1980 is haunted in particular by Throbbing Gristle, especially the phrase that they took from another killer, Charles Manson: ‘can the world be as sad as it seems?’ In Peace’s hands, this question becomes an urgent theological enquiry, the very relentlessness of the sadness and misery he recounts calling forth an absent God, a God who is experienced as absence, the great light eclipsed by the world’s unending tears.
