I wish I hadn't read the back cover of Ice. I read the first few pages expecting something like Stephen King's The Stand--the world is throw into disarray by a castclysmic disaster, in the case, a new ice age, and the survivors have to... survive. And the first few pages reinforced this idea, with the protagonist (never named) picking up extra petrol for his drive in anticipation of "the cold" causing him problems.
But only paragraphs later, he's watching a girl, pale as the snow and underdressed for the weather, materialize in front of his car then be subsequently crushed by the ice, which is almost a living being throughout the book. But this doesn't surprise our intrepid driver--in fact, rather than being horrified, he's not at all sure how to react. And I felt the same, wondering if this really happened or not. And then he's at a house--I imagined a gothic-style manse--visiting presumably the girl and her husband (guess she didn't die). The husband is jovial and friendly, the girl cold and distant, until they go for a walk in the woods and the husband dangles our hero over a cliff while taunting him.
Then he leaves the house for some reason that now escapes me, and as he goes, he sees a dark, giant hand reaching out of the house and pulling the girl into it screaming.
This is the first 15 or 20 pages, and they set the tone (and the plot) for the whole novel. Variations recur over and over, as some man--sometimes a husband or lover, sometimes another person known only as The Warden--take the girl with them wherever they go, often imprisoning her in ways that intimate sexual violence, and our hero, such as he is, attempting to rescue her, only to run away or be taken away before he succeeds. There are a lot of hallucinations, though the book never tips its hand and tells us what's real. Often the hero swears he'll never look for her again, but always, his mind goes back to this strange woman (though the book always calls her a girl). As these cycles continue though, we start to see that our hero isn't exactly heroic, as he finds himself relating with the Warden and treating the girl just as violently and cruelly. It's very disturbing to read.
I asked for the keys, saying I would have a duplicate cut for the outer door: I had to be independent. She brought the two keys, but gave me only the key of my own door, hiding the other one in the palm of her hand. I told her to hand it over. She refused. I insisted. She became stubborn and retreated into the kitchen. I followed and took the key from her forcibly. I did not much care for this sort of behavior, but a principle was involved. She would not oppose me again.
Anna Kavan was an enigma of a writer. After an earlier career, under a different name, writing domestic dramas, she adopted the nom de plume Anna Kavan--a name from one of her own books--and proceeded to write several novels featuring, but not exactly starring, the pale girl from Ice. Throughout her life, she struggled with heroin addiction and mental illness, and it's very hard to read Ice without addiction in the foreground. And yet, to cast the men throughout the book as being simple standins for substances or illnesses seems overly simplistic. How to explain, for example, the almost James Bondesque government conspiracies that underly the movements of the protagonist and the Warden, or the outsized importance that the pale girl, who never really exists except as an object of desire and abuse? Ultimately Ice is a sad, disturbing novel by a woman who seems to have lived a rather sad, disturbing life. But it's a singular work, with a surreal tone--and subzero temperature--I've never seen anywhere else.
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