White by Marie Darrieussecq

Fleeting moments of density in our mass cause laughter to ring out haphazardly. It does not take much to hold us here, in this zone, it does not take much at all. Vacillating, yet perpetual. Solid as ice. In the perpetual whiteness where nothing ever happens, the White Project forgotten. In the whiteness that suits us. Several mythologies situate us here: sometimes we are the dead, or those who are still moving. Above all, we avoid being counted. Of course, we can drift up to the surface of the planet, like an atmospheric phenomenon, El Nino or La Nina, but if the Earth holds us, then Antarctica is our... what? Our anchorage? Leave that to the sailors. Our territory? Leave that to the animals, the seals, whales and penguins. Our field? For the gardeners. Our empire, our realm? For others still. Our country? What a joke. Marshland is for the will-o'-the-wisp, lava for trolls, forest for elves; but the South Pole is our identity, like the sea for the melancholic, the chaise-longue for the consumptive, or an empty room for the amnesiac. We would set down this equation: that Antarctica is to Geography what our bodies are to History. And we would add that for this season (as they put it) we shall certainly be drawn to floating around the White Project. Perhaps even more than usual.

Two people arrive at a research base at the South Pole. One is Peter Thomson, an Icelandic heating engineer, whose job is to keep the generator running and the heat on. The other is Edmee Blanco, a French woman living in Houston, who is the radio operator--the base's link to the outside world. Slowly, at a pace that matches the changelessness of the white continent's days, they are drawn together. Perhaps because they sense that the other has, like them, come to Antarctica to escape some unbearable aspect of their lives. For Peter, it is his racial ambiguity that has made him an outcast all his life among the pale Icelanders. For Edmee, it's a terrible murder to which she is only tenuously connected, though perhaps being tenuously connected to a murder is even more difficult than being directly implicated. These stories unfold in Darrieussecq's narrative with a strange dilatoriness; at first they seem so random--the kind of thing a scriptwriter might throw in to give a character roundness--but by the end of the novel, they feel convincing. And yet, on the white continent, these stories feel strangely irrelevant--as no doubt Edmee and Peter are hoping.

I've never read a book like White. (Isn't it amazing how, after fifteen years and thousands of books, you can still find yourself saying a thing like that?) Darrieussecq's descriptions of Antarctica are the book's greatest pleasure, not just in a physical sense but a metaphysical one. For her, as for Edmee and Peter, Antarctica is a place that is both peripheral and central, a spot that is blank both on the map and in life, a "white patch pierced by a metal rod at the bottom of the luminous globe." Nothing grows here, and yet is the "place where the winds are born." Its emptiness and impenetrability are its chief qualities, but as one researcher explains, if you extract a miles-long core from the ice--as the White Project attempts to do--you can read the record of all of human history, ancient eruptions as well as ash from the World Trade Center. White unfolds very slowly, and barely seems to have a plot at all--the long arrival, then the quiet dalliance between Peter and Edmee, and then at last a generator failure that brings the project to ruin--but on a metaphysical level, the continent is constantly unfolding its mystery.

One of the strangest things about White: it's narrated by ghosts. They are not the ghosts of former explorers, though they describe themselves as playing among Robert Falcon Scott's dead horses; they're not the ghosts of people at all. What they are is never clear, though as Darrieussecq explains, they are to history what Antarctica is to Geography. I suppose that means fundamentally inscrutable or unexplainable. They gather around Peter and Edmee, watching and describing, agglutinizing like memories or a thoughts which have no real physical ability to affect anything, but which are still somehow quite powerful. If Peter and Edmee believe that, by running to the farthest point of the globe, they are running from the ghosts of their own lives, they might be surprised to find that there are ghosts even there that cannot be avoided. It's a strange and bold authorial move, but it fits, somehow, the white continent's strangeness and its allure.

White is, among other things, a novel about failure. Set in a near-future, the White Project researchers are overshadowed by the first manmade mission to Mars. (The connection between these two kinds of pioneers is explicit, though the Mars mission is more well-known because it contains seeds of progress and hope--a way out of the earth. The White Project, by contrast, is an unpleasant reminder that even the Earth has its secret and unknown places.) Like the White Project, the Mars mission is doomed to failure: the Antarctic researchers, like everyone else, see the lander tip over on its door, trapping the astronauts in their own tomb. We'll remember this image when the Antarctic researchers are huddled in their own emergency pod, waiting to be rescued. But for Edmee and Peter, whose affair is over nearly as soon as it's begun, it's a warning that escape is not possible, not in the stars, and not in the white continent, where the winds are born.