'Spent Light' by Lara Pawson
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
Auden’s lines from ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ are an appropriate epigraph for Lara Pawson’s extraordinary work Spent Light, a mere 135 pages from the excellent CB Editions, run by Charles Boyle. The title is followed by the explanation ‘A Book’: well, thanks, yes. That description, at once true and mischievously unhelpful, is something to hold on to, especially since in the book itself you never know when you are going to drop suddenly through a trapdoor and have to reorient yourself.
Pawson starts in ordinary domestic objects, beginning with that most common and uninteresting one, a toaster, but looks at them from extraordinary angles, springboards which might send her anywhere. Her gaze is never less than unflinching.
On the toaster:
Above each light, fractionally off centre, a word is printed in the same restrained font found in CIA documents. Together, they form a synopsis of the anthropocene: REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL.
Followed in the next fragment (the book is a series of such paragraphs) by:
To the light of these buttons is a dial the size of an adult anal sphincter.
Woah.
Time and again such explosions await the reader at the end of a sentence, but I don’t want to make it sound like everything is disturbing, or discomfiting. Far from it: this is a very funny book, but the unsettling juxtapositions often do come from proximity to violence and distress. Among the places Pawson’s perspective goes are Gaza, Franco’s Spain, the Boer War, Iran, Congo, Nazi Germany, Babi Yar near Kiev and Libya. Previously she was a foreign correspondent in parts of the world riven by conflict (her first book was Angola’s Forgotten Massacre), and the awareness of such places repeatedly barges into the domestic environment in London. In so many places peaceful domesticity is unachievable: most of us in Western Europe lead protected and privileged lives, but,
There is dust from Gaza in our home. It it in the kitchen, it is on the fridge. I have touched this dust! Have I swallowed it, too?
So this is an earnest or hard read. Instead, it is beautifully light, moving fast between tones and ideas. It is often moving. The prose is both supple and clear. It is tightly constructed. It will make you think, and move you. And it will constantly surprise you:
While gazing at three pairs of black knickers drying in a row on the red radiator downstairs, I realised I was looking at Hitler’s fringe. Because each pair was slighjtly overlapping the next, together they formed what at first struck me to be a toupée. A block of black hair swept to one side, save a single lock - one thigh hole hanging slightly lower, slightly looser, than all the rest. It brought to my mind the narrow finger of Hitler’s forelock trembling above his eye as he stands behind a lectern, rising on his toes and shouting, his left thumb tucked tight against the palm of his hand … These were my favourite knickers.
The next paragraph - not one for the fainthearted - isn’t one to quote on this website. Go look for this ‘book’ yourself; no other word is going to classify it.