Former BBC war correspondent Lara Pawson has followed This Is the Place to Be, her radical, poetic memoir of her career in Angola, with Spent Light – an innovative hybrid of fiction and autobiography that weaves life’s rich tapestry into intricate, soul-baring paragraphs that waste no words and spare no sensibilities. The work is presented beautifully by CB Editions in a book that, fittingly, resembles a prestigious poetry collection, wherein Pawson meditates on everyday objects and experiences in a perspective that moves dizzyingly from bodily to local to global and back again. A passage speaking to her partner, J, connects cobalt-mining in Congo with her thoughts on a walk in the English countryside:
The truth is I’ve even noticed a feeling of excitement creeping up on me when I’m holding my mobile phone inside my pocket. It’s the gratitude that comes from the knowledge that here I am, walking around with a tiny piece of Congo in my hand, as if it could make up for all the Englishness I loathe. Here I am calling you to tell you that I’ve just been eating wild blackberries the size of plums beside the Kingsmill factory ... that the dog 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 ... that Nina Simone is changing the quality of my intellectual and emotional life ... that I’ve never been certain of what it means to be a woman ... that before we’re old I want you and I to take LSD in a skateboard park.
A narrative that presents as fragmentary, bordering on stream-of-consciousness, coheres into something deeply affecting – the accumulation of moments of pain, beauty, and epiphany refracted through quotidian things: a timer, a toilet, a toaster, a squirrel, a toenail. Memories abound that can feel confrontational in their bluntness but never gratuitous. Stark, shocking imagery is tempered by the gentle sense of love that pervades the narrative. Pawson confronts horrors, bodily and otherwise, to offer perspective on a relationship with J that offers stability, intellectual companionship, and tenderness. Spent Light coalesces into a Wunderkammer of treasures, memories and mundanities that the reader is invited to view – sometimes repellent, often alluring, always resonant and compelling.
