In this lyrical series of essays, Jean Sprackland falls in love with the dark. Night Vision is a wide-ranging study of darkness, which roams from the “subterranean canals” of mine shafts to the feminist “Reclaim the Night” movement. Some essays, such as the one where scientists study the effects of darkness on the body, are historical. Others are personal. Most are in between.
Sprackland’s interest in darkness began with a move to the rural remoteness of England. A bout of insomnia, followed by the death of her parents, forced her to confront the second half of life: the one spent in the dark.
The book’s structure and language speak to Sprackland’s background as a poet (her 2007 collection, Tilt, won the Costa Poetry Prize). Noises in the dark are like “line[s] in a poem disclosing the next”. Night Vision is dotted with meaningful moments from Sprackland’s life. Our journey through the dark begins in her childhood bedroom, where the water tank gurgles ominously. We see her through the breech birth of her child, “the sudden transition from dark to light”. Finally, we follow her on a pilgrimage to a Norwegian town where the sun shines for only an hour a day.
As a counterpoint to this positive account of the dark, Night Vision is interspersed with descriptions of sexual violence. “You were to blame because you had accepted a lift home,” one passage begins. Later, a “fizz of presentiment” predicts the arrival of a stalker. “Now here he was,” Sprackland writes, “tapping the glass and saying, Are your parents in? And here was you, giving the wrong answer.” Darkness is not the same for everyone.
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Night Vision is not a perfect collection. Its style is occasionally better suited to poetry than to prose – the opening line, “darkness is hard to see”, verges on tautology. Nevertheless, this is an evocative and ambitious study of a state that makes up half of human experience.
In its final chapters, Night Vision turns to the light: bonfires, glow worms, harvest festivals. Throughout, the book has revealed many “paradoxical truths” in our thinking about darkness: that it is both safety and danger, presence and absence. The final insight is that darkness and light are symbiotic, neither possible without the other.
