baker's descriptions about photography did remind me of this experience, it did not mimic it exactly.
Unlike Rio I don't feel like Baker was being condescending or trying to show off how absolutely artsy and intelligence she was. I genuinely got the feeling of her being passionate about the subject of photography and that's wonderful! Some parts of it were really fascinating but it really, really broke the immersion I was feeling at points. The plot itself was already scattered enough because it was being told by a character who was telling a story in a fashion that was realistic and made sense for her mind to be in that state. The photography bits though really threw me for a loop and at some points I just skimmed it rather than read it fully. These bits really added nothing to the plot and if she were to cut out all of these bits the story would be much more engaging and better paced. If it weren't for these bits this would have been an easy four star rather than the three.
Baker is an exceptionally talented character writer and her prose is so poetic and engaging I hope she chooses to take another swing at the literary genre. I think she could really make a name for herself!
January 5, 2022
Baker’s use of language is beautiful and the story was compelling, but the constant comparisons between life and photography felt a bit cliche as the book went on. The narrative itself was a bit disjointed, but manageable. I loved the characters, mainly because they were believable. Overall, a lovely and enjoyable read.
January 21, 2022
I had a mixed reaction. I liked the scattered plot when I saw that it was a reflection of the thoughts going through the characters mind. Not a fan of the photography side of the plot could have been left out.
July 21, 2025
Really good book, short sweet and beautiful descriptions of the Australian landscape. Love love loved this!
October 27, 2014
The Hidden is written by the talented Candida Baker and although the writing is very accomplished, I found that reading the novel was a real challenge. For a small book there is an awful lot happening.
At the start of each chapter there is a quote or meditation on the art of photography. The bulk of the novel is told in the first person by Caroline Savage a British photography who is putting together an exhibition of the photographs she took in Australia way back in the late 1970s. Here is Caroline very early on meditating on one of her photographs:
“I hold a photograph in my hand and it is of daffodils. Why I liked to look at this image - why I still like to look at it - is that when I took it, it had just stopped raining. There is moisture on the petals and there is a sense to an European eye at least, used to daffodils in greener pastures, of something slightly odd - the grey green gum trees behind the flowers give the hint of a landscape folding into .....what? Not an English garden at any rate.”
And with these words Baker sets up the tension nicely. It increases steadily too but unfortunately the sense of foreboding is often dispersed by the switch between time frames and points of view. You see not only are we dealing with a women in her fifties looking back at photographs she took in her twenties, but this same woman is also experiencing changes in her life in England in the present time - problems with a colleague and her son. We then switch back to first person recollection of what happened in Australia with her brand new Australian husband and for this reader anyway the most annoying switch - that of Caroline in third person in Australia, which I felt could have been dropped.
Despite these criticisms I enjoyed the novel and found the mounting tensions and my desire to find out what happened was one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in twelve months.
At the start of each chapter there is a quote or meditation on the art of photography. The bulk of the novel is told in the first person by Caroline Savage a British photography who is putting together an exhibition of the photographs she took in Australia way back in the late 1970s. Here is Caroline very early on meditating on one of her photographs:
“I hold a photograph in my hand and it is of daffodils. Why I liked to look at this image - why I still like to look at it - is that when I took it, it had just stopped raining. There is moisture on the petals and there is a sense to an European eye at least, used to daffodils in greener pastures, of something slightly odd - the grey green gum trees behind the flowers give the hint of a landscape folding into .....what? Not an English garden at any rate.”
And with these words Baker sets up the tension nicely. It increases steadily too but unfortunately the sense of foreboding is often dispersed by the switch between time frames and points of view. You see not only are we dealing with a women in her fifties looking back at photographs she took in her twenties, but this same woman is also experiencing changes in her life in England in the present time - problems with a colleague and her son. We then switch back to first person recollection of what happened in Australia with her brand new Australian husband and for this reader anyway the most annoying switch - that of Caroline in third person in Australia, which I felt could have been dropped.
Despite these criticisms I enjoyed the novel and found the mounting tensions and my desire to find out what happened was one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in twelve months.
February 13, 2016
Re-read, 14/2/16
I was quite taken aback when I checked at Goodreads to discover that I had already read Candida Baker’s The Hidden. Yes, back in November 2000, not long after it was first published. Easy enough for a book to muddle itself onto the TBR shelves when it should have been on the Read Shelf, but how could I have read a book as gripping as this one and not remember it?
But I had read it. Here’s what I wrote in my journal (with a couple of excisions to remove spoilers, in case you get hold of this book for yourself and read it).
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2016/02/14/th...
I was quite taken aback when I checked at Goodreads to discover that I had already read Candida Baker’s The Hidden. Yes, back in November 2000, not long after it was first published. Easy enough for a book to muddle itself onto the TBR shelves when it should have been on the Read Shelf, but how could I have read a book as gripping as this one and not remember it?
But I had read it. Here’s what I wrote in my journal (with a couple of excisions to remove spoilers, in case you get hold of this book for yourself and read it).
This is a gripping book, shifting in and out of time and place and narrator. The tale teller is Caroline Savage, narrating her story for her adult son Harry, but she moves from past to present in an anguish of uncertainty about herself, her motives and her own awareness.
It’s good, very good. There is an intensely personal tone, Caroline writing of herself in the third person past tense when she can’t bear to confront what’s happened and reverting to first person present when she feels more confident. She is explicit about why she’s doing this, it’s because she is not the same person as she was back then. The confessional tone invites the reader to share her confusion and her sense of achievement when she moves on with some kind of personal growth.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2016/02/14/th...
November 6, 2008
Disjointed and disappointing. I found the constant attempts to link photography and the narrative distracting.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews