Ice by Anna Kavan

I thought of the ice moving across the world, casting its shadow of creeping death. Ice cliffs boomed in my dreams, indescribable explosions thundered and boomed, icebergs crashed, hurled huge boulders into the sky like rockets. Dazzling ice stars bombarded the world with rays, which splintered and penetrated the earth, filling earth's core with their deadly coldness, reinforcing the cold of the advancing ice. And always, on the surface, the indestructible ice-mass was moving forward, implacably destroying all life. I felt a fearful sense of pressure and urgency, there was no time to lose, I was wasting time; it was a race between me and the ice.

It would flatten Anna Kavan's sci-fi-dreamscape Ice, and rob it of its power, to summarize it, so don't read this paragraph: against the backdrop of worldwide war and a rapidly freezing world, an unnamed man searches for an unnamed girl. He describes her as fragile and pale; he worries that she will be unable to fend for herself in the ruined world, and indeed she is described as having a learned helplessness. She's at the mercy of a sinister figure called the warden, who looms large in the planet's war, and who is possessive as the narrator is of her. He races to find her, and does, and then lets her go again, only for the cycle to begin again.

Like I said, that summary entirely fails to suggest the experience of reading Ice. It has been called a science fiction book, but it seems more to me to make gestures toward science fiction: the rapidly advancing ice sheet that crushes everything in it path emerges not from the logic of science but the logic of dreams. Like in dreams, knowledge is transmitted without medium; the narrator doesn't need to pass by the ice sheet to see it, or even learn about it, he only needs to tell us about it--and war and social upheaval get the same treatment.

The point-of-view changes without notice or fanfare; from the narrator's to the warden's to an omniscient third person's. Kavan deftly uses these POV shifts to suggest an overlap between the narrator and the warden, who are sometimes enemies and sometimes very possibly the same person. Even basic storytelling logic is interrupted: in several scenes, the girl dies, and in the next the narrator is hunting for her again. Are these merely dreams or visions? It's a trick question, the whole book is a dream, the whole book is a vision. Ice is a book that should not work, and it's greatest achievement is that it does. It's one of those books that makes you think, I didn't know you could do that. It flies in the face of every convention, and attempts to slot it into genre are sure to fail. 

It seems to me that Ice speaks to us today with a kind of prophetic vision of climate change. Here the temperature is going down, not up, but the novel captures the kind of hallucinatory existence that must accompany the end of the world. Like Joy Williams' Harrow, it's a book that understands old forms will never be able to tell the story of the world's end. And there's something familiar in the ambiguous nature of the narrator, who sometimes positions himself as the girl's savior and sometimes as her torturer, himself as implacable and unstoppable as that sheet of ice. He is implicated with it: "I could not remain isolated from the rest of the world," he writes, "I had to take an active part in whatever was going on." His dogged pursuit of the girl, too, speaks of the relentless patterns of abuse disguised as masculine care.

Some have said, apparently, that the novel is an allegory for Kavan's heroin addiction. Maybe so. I can see it in the book's hallucinatory cycles, and the fear of being pursued by something you can't fend off, or pursuing something you can't tear yourself away from. But addiction is such a private disaster, one that draws one inward, toward collapse. But such inward, psychological readings seem too small for Ice, which says quite plainly: the crushing ice is coming for everyone.