Spent Light is subtitled “A Book”. It’s not a memoir, but not really autofiction either; life writing, maybe, but the lives in question are not human. Pawson’s writing is prompted by objects usually considered inanimate but made and traded by people in systems that do harm. The book is among them, a physical object, in case you hadn’t noticed. (The book is interested in things you may not have noticed, or may have chosen not to notice.)
In the opening pages the narrator is given a toaster previously belonging to a deceased neighbour. The toaster is compared to a handbag, with the lights above the controls calling to mind a dog’s nipple “or the trigger pin on an Arma-Lite semi-automatic” or “that inarticulate surge of pleasure when your finger closes in on my clitoris”. I was seduced by this wild incantation when the narrator describes three words on the toaster “printed in the same restrained font as CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the Anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL.” This is a book committed to thinking, looking and seeing and not looking away.
At first Spent Light seems to be about metaphor or simile. Each object in the narrator’s daily life is like, or reminds her of, another object, or a darker purpose for the same object. The timer used for boiling eggs is the same brand as the one used by IRA bomb-makers, and the narrator finds herself longing “to wind it up and fix it to the underside of our neighbour’s car … just to listen to the sound of the tick-tick down there, just to get a taste of what it is to create fear”. The gas burning under the egg pan reminds her of Zyklon B and the crematoriums of Auschwitz. Washing the floor in her Victorian house, “down here, on my all fours, the heels of my hands pushing into the nicks of history”, she thinks of the tiles laid in “the year that King Leopold II declared by royal decree the État Indépendent du Congo”, and of an unbearable, unforgettable photo of two Congolese boys whose hands had just been hacked off by Belgian soldiers.
These aren’t metaphors or similes but material connections, ways in which objects form networks. The material culture of England does in fact contain blood, in every literal and metaphorical way; usually we get by not thinking about it. Eventually, inevitably, Pawson turns her gaze to a phone, which reminds the narrator of her previous phone, dropped and broken on a country lane. She cannot recall “the name of the town in southern Congo, the one where toddlers cut cobalt from rock … where babies are born with legs that won’t unfold and girls as young as one are raped by men who believe that sex with a virgin will increase their chances of finding cobalt”. And then, devastatingly, “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.”
The addressee, the “you”, is the narrator’s partner. She wants her phone so she can tell him that “I’ve just been eating wild blackberries the size of plums beside the Kingsmill factory, that I am watching a young fox dozing in the grass … that a man in a purple turban is bowling cricket balls for his nine-year-old daughter and she’s whacking them into space … that the dog had just caught a young, violet pigeon and I’d had to finish it off with my own hands in front of a male cyclist who seemed unfamiliar with death”. The sentence rampages on over four pages, ending “that I love you, that I’m missing you, that I can’t wait to come home”. But there’s blood in the flooring, at home, and all the domestic utensils have been used by someone somewhere as instruments of torture. All the objects announce what we don’t want to hear, and they’re right – but so is love in this love letter.
Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.
• Spent Light by Lara Pawson is published by CB Editions (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
