A former war reporter finds terror in everyday objects
SPENT LIGHT LARA PAWSON 136pp. CB Editions. Paperback, £10.99.
And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
RARELY DOES A BOOK lead quite so neatly on from its epigraph as Lara Pawson’s does from these lines in W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”. Spent Light is a collection of observations and associations prompted in the author – or perhaps in her literary proxy – by objects she owns and encounters. Her mobile phone makes her think of children mining cobalt in DR Congo; her knickers on the radiator recall Hitler’s fringe. Unlike Auden’s teacup, Pawson’s objects are not ennobled by damage. Not for her, the “crack where the light gets in” or any other number of sentimental readings. This is someone who once gave away or burnt all her belongings and apparently feels no emotional attachment to their replacements. On the contrary the connections they prompt are chilling; the book reads like a terrifying game of word association.
Pawson’s house – especially the kitchen! – is the portal to a violent world. The associations start innocently enough: the button on her toaster reminds her of a clitoris and its dial of an anus. But the words REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL are a “synopsis of the anthropocene”. The toaster’s “skirt” reminds her of a woman she met on a bus in southern Spain, who recalled her mother being forced by a gun-toting bullfighter to induce an abortion by drinking castor oil. She says she thinks of this woman whenever she uses the toaster, which for many would be reason enough to give up breakfast, but there’s worse:
Standing here, in front of the cooker, peering down on the black grates that straddle the hob, swastikas are what I see. Looking at the dials, turning on the gas, who could fail to consider the camps? Most of us, I’d hazard, have not made that connection. But by proposing it Pawson draws readers into a dangerous territory where things that ought to be unthinkable and unsayable can naturally be evoked by humdrum tasks. Between 1996 and 2007 she was a correspondent in Angola and other African countries for the BBC. Her previous book, This Is the Place to Be (2016), considered the addictive quality of war reporting, Here she takes inspiration from the architect Louis I. Khan, who regarded “light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent light”.
And so to the pepper grinder. “Has anyone ever managed to grind peppercorns into the eyes of a rapist down a dark alley, as I was advised?”, Pawson wonders. She thinks it would be better to “greet” him with a hand grenade. The sort that can “blow off limbs or blow out lungs or blow out a musician’s ear drum”.
On the kitchen table, to sho
