‘The surest and quickest way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare unafraid at a single object.’ Cesare Pavese wrote those words in Dialogues with Leucò, one of two quotations that preface Lara Pawson’s deceptively slim third book, Spent Light.
When her dog starts killing squirrels, Pawson cooks them, acquiring
a Whitby Wild Cat skinning knife
Pawson takes the Italian writer at his word, turning to a toaster for inspiration. The electrical appliance, which appears two pages in, is a gift from a neighbour, Reg, after his wife dies. Pawson uses it to launch a deeply empathetic piece of writing exploring the brutality of the world in which we live. ‘What would have had to happen to me to make me be so cruel?’ she asks, after recounting a gruesome tale about a bullfighter killing someone’s baby. The female first-person protagonist is unnamed, but is surely a proxy for Pawson. The book addresses a second person, her partner, which softens some of its harsher moments.
The toaster’s elements, from its buttons to the black skirt hiding its wires and feet, prompt stories that Pawson shares in pared-back prose that bounces along like the radio reports she used to record in her previous life as a BBC correspondent in several African countries. In the toaster’s dial she sees a dorsal fin that sparks a vision of a porpoise. It is both the most elegant aspect of the machine and the most sinister:
Not because the porpoise died with 23 plastic bags in its stomach and the string from a tampon of a girl who panicked and ran to the sea to secrete this foreign object the only way she knew how, but because the dial controls heat… Heat, like a sharp rise in the price of bread, can trigger strife. Indeed, in Egypt, bread is known as aysh, which is Arabic for life.
Pawson, who explored Angola’s forgotten massacre in her first book, In the Name of the People (2014), writes with a grotesque beauty. ‘I studied the scene from behind a hornbeam, its catkins hanging in clusters like the pointless fingers of a stillborn.’ Violence is everywhere. It even lurks in a pepper mill, which ‘feels like a hand grenade’. A broom becomes an RPG, ‘the way I balanced it, stylishly, on my clavicle’. When her dog starts killing squirrels, she cooks them, acquiring a Whitby Wild Cat skinning knife which she keeps in her desk drawer. ‘Its weight and shape inspire me. Its purpose absolute.’ There is a comparison here with how Pawson is peeling back what we think we see when we look at things, encouraging us to look harder, to see more.
In tone and structure, Spent Light has much in common with Pawson’s This Is the Place To Be (2016), a free-flowing memoir stitched from snippets of her time reporting from Africa and growing up in England. Each recollection drips into the next, creating a torrent that carries the reader along. She achieves a similar effect in Spent Light, spiralling through memories as she attempts to come to terms with her life in the UK.
Her focus on the home makes it a counter to This Is the Place To Be, where ‘the place’ was Angola. ‘Here I am with my mobile phone calling you to tell you… that I love you, that I’m missing you, that I can’t wait to come home,’ she writes in a poignant passage that ends a stark fragment that segues from slipping her ‘blue burner phone’ into her running tights to the horrors of child-mined cobalt (‘a tiny piece of Congo in my hand’) from a town in southern Congo. She is merciless:
I tried to work out the difference between myself with my mobile phone and the millions of men who, in their desperate attempts to be sexually aroused, pay to download images of children being abused.
Pawson borrows her title for this book from the Estonia-born American architect Louis Kahn, who ‘believed we are all made of spent light. We all have something to express, from microbe to moth to machine and man’. Both Spent Light and This Is the Place To Be beg to be read in tandem: nuggets from one crop up in the other. And both are influenced by Georges Perec’s Je me souviens, in which the French writer tried to catalogue several years of memories, and by Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait, which is comprised of disparate sentences about Levé’s life.
Still, Pawson has created something very much her own here. It’s not fiction, it’s not non-fiction, it’s not memoir and it’s not an essay. What it is is a reminder that everything in this world is connected and that stories are everywhere, even in objects we might otherwise overlook.
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