Solar Imagery

Solar imagery gives the sun several competing roles: a source of spiritual authority, a possible means of escape, and a material force that can injure and kill. The contrast is most stark when the Nature Absorption Academy’s language of harmony with nature meets the solar equipment Pirjo turns against Carl and Assad. Light promises renewal, but it does not guarantee rescue; its power depends on how people interpret and use it.

Sacred Light and Its Contradictions

At the Academy, the sun belongs to a language of unity and surrender. During a séance, Atu speaks in English about living in symbiosis with nature, renouncing dogmas and beliefs, and surrendering to the universe and the life-giving sun. The formulation makes sunlight an emblem of a spiritual order beyond competing doctrines. Yet the scenes involving Shirley and Pirjo give that image a material edge: rays can be focused, converted, and made dangerous. The novel therefore sets the Academy’s ideal of shared reverence against the consequences of treating natural power as something a person can direct.

This tension is not simply between belief and unbelief. Sunlight is genuinely consequential in the plot, but its presence does not itself determine whether an act is benevolent. It can be imagined as divine guidance, used in a desperate attempt to start a fire, or channelled through cables to torture captives. The image gains force from these differences: the same light that gives Atu’s teaching its promise also supplies the energy in Pirjo’s apparatus.

Shirley’s Attempt to Make Light into Escape

For Shirley, sunlight becomes a last, improvised resource while she is trapped. She calculates whether its position gives her enough time to attempt her plan, then tries to concentrate its rays through her glasses onto a wall until they form a burning point. The glasses are a hideous discount-store pair from Tiger in the Southside Shopping Centre in Wandsworth, bought in the hope of making her makeup more flattering. Their ordinary, almost ridiculous origin contrasts with the desperate purpose to which she puts them.

Her plan is specific but precarious. If the focused rays start a fire, she intends to shut herself in the bathroom and hope that someone notices the fire and raises the alarm before it consumes the house. If no one comes, she expects events to run their course; the small bathroom, she reasons, will quickly use up its oxygen. Her earlier first-aid training has taught her that smoke inhalation generally renders fire victims unconscious before they feel pain. That knowledge gives the attempt a grimly practical dimension: she is not simply invoking the sun as a symbol but trying to use its heat to create a chance of rescue, while imagining the physical consequences if rescue fails.

When the initial effort does not provide an opening, Shirley attacks the skylight with jars of face cream and wrinkle cream. The cracking sound tells her she has struck her target; the hole admits direct rays, which fall across her face. She closes her eyes and prays to Horus, asking the sun-associated power to serve her and show its strength. The prayer momentarily turns an act of forced entry into a ritual, but the practical outcome remains uncertain. After shouting for ten minutes, she realizes the house is so well insulated that nobody has heard. She then focuses the light on a crumpled sheet from a blue notebook, watching the paper grow darker. The careful attention to that small change holds the scene between hope and danger: the rays are doing something, but the evidence does not yet establish that they will save her.

Atu’s Teaching and the Future Named for the Sun

Atu’s public teaching gives the solar image its clearest religious expression. He presents the sun as life-giving and asks his listeners to surrender themselves to the universe rather than to dogma. In the same séance, he turns to the woman who began the proceedings and says that he has learned the name of their child through Zini, the spirit of the wind. The woman indicates that she is six months pregnant and due in August.

Atu says that if the child is a girl, he will name her Amaterasu. The people fold their hands toward the ceiling, while Nisiqtu explains that Amaterasu is a sun goddess in Shinto religion and gives the full name’s meaning as “the great god of August who shines in heaven.” The naming makes the sun more than an abstract principle: it becomes part of an imagined child’s identity and future. The woman’s visible elation, and her eager question about what Atu would call a boy, show how completely the announcement has shaped the moment. The scene is tender and ceremonial, yet it also sits within the Academy’s hierarchy, where Atu’s spiritual authority gives his words particular weight.

Solar Power as a Weapon

The most violent transformation of the image occurs when Pirjo uses the Academy’s solar system to electrify Carl and Assad. She cuts two three-meter lengths of cable, winding one around an immigrant’s thumb and the other around Carl’s left ankle. At the junction box, she removes the cap and loosens the cable lugs carrying current to the inverter, bringing the direct current from the solar panels into the arrangement. The effect depends on the sun’s strength: weak sunlight causes only a stinging sensation, while stronger sunlight can make the voltage enormous and eventually kill the person receiving it.

Pirjo connects the cables to the positive and negative poles. The two men’s muscles contract at once, their legs shoot forward, and Carl’s leg kicks her in the stomach. She nevertheless repeats the treatment, warning that the current will be much worse when the sun comes out more strongly. She frames her actions as service to a world waiting for the Academy’s message and dismisses the captives as obstacles to a vision of religious unity and peace. The gap between that declared vision and the cables wound around two bound men turns the language of spiritual harmony into an instrument of coercion.

For Carl, the solar current is no metaphor. His body bubbles and then seizes; even the small muscles in his eyelids and nostrils stiffen. He feels as though he is burning, experiences irregular heartbeats and flashes of light, and struggles as his lungs become less responsive. The more light the clouds allow through, the stronger the current becomes. His brief thought that it is “not long now” marks the immediate stakes: the sun’s changing intensity has become measurable in his body, not merely an element of religious speech.

The Sun at the Moment of Reversal

Near the end of the confrontation, the changing light also frames Pirjo’s own collapse. As the room changes color, she wonders whether death feels like the world becoming light and warm. A flicker at the window makes her blink; the sun is breaking through, and she sees it as beautiful. When full sunlight reaches her face, she thinks its strength will surely kill the men. But her neck muscles slacken, her chin falls to her chest, and the shaking stops. She no longer has enough energy to continue.

The reversal does not make the sun a moral judge or a reliable rescuer. The same brightness that Pirjo expects to intensify the current accompanies her dying, while Carl’s earlier ordeal has shown how cloud cover can alter the electrical danger from moment to moment. The sun remains a natural force whose effects are real but not obedient to the spiritual meanings assigned to it. Across Shirley’s focused beam, Atu’s invocation of a life-giving order, and Pirjo’s solar-powered torture, light repeatedly opens a possibility—and then exposes how precarious, compromised, or lethal that possibility can be.