The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble

First published: 1977

Type of work: Social chronicle

Time of work: The mid-1970’s, with flashbacks to earlier periods, especially the decade preceding the action of the novel

Locale: Yorkshire, London, other locations in England, and Wallacia, “a Balkan country well behind the Iron Curtain”

Principal Characters:

• Anthony Keating, one of the two protagonists of the novel, a property developer threatened by economic collapse
• Alison Murray, the other protagonist, Anthony’s lover, an actress who gave up her career to care for her daughter Molly, who is afflicted with cerebral palsy
• Len Wincobank, a zealous property developer, in prison for fraud
• Maureen Kirby, Len’s secretary and lover, a survivor
• Jane Murray, Alison’s older daughter, imprisoned in Wallacia for killing two people in a traffic accident

The Novel

How does one behave when the age of faith is past and when economic recession undercuts one’s efforts to create an earthly paradise? How does one make responsible choices in an Ice Age in which the innocent and guilty alike suffer catastrophe and where human endeavor too often seems futile?

For Anthony Keating, responsible conduct if such is possible seems to depend not so much on conscious choices as on an instinctive awareness of his kinship with all the vulnerable creatures of the globe. Anthony recognizes this kinship at the opening of the novel, when he identifies with a stricken pheasant floating in his pond. He correctly guesses that the bird has died of a heart attack, the same malady from which he is himself recuperating at his Yorkshire estate.

As Anthony buries the pheasant, he muses on the words of a friend: “These are terrible times we live in.” Thereupon follows a catalog of private and public woes. The friend, Kitty Friedman, has had her foot blown off and her husband killed by an arbitrarily placed Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb. Anthony’s lover, Alison Murray, is languishing in Wallacia, an anti-British, Eastern-bloc nation, where she is vainly trying to help her teenage daughter, Jane, imprisoned for killing two people in a traffic accident. Anthony himself and his partners in the Imperial Delight Company are facing possible bankruptcy, and Len Wincobank, Anthony’s mentor in the property business, is in jail for trying to retrieve his fortunes by fraud. Even beyond Anthony’s circle, “depression lay like fog” and “people blamed other people for all the things that were going wrong” without knowing “whose fault it really was.”

The issue of fault and blame comes up repeatedly in the novel as Anthony and Alison and their acquaintances struggle to assume or deny responsibility for their lives. Kitty Friedman is nearly unique in her refusal to blame anyone for the tragedies of her life, but such saintliness is achieved only at considerable cost. Her defense against the perverse blows of chance is simply not to think about them, to deny the force of evil in the universe, to screen out the “black wastes” of suffering. The price that Kitty must pay for this strategy is the loss of the past, for she “dare[s]” not “think” of her own husband.

No more realistic than Kitty and much less good-natured is Linton Hancox, an anachronistic classics teacher and a failed poet, who blames dull students and unappreciative readers for the blighting of his promise. Similarly, Len Wincobank charges the “planning authorities” at Porcaster with causing his downfall. Tom Callander, an architect in prison with Len for taking bribes, attributes his misfortune to a disturbance in “the law of chance,” an idea he has culled from a confused reading of Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence (1972). Maureen Kirby, Len’s self-sufficient paramour, is unusual in regarding the drop in worldly status that she and so many others have experienced as a return to reality following the enjoyment of unearned gifts.

Anthony, for his part, is perfectly willing to accept responsibility for his fate. Indeed, he takes comfort in reflecting that “he had brought it on himself.” Yet he fails to see the justice of the “punishments” doled out to some of his friends. What is the point of making the right choice if one may be killed by a bomb at any time?

While Anthony in Yorkshire reviews the choices of his recent past, Alison in Wallacia ponders her own choices and responsibilities as she works for the release of her daughter Jane. Had the fatal accident truly been accidental, or had Jane been unwittingly putting in her claim for the constant maternal attention she had been denied from age seven, when her sister, Molly, a victim of cerebral palsy, was born?

Alison’s return to England in response to Molly’s apparent need of her suggests that Jane may have a valid complaint. In a farewell meeting before Alison leaves Wallacia, mother and daughter are both resentful Jane, of Alison’s rejection of her in favor of Molly; Alison, of Jane’s continued hostility and immaturity. In a speech that she should have made long before, Alison advises Jane to assume some responsibility for her life and choices, to stop blaming the accident of Molly’s condition for all of her own misfortunes. Alison, however, makes a mistake: She turns from her daughter, closing her lecture with the words, “I wash my hands of you.” At the very time that Alison tells her daughter that she must answer for her actions, she herself tries to sever her ties to that daughter. Alison works hard at being a good mother, but she forgets that she cannot will away her obligations any more than can Jane. It is not surprising that she feels a certain deadness upon her return to England.

Alison’s deliberate compartmentalizing of her responsibilities works less well than Anthony’s instinctive even if sometimes reluctant conservation of all the vulnerable creatures with whom he comes in contact. It is this innate generosity of spirit that enables Anthony to tolerate and even protect Tim, the pathologically confused servant and struggling actor sent along by Donnell Murray, Alison’s former husband, to help with Molly; to accompany a friendless and drug-addicted woman in labor, whom he finds “squatting” in his empty London house, to the hospital; and, at great personal risk, to go to Wallacia to rescue the unsympathetic Jane.

When the British Foreign Office asks Anthony to retrieve Jane from a politically unstable Wallacia, he welcomes the call to action with amused selfmockery: “[W]ho am I to resist an appeal to a chivalric spirit that was condemned as archaic by Cervantes?” Yet if Anthony laughs at himself for his adherence to an archaic, chivalric code of conduct, he is nevertheless aware that the adoption of such a code when it is no longer enforced by society constitutes an act of self-definition. Looking at Jane’s copy of Antigone as he sits trapped in a Wallacian airport, Anthony considers that “Antigone had gone out and died for a completely meaningless code.” Yet he also sees that Antigone made a stand that cannot be ignored because it was her attempt to preserve her individual integrity.

Like all choices made in the Ice Age, Anthony’s choice is a gamble. On the one hand, it pays off in the reform of Jane, who at last emerges into adulthood, takes responsibility for her accident, and decides to become a nurse. On the other hand, it results in Anthony’s imprisonment in a Wallacian camp, where, in his extremity, he explores “the nature of God and the possibility of religious faith.”

Thus, Anthony consoles himself at the close of the novel. At the same time, the Ice Age recedes with the discovery of North Sea oil; with returning affluence, most Britons will regain their illusions of control over their own destinies, the IRA bombs and the victims of life’s accidents forgotten for the moment. Alison alone remains suspended in a frozen, sterile world: “Britain will recover, but not Alison Murray.”

The Characters

A gentle man who has difficulty making choices in a chaotic universe, Anthony Keating almost seems to welcome the external constraints imposed upon him. Reared in a cathedral city and educated at Oxford, Anthony, as the son of a clergyman-schoolmaster, is at first more eager to escape the expectations of his father than to establish his own identity. He marries young, lives by “his wits,” and follows a friend’s suggestion that he get a job writing for television. It is not surprising that Anthony finds “incomprehensible virtues” in Giles Peters, the friend who tells him what to do: Giles can make decisions.

Outwardly successful, Anthony gradually comes to recognize that his marriage is a failure and his job lacks challenge. Just as Anthony is “ripe for conversion, to some new creed,” he meets “self-made” property developer Len Wincobank, who is devoted, “with a kind of blinkered faithful zeal,” to rebuilding the face of England. Margaret Drabble’s use of the language of religious experience is suggestive here. When the old faiths go by the wayside, energetic men such as Anthony will look for substitutes. In a society apparently ruled by chance, the preoccupation with property development and speculation, which is, after all, a form of gambling, seems appropriate.

Len’s example inspires Anthony, with the help of Giles and his money, to form his own property development firm, the Imperial Delight Company. The name is inherited from an archaic candy factory purchased by the new partners but, nevertheless, indicates the significance of the venture. Although Anthony believes himself to be “a modern man, an operator, at one with the spirit of the age,” his enthusiasm seems to belong to an earlier time, his “sense of empire” rather like that of a nineteenth century captain of industry. Characteristically, his greatest “pride” lies not, as in Len’s case, in his plans for new buildings but in the “possession” of a defunct gasometer “a work of art” that will ultimately “have to come down.” It is probably just as well that a heart attack removes Anthony from the scene of the action; even the sacrifice of a small elderberry tree to Imperial Delight’s redevelopment plans is a source of regret.

The same instinct to preserve and protect manifests itself in Anthony’s mission to rescue Jane. In assigning him that mission, the British Foreign Office makes possible still another conversion for Anthony, one that may be no truer objectively than the religion of property development, but which has the virtue, at least, of being consistent with his character. Indeed, his action springs from his own inner imperatives rather than from any consideration of rewards or consequences.

It is Alison who remains fixated upon the consequences of her choices and who fears that she is somehow responsible for all the evils that have befallen her family. There is the case of her older sister Rosemary, whose envy of Alison’s greater beauty has always “made Alison feel guilty, sick.” When Rosemary undergoes a mastectomy, Alison’s guilt has something real to attach itself to: She cannot help but attribute the cancer to her resentment of Rosemary, much as a child may ascribe the death of a sibling to his own dark fantasies.

Alison’s self-accusations do not end with her relationship to her sister but extend to what she defines as the central role of her life, that of mother. She wonders whether chance is the only element at work in producing her daughter Molly’s affliction or whether she must suffer “the guilt of Molly’s sacrifice” in a world that metes out “punishments for. . . unknown crimes.” For Alison, it is an act of faith to believe that her daughter’s condition really is an accident and not the intentional malevolence of a hostile universe.

Yet Jane’s traffic accident, her continuing resentment of Molly, and her petulant claims on her mother’s attention all exacerbate Alison’s fears. Undeniably, Alison stands at the center of an ugly, repeating pattern of sibling rivalry: Jane is jealous of Molly, as Rosemary has always been jealous of Alison. The victim of so much “ill will” and disaster, Alison fears her own thoughts. In a vision that is both a fantasy of power and a nightmare of guilt, she sees, “a world where the will was potent, not impotent; where it made, indeed, bad choices and killed others by them, killed them, deformed them, destroyed them.”

A less extreme reaction to misfortune than the angst of Alison or the conversions of Anthony is the cheerful pragmatism of Maureen Kirby, Len Wincobank’s secretary and paramour. After Len goes to prison, Maureen gets a new job, builds a successful career, tries to be faithful to Len, but does not agonize too much when she decides that she cannot. Full of vitality and good humor, Maureen takes herself less seriously than does Alison; she acknowledges responsibility for her own actions but does not blame herself for all the misfortunes of her world.

Critical Context

A prolific writer, Margaret Drabble has written a number of novels, a biography of Arnold Bennett, and several stories and articles. She has edited the fifth edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985), a project that suggests the depth and breadth of her knowledge of English literary traditions. Her eighth novel, The Ice Age reveals her indebtedness to, and creative use of, those traditions.

Like the Victorian novelist George Eliot, to whom she is often compared, Drabble examines the conditions and consequences of moral choice in novel after novel. Her protagonists struggle, if not to make the right choices, then to accept responsibility for the choices they have made. In The Ice Age, however, the act of choice is threatened perhaps more than in any previous Drabble novel by the individual’s powerlessness to foresee consequences in a world dominated by chance.

Drabble gives no universally applicable solutions to the problems she sees. In an interview with Nancy Poland, she notes: “I have lots of questions. I don’t really pretend to have any answers so I am not a teacher. I am an explorer.” The Ice Age explores alternative adjustments to depression and chaos in the strategies or nonstrategies worked out by her various characters.

In moving from character to character, Drabble employs an omniscient narrator reminiscent of those of her nineteenth century forebears, but Drabble seems deliberately to exert less control over her fictional universe than Eliot did over hers. At the opening of the last section of the novel, Drabble’s narrator announces to the reader, “It ought to be necessary to imagine a future for Anthony Keating” as if storytelling becomes more taxing amidst the intransigent conditions of twentieth century disillusionment, so that the narrator must struggle to imagine the remainder of the story. At the end of the novel, the narrator proclaims that Alison’s “life is beyond imagining.” The tidy resolutions of the Victorian novel are no longer possible for the intelligent modern novelist. Drabble not only refuses to predict Alison’s future for the reader but also suggests that such a prediction, were she to offer it, would be a falsification of experience.

Bibliography

Hannay, John. The Intertextuality of Fate: A Study of Margaret Drabble. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Studies four novels, including The Ice Age. The chapter on this novel argues that Drabble uses a providential model of fate, in which events occur as part of a larger plan, even though its existence cannot be discerned by the people involved.

Moran, Mary Hurley. Margaret Drabble: Existing Within Structures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Analyzes Drabble’s views of human freedom, choice, and constraints, using all the novels published up to 1983, including The Ice Age. Moran argues that Drabble sees human lives as determined by a variety of forces, including fate, nature, and the family. Hence, she rejects the existentialist idea that one is free to become what one wills.

Myer, Valerie Grosvenor. Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. After a brief introduction, each novel from A Summer Bird-Cage to A Natural Curiosity (1989) is discussed. A useful introduction to Drabble’s fiction.

Packer, Joan Garrett. Margaret Drabble: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1988. A comprehensive, annotated bibliography of Drabble’s writings, both major and minor, and of English-language secondary works about Drabble published before May, 1986.

Rose, Ellen Cronan, ed. Critical Essays on Margaret Drabble. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. A collection of eleven essays tracing the evolution of Drabble’s themes from the lack of choice for women to the question of the effect of equality on women. Five of the essays were written especially for this volume, and none of the six reprinted essays is older than 1977.

Rose, Ellen Cronan. The Novels of Margaret Drabble:Equivocal Figures. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980. Covering her works through The Ice Age from a feminist perspective, Rose complains that Drabble never releases her heroines from patriarchal trammels. Beneath the visionary message of strong women is the conservative message that women will never attain autonomy.

Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Surveys how Drabble’s vision is primarily autobiographical by focusing on the themes of young women, independent women, marriage, and coping with middle age. Includes the novels up to The Middle Ground (1980).