Fiction: Imagine the vast, overwhelming emptiness of Antarctica conjured up in a series of physical images - this is exactly what French writer Marie Darrieussecq does in White, her fifth novel, writes Eileen Battersby.
Into this kingdom of relentless light, under "the circle of the sun, its eye always open", she brings a mixed team of characters, all part of a project based at a research station some 15 kilometres from the South Pole. In what is a determinedly metaphysical work exploring states of mind, Darrieussecq concentrates on evoking the physical in a region where summer temperatures reach minus 40 degrees and the winter cold registers minus 80.
The White Project is not for tourists. It is part of establishing a permanent European base in the heart of Antarctica. The team arrives by sea, a "black, slow, limp sea", a sea that is different: "The sea no longer has any flecks or notches, but a sort of ample smoothness that swells, then contracts. The horizon is a hazy strip between heaven and earth." Into this "opaque greyness" enters the immense mass of an iceberg.
Several men are heading for the South Pole to begin a six-month stint on the White Project. Among them is Edmée Blanco, a French telecommunications engineer who lives in Texas and is married to a NASA administrator. Early in the narrative, Darrieussecq makes it clear that a crisis as much as an exciting job opportunity has brought Blanco out to this barren place where crushed ice "passes for air" and "the sun hangs from the top of the sky like a clock." Something more horrific than the merely emotional has happened. Little is revealed about her, nor are there any insights into her marriage. Instead the story concentrates on the alien, inhospitable nature of the place to which she has willingly come.
A later arrival is Peter Tomson, another engineer. He is preoccupied by troubles of his own. While her characters make sense of an environment that demands a new set of routines, Darrieussecq works at evoking a world that has always attracted human exploration and created many tragedies. Its ghosts, specially those of the various expeditions, such as Scott's, act as a type of chorus overlooking the proceedings. There is nothing strange about this dimension because Darrieussecq has often drawn on the surreal and rarely fails in making it her own. Antarctica is where you empty your mind, and there is no doubt that the two central characters, shadowy as they are, are keen to purge their minds.
Tomson is suspended in his memories and Blanco is also aware of having been caught by complications ("After the Higgins tragedy, she should have attended the psychological debriefing sessions - but there, too, she had behaved eccentrically"). White draws you in, it creates the sensation of watching the aftermath of an accident - you want to look away, but you can't.
However odd this novel is - and it is odd - it is yet another example of Darrieussecq's originality. In less than a decade she has assembled an impressive body of work; short, sharp, intelligent narratives that are invariably subversive and never become intellectually pretentious. Her career began with a flourish: Pig Tales (1996) is a surreal and emphatically political fable about a young woman who turns into a pig, and is left hovering between her human and porcine forms. Even at her most comic - and Pig Tales is a tremendous comedy - this young French writer, who was born in 1969, makes large statements about life.
Her second novel, My Phantom Husband (1998), is not funny. Instead, it is a sombre study of a life that goes off-track. The narrator is a young woman who has been married for seven years. One evening, her husband sets off to buy bread and vanishes without trace. Intensely philosophical and abstract though it is, it also remains a personal account of an unexpected state of mourning which develops into an exploration of love and loss.
Breathing Underwater (Paris, 1999; London, 2001) follows a young woman who decides to walk away from her existing life. Taking only her little girl, the woman drives to the seaside. The narrative unfolds through a detached third-person voice. Whether flight or odyssey, the action is enacted in an atmosphere of apathy with intent worthy of film-maker David Lynch. This trio of early novels, each independent and self-contained, confirmed Darrieussecq's ability to surprise, engage, and even unnerve.
The weary urgency of her fourth novel, A Brief Stay With the Living (Paris, 2001; London, 2003), made it more typical of contemporary French and British fiction than her previous books. Melodramatic and slow-moving, it is a communal stream-of-consciousness narrative which adds up to a family tragedy for sure, yet one that never fully convinces. Ambitious in its four-handed telling, it is overly diffident. Yet in reading White, one senses exactly what Darrieussecq was aiming at in that awkward fourth novel. This new work is also an attempt at the difficult, exploring the metaphysical at its most offbeat and taking chances, some of which don't quite succeed - but Darrieussecq's interest in how people confront the business of living is her chosen subject.
Throughout the narrative, itself a suspended interlude, the physical descriptions of beautiful wasteland impress. "It is one long day: with a dawn, early light . . . the sun coming up . . . executing its circle . . . Then it stays suspended. North, South, East, West, around the white zucchetto. The sky is pale yellow, faint blue at the zenith. This lasts about a hundred human days . . . Then, night for several months, while it is day at the North Pole. That is how things work, on this planet."
Elsewhere, "It never snows. The weather forecasts mention blizzards three hundred kilometres away; but here - nothing. Meteorologically, it is the most static place on the planet. The central point, the eye of the needle. The Pole." Here the sky, the sea, a cold that cannot be defined, the relentless whiteness and, above all, the sun, dictate.
The romance is irrelevant. Darrieussecq's prose seems more cryptic than usual, which may be due to the translation. Still, its very edginess works. This is a subtle study of being and nothingness, and its philosophy is well-matched by the landscape and the ghosts that have never left it.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
White. By Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Ian Monk, Faber, 145pp. £10.99