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Spent Light, the third book by writer and critic Lara Pawson, eschews familiar narrative genres and structures. It is not expressly a memoir, like her last book, 2016’s This is the Place to Be — although the two share some stylistic traits. It is also not a work of reportage, though Pawson has worked as a correspondent in places such as Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana. Instead, Spent Light is labelled “fiction/memoir/history”: a somewhat muddy and oppositional trio.
What is the book, really? In its pages, fragmentary passages lead us through an inventory of objects located in the nameless narrator’s home. There’s a toaster, a pepper mill, hairpins, watermelon skins, fridge magnets, a copy of the FT, much more. The narrator — it is not clear whether we should perceive her as Pawson, yet the two are the same age and appear to share experiences — gives a close reading of these belongings. What starts to emerge is a picture of her life, personality and philosophies, and a portrait of the world at large.
We begin with the aforementioned toaster, which has been gifted second-hand to the narrator by a neighbour. Its buttons are “the shape of pellets of rat shit”, she observes; printed on its side are words that “form a synopsis of the Anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL”.
Each observation recasts the object into something new and tells us something about the world it inhabits. The toaster’s thick black skirt reminds the narrator of a skirt-wearing woman she saw on the bus to Órgiva. Next, she recounts a violent memory the woman disclosed to her in which a bullfighter ordered the woman’s mother to drink castor oil to induce labour, then killed the newborn baby.
With vivid, unflinching prose, Pawson describes “the smell of [the] mother’s diarrhoea and the silence that came down like heavy velvet when the brick sunk into [the] brother’s soft skull.” Each time the narrator sees her toaster, that trauma appears. “What would have had to happen to me to make me be so cruel?” she asks.
The book’s sprawling thought process leads us across land and time, to the likes of Gaza, Angola, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Iraq, central Europe, and elsewhere throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Pawson has described her experience of covering the Angolan civil war as “one that influenced me radically”. Spent Light isn’t interested in this kind of straightforward biography, but it does look at objects of war (gas chambers, bombs, guns) and forces the reader to consider how man-made mechanisms enforce institutions of brutality.
Maybe the book offers a means of objectifying trauma — literally so. Or perhaps it offers a way of understanding life and death, human cruelty and suffering. At the same time, there is hope here. Some objects, like a brass door handle, have rich history and significance. The book is also a kind of love story. An unnamed “you” is addressed throughout; by the end this figure has moved into the narrator’s home. Beyond the concrete, the book reaches into the absence in which things exist.
At times it is hard to understand where Spent Light’s centre lies. Yet the book is beyond doubt affecting. It invokes in the reader a sense that reality as she knows it is a private hallucination; a series of connections she has chosen to make — and could remake, reimagine, if only she looked again.
Spent Light by Lara Pawson, CB Editions £10.99, 146 pages
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