There is a dual problem with talking about darkness: it has a cloak of metaphor thrown over it and, well, actual darkness is hard to see.

Night Vision: In Search of the True Dark
JEAN SPRACKLAND

(JONATHAN CAPE, 288 PP, £18.99)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £17.09 • TEL 020 7799 4064

Annie Dillard wrote, “After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp.” Jean Sprackland’s new book supports that conclusion but adds something fresh: if few of us can claim (or would want to claim) to be masters of the dark, it is crucial for life. It is a place in which we sometimes need to dwell, if only as nomads. Sprackland says, “I love the dark, and I am afraid of the dark, and I’m beginning to under- stand this is not a contradiction.” Just one example of her own gift for pithy insight. Night Vision is intelligent and generous, a personal interrogation of the place of darkness in her own biography and a wider cultural imagination. Such a study could rapidly devolve into pompous pronouncements, over-strained metaphor or literary trickery. In Sprackland’s hands there are no such concerns. She locates the dark in both place and story, and it is compelling.

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