When I asked for Lara Pawson’s Spent Light at my local bookshop in January, they said they didn’t have it and there was no Australian distributor, but they could order it as an import. Several weeks later the book arrived, and the bookseller winced as she told me the price. ‘That’s so expensive,’ she said, ‘And only 135 pages.’
I read the whole book in a sitting that day, read it again straight away, and have read it a third time since. I will reread it in years to come.
Ignore the width; feel the quality. To use Pawson’s own formulation, this is ‘a book that won’t let go of my head’. I am delighted to report that, as the year ends, my bookshop has a number of copies at a moderate price, and at least one bookseller is pressing it on customers. The cream rises.
Spent Light, published in 2024, is subtitled ‘A book’, a nod to the impossibility of pinning it in one category. It might technically be a novel, given how capacious that designation is, but in many ways it is closer to poetry, or the contemporary essay. Shards of memoir glitter darkly. It would work splendidly as a spoken word piece. You can call it autofiction, depending on how you understand that malleable term. On the back cover, Jennifer Hodgson argues, ‘I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter’.
So, how does it work? Pawson finds nouns – objects, usually, but sometimes people and sometimes experiences – which she meditates on and writes about with deep acuity, then what she is writing and thinking reminds her of another noun, and in the next paragraph or paragraphs she will write about that and her associated thoughts, until that links to the next thing. The clue is in the perfectly-pitched epigraph, from WH Auden: ‘And the crack in the tea-cup opens/ A lane to the land of the dead.’
For example, the book begins with Pawson being given a large old-fashioned toaster by her neighbour, which she examines minutely. ‘At one end, three buttons the shape of pellets of rat shit. Above each button, a shell of red plastic encases a tiny bulb.’ And then, this how-did-we-get-here-from-there stunner of a sentence: ‘If I rub one of these for a moment or two, the dog’s nipple comes to mind, or the trigger pin on an Arma-lite semi-automatic, or that inarticulate surge of pleasure when your finger closes in on my clitoris.’
These sentence-length jolts, and there are many of them, made me lose my sense of readerly proprioception – but I was engrossed, and enlivened. That sense of excited astonishment impelled me to submit to the whiplash and the dizziness, and let her take me wherever her mind decided to go. The next place her mind went, while peering at the words REHEAT DEFROST CANCEL on the toaster? This is ‘a synopsis of the anthropocene’.
Perhaps this sounds tricksy. It isn’t. There is a fierce sincerity informing the writing, an implacable commitment to allowing her mind and memory to spiral wherever it will, until she finds another object to fix upon, and up and away over again. Pawson’s moral ferocity is unsparing, not least when directed at herself.
Musing on the hideous exploitation of children who cut cobalt from rock in southern Congo to feed the global desire for telecommunications hardware, she reports: ‘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.’ I baulked at the obscene comparison, then started to think more carefully about her point, and felt sick creeping alarm.
Her similes dazzle. The slippery white curves of a toilet bowl remind her of cartilage at the end of a roasted chicken’s leg. Liquid soap slides from the bottle as slowly as Spanish slugs.
Her anecdotes intrigue. She finds an abandoned cymbal in the forest. She investigates knitting dog hair. She skins and eats a squirrel that her dog has killed.
Again and again, Pawson demonstrates the difference between looking and seeing. She refuses to turn away. Similarly, she allows what others would label intrusive thoughts to invade her mind, and documents them, beads of glimmering non sequiturs threaded on her narrative necklace. She models courage, standing clear-eyed before the Holocaust, Gaza, Angola, Kosovo, other conflicts, and waterboarding, terrorism, war crimes.
But her domain is also poetry, and art, and domesticity. She occasionally addresses an unnamed ‘you’, apparently her partner, and there is a tenderness to this intimate connection that consoles. It counterbalances a tone that is raw, not elegiac, as she investigates this troubled world.
It also helps that Pawson is startlingly funny: ‘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.’ When she pulls the knockers on she feels like ‘his skull is trapped between my thighs, his hair caught between my jelly cheeks’.
This extraordinary book, with its consideration of art and design and love as well as torture and war and evil as well as defecation and genitalia and sex, is a reminder that ‘exquisite’ can be used as an intensifier for beauty as well as for pain, agony, torture. That is also how I would choose to describe this book that defies description: it’s exquisite. And worth whatever you might pay.
