White
By Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Ian Monk
Faber
£10.99; 154pp
ISBN 0 571 22387 7
Buy the book

In 1906 Ernest Shackleton was said to have placed an advertisement in the pages of this newspaper: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

The French author Marie Darrieussecq shares a love for adventure with the great explorer. In her new novel, she takes the hostile environment of Antarctica as a welcome challenge: virgin snow, says one of the protagonists, makes you want to leave footprints. Edmée Blanco and Peter Thomson are engineers on a remote research station in the middle of an icy desert: she maintains the telecommunication with the civilised world, he ensures the all-important energy supply. Life at minus 80 degrees is harsh — and yet the spark catches for an affair that provides shelter from their traumatic past lives.

The French enfant terrible has been drawn to extreme conditions in the past: her debut novel Pig Tales brought us life through the lens of woman transforming into a pig, and the titles of the more recent My Phantom Husband and Breathing Underwater speak volumes of her interest in protagonists who can no longer trust their own senses. White takes the final plunge into the metaphysical realm: our narrators are ghosts, the mischievous lost souls of explorers who lost their way in the race to the pole.

Darrieussecq has been much overlooked in Anglophone circles — a scandal, not least for the fact that she follows in the footsteps of a very British tradition of modernist writing. Her fascination with the poetry of perception has much of Virginia Woolf at her most dazzlingly experimental, intent on what Woolf described as making “the body listen alone”.

At times, White’s snowstorm of impressionistic metaphors can be disorientating. When Darrieussecq’s plotline fades behind yet another insomnia-induced daydream, one longs for a little less Septimus Smith and a little more Mrs Dalloway.

But as with Pig Tales, there is an imaginative boldness here that knows no borders, and it redeems the poetic meanderings. Most importantly, it is a story that never allows its sense of humour to freeze up: as Edmée’s ship narrowly misses an iceberg on its way to the research centre, the spectral passengers of the Titanic stand by, commenting with a faint murmur of disappointment.

Read on

Lovers of the Arctic Circle by Julio Medem (Tartan Video)

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy