I rarely look in the mirror: Spent Light by Lara Pawson

There are days when I want to embody the qualities of a thing. To be effective, but not affected. To be present but not involved.

So, in case you haven’t heard, it begins with a toaster. The first thing that the narrator of Lara Pawson’s Spent Light wants to tell us is about the second-hand toaster her neighbour gives her one day, the first toaster she says she has ever owned. She takes it home and examines it. Fondles it. Compares the shape of its buttons to pellets of rat shit, as one does. In fact, if nothing else, the first few pages of this book let us know that this is a woman with an oddly fleshy approach to inanimate objects, but she’s not really talking to us. Rather, the reader is listening in on a one-sided monologue addressed to her partner who is presumably already well acquainted with her idiosyncrasies, and possibly even has his own.

The classification on the back cover reads: Fiction/Memoir/History and it’s hard to say whether that’s a help or a hinderance. Pawson’s last book, This Is the Place to Be, fell more neatly, if unconventionally, into the category of memoir. It is the brilliant, fractured and often disturbing telling of a life—a blend of self-observation, memory, and an account of her experiences as a war correspondent in Angola. Spent Light may seem similar, but it is not only stranger, it blurs the history and memories with fiction. One might be inclined to call it “autofiction,” a term as over-applied to current literature as “tastes like chicken” is to any unfamiliar meat dish, but what we learn about the woman at the centre of this book is at once intimate and ambiguous. She speaks about bodily functions and culinary adventures with squirrels and her obsessions with the walls and floors and objects in her house, but what she chooses to reveal about herself is actually limited. She has spent time in Africa and elsewhere, but we don’t know why. She sometimes experiences a certain gender anxiety, but it is fleeting. And, since she is speaking to someone who knows her well, any shared experience that she is recalling does not require unnecessary context. The stories in themselves, personal and powerful, are sufficient.

Through her observations and meditations on objects, chores, possessions, nature, her dog, and the banality of everyday violence, our narrator is not only becoming her own strange, living, breathing curiosity cabinet, she is also weaving a web that stretches out into the wider existence of calculated and gruesome cruelty—a world of slavery, colonial exploitation, and war. Sometimes her thoughts drift to horrors of the past, of the last century and centuries before, but at other times the horror is with us in an even more present way than it was, at least for those who were not paying attention, when Pawson wrote this book and had her protagonist contemplate the chipped fridge magnet with the word GAZA emblazoned on it:

The first time I held it, I felt quite overwhelmed. I thought about the hands that had made it, and the hands those hands have held, and the lives lived by the owners of all those hands. I thought about the bread that has been torn in those hands, the taps that have been turned and the water that has washed. I thought about the hair that has been untangled between the fingers on those hands, and the wire fences to which they have clung.

That is the risk. Things come, things go. The history of man’s brutality against man is always with us, and Spent Light’s narrator cannot help but incorporate these images into her quotidian reflection on the world around her and her place in it. Every action, every object has an association with a memory, or an intimation of violence, or both. A fridge magnet is never just a fridge magnet.

This book, I suppose in keeping with its tripartite classification, is very difficult to summarize succinctly. Pawson’s prose is sharp and unsparing. It moves swiftly, shifting from unlikely observation to shocking image to expression of affection and on again. It possesses a certain terrible beauty, to reference Yeats, but it is also very human and often very funny. It does not fail to remind us of the potential darkness that lurks inside each one of us, yet it also celebrates the capacity to look to the light—in nature, in love, in the ordinary things we cherish, and in the memories we hold dear. A compelling read, it is one that sits uneasily, strangely, and wonderfully in a light of its own making.

Spent Light by Lara Pawson is published by CB editions.

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts