Books
White-out
by Denis Welch
A hypnotic novel about Antarctica.
Laurence Fearnley’s fifth novel is a very accomplished piece of work. I was deeply impressed by it. The only other novel of hers that I’ve read – the second one, Room – left little mark on my mind. Degrees of Separation will stay with me, though, because of its skilful plotting, its insight into character, its subtle ironic style and, of course, its remarkable setting – Antarctica.
Fearnley’s Antarctica consists mainly of Scott Base and the area around it, so there are no polar heroics here: just the claustrophobic tensions of base life set against the wide white yonder outside. That polarity refracts through the private emotional conflicts of the three main characters. When one of them reflects that the Antarctic environment “could be defined in terms of what was missing”, it works as a definition of the characters themselves. Essentially, this is a novel about the great untracked spaces between what’s inside and outside each of us. And baby, it’s cold outside.
The story is told in alternating chapters from the point of view of William, a work-obsessed ornithologist who has been coming south for 40 years to study skuas; Marilyn, an almost pathologically timid young woman bullied into a job at Scott Base by her prison officer boyfriend; and Sally, a composer who won a place on the Artists to Antarctica programme and now feels awkwardly out of place among the scientists and researchers.
Each of these character portraits is virtually a novella in itself. Perhaps the most successfully delineated is Marilyn, whose job as comms operator requires her to read the daily Scott Base news bulletin. Her attempts to do so, in a state of hysterical nervousness, are both cringe-makingly funny and desperately sad.
More seriously, through loneliness, homesickness and a stifling inability to speak her mind, Marilyn sinks into precisely the kind of situation she least needs. Fearnley spares us no stage of this decline, while never going so far as to destroy our essential sympathy for a tormented character.
William is brilliantly done, too. He has been so preoccupied by his research that he missed his sons growing up – missed just about everything going on around him, in fact, if it wasn’t to do with skuas. It takes a stranger to point out that his wife sewed a loving greeting into a jersey he wore for years: he simply never noticed it. William’s vague, only half-ashamed awareness of his own shortcomings is delicately and convincingly drawn. Sally, being more intellectual and self-analytical, is harder to relate to, especially when we realise that, clinically, she intends to incorporate into a new composition Marilyn’s anguished cry of “I don’t know what to do!” in the middle of an on-air bulletin. But Sally is no less real for that.
Fearnley’s style is Sebaldic, by which I mean in the manner of W G Sebald – flat, steady, unrelenting, clause generating clause, detail piled upon detail, with many digressions into dreams, memories and speculations, and some disorienting shifts in time. The effect, slightly deadening at first, is ultimately hypnotic. There are even several photographs scattered through the book in classic Sebaldic fashion. Most exquisite is the way in which Fearnley allows us to see a scene or event, whether past or present, from different perspectives. These characters’ lives have interlocked before – hence the book’s title – only they don’t know it (though they come tantalisingly close at times to finding out). Only indirectly do we the readers come to know it, and, thanks to Fearnley’s painstaking delicacy, each new piece of knowledge touches us like a snow crystal brushing the cheek.
The connections are never spelt out; there is nothing crude, obvious or judgmental about the construction of this book. In the small continent of its pages there is plenty of room for readers to form their own judgments and conclusions. And to get the shivers in doing so.
DEGREES OF SEPARATION, by Laurence Fearnley (Penguin, $28)
