White

White / Marie Darrieussecq;
trans. from the French by Ian Monk
London: Faber, 2006, c2003.
156 p.

I really like reading novels set in the Antarctic, even having had a year of polar reading at one time. So when I saw this slim book at a second-hand book store, I grabbed it. It's been on my reading list for at least a decade. It's a short novel about two people, Edmée and Peter, who are both part of the White Project to build a permanent base at the South Pole, in the far distant future (at time of writing) of 2015. 
It's a bit funny reading it now unless you transpose the date to 2051 to make it feel more likely. While there is a contingent of scientists and technicians at the pole to work on building this base, there is also a manned mission to Mars that they're all talking about; each is a desert and a situation which appeals to those trying to escape humanity. 

Although once they're at the Antarctica base, both of them realize that solitude is the furthest thing from them; nobody is allowed to leave the base alone, and the cramped quarters mean that they are all jumbled together all the time.

But this kind of simultaneous solitude & cramped propinquity serve to highlight personalities and the fissures of human relationships in a vast emptiness. 

As the book starts, Marie is heading to the base on an ocean crossing. The description of pitching waters, storm, seasickness and more is extremely visceral. It's an uncomfortable and physical experience. Meanwhile, Peter is coming the other direction, by plane in a comfy though very cold trip. He's there to maintain the generators; she's there to act as radio operator. 

The writing is exquisite and dream-like. For the first half, the book is descriptively rich, evoking the distances and physical experience of the pole. The narration is from the perspective of a floating cloud of the dead, the ghosts that all these people bring with them (and they both have traumas they are fleeing). This works as a faintly eerie outsiders view on the group at the base. And they also add the shades of previous explorers like Scott and Amundsen, which was one of my favourite elements. 

But about 3/4 of the way through, Edmée and Peter begin an affair. This seems a little lazy, as if it's an inevitable outcome of Edmée being the only woman at the base. And the descriptions suddenly switch from solitude and loneliness to closeups on the physical parts of these two lovers as they explore one another in the temporary solitude of Edmée's radio hut. The sex scenes were jarring; they seemed out of place in this narrative of cold and closed-off people. Mixed in with these scenes are vague relatings of both of their actual nighttime dreams of their past lives in human communities. At this point the disjointed nature of the story became far too strong for me and I skimmed to the end.  And the ending wasn't satisfying, for me. 

It again seemed a bit vague, and a disappointing and inconclusive result for the White Project, although the earlier revelations of the results of the Mars project should have given me a little bit of a heads-up. In any case, the opening pages and the evocative writing made this a great book in the beginning, but it didn't hold my interest long enough to fully enjoy it. I didn't much like either character or the pint of the story in the end. 

It's too bad, because the polar bits themselves are pretty wonderful. But I am glad I read it, finally!