Ice by Anna Kavan

First published: 1967

Type of work: Surrealist fable

Time of work: The near future

Locale: A sequence of unidentifiable countries, probably in Northern Europe

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a former soldier, obsessed with a onetime love
• The young Girl, a pale and slight creature, continually pursued by the narrator
• The Man she marries, possibly to be identified with the character below
• The Warden, a blue-eyed man who repeatedly abducts and hides the girl

The Novel

The scenario for Ice is familiar from a dozen science-fiction novels. A new Ice Age is coming, created seemingly by radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion of some unknown type. As the glaciers extend, more and more heat is reflected back from the Earth, dropping the temperature further and setting up a disastrous downward spiral. Some populations react to this by fleeing south, which creates immediate resistance and sets up the conditions for further war, civil disturbance, and military dictatorships. In the developing chaos, one man searches frantically for his lover, hoping to take her to safety. This cliched plot outline, however, does no justice to the individuality of Ice. As a science-fiction “disaster story,” Ice is in fact inadequate and uninteresting. The nature of the original disaster is never more than vaguely specified; there is no concern for realistic political reactions; the author spends no time at all in trying to persuade the reader that her plot is even plausible. The science-fiction scenario is never more than a background and at times appears to lose realism altogether, becoming instead a metaphor for an exploration of an obsessive inner state.

The mind explored is that of the narrator, whose history very soon takes on the quality of a dream or nightmare. The reader is never at all sure where he is. He begins on a lonely road, in bitter cold, trying to reach the house of his love and her husband before nightfall. His account of this search, however, immediately becomes interspersed with a memory of a former visit in summer heat, only to fade very soon into a later stage, when the wife has left her husband and fled by sea into the thickening ice. He follows her to another country, possibly Norway, where she is hidden from him by the “warden” of the harbor town. As he finds his way to her, she and the warden escape again, across another frontier, to be pursued once more. Half a dozen times he comes up with her in different locations. Each time they are separated, until the end, when he and she are for once together and alone, in a car, driving in temporary security to yet another frontier.

Even this chaotic account of pursuit and loss does not convey the full disorientation of Ice, for another very strongly marked feature is the narrator’s sudden plunges into accounts of events, usually involving the girl, which appear to be historical memory (such as the sack and pillage of the warden’s town), pure myth (such as the sacrifice of the girl to a fjord-dragon), or macabre dream (such as the narrator’s vision of an alien being). So pervasive are these shifts of scene that the reader soon loses confidence that any of the events narrated are actually meant to be happening at all. Sometimes they are identified as dreams; sometimes they contradict one another so clearly (as when the girl is shot, only to come alive again without explanation) that one cannot take them as straightforward narration of any kind.

The general effect is not one of sequential plot so much as of recurrent image, defined only by the obsession of the narrator. Again and again, he sees his frail, bruised, pallid love bound, raped, sacrificed, killed. Again and again, he pursues her in and out of frozen harbors. Several times he finds himself in an unknown labyrinth, seeking her, finding only her always-present protector, the man with the ice-blue eyes, always in a position of power and authority sufficient to keep the lovers apart. There is, it is true, a conclusion to the plot, as the girl for the first time turns on the narrator and abuses him for the cruelty he shows in always trying to “protect” her. They seem, for a moment, to reach an equal relationship in warmth and safety. Yet the gun in the narrator’s pocket and the snowflakes driving into his car windscreen have been such recurrent images that even at the end they imply only further doubt and insecurity.

The Characters

It is almost fair to say that Ice has no characters. Certainly it is never clear how many there are. The girl’s husband appears to vanish after the first two chapters, but his threatening behavior in those is so like that of the warden later on that it is tempting to identify them especially as the warden reappears so often in different roles, places, and uniforms, always picked out, however, by his flashing blue eyes. Furthermore, as the novel progresses, the narrator becomes more and more uneasily aware that he and the warden are like each other, are perhaps identical twins. One cannot avoid the thought that they represent different fractions of the self, as it were an ego and an alter ego. Having gone so far and remembering that the author of the book is female one could even continue the thought and suggest that all the characters are fragments of one personality, the action of Ice taking place entirely in the mind.

Whether that is so, the following points can be made. There is something infantile about the girl. Though she is always perceived sexually, her thinness and paleness are insisted on to the point of morbidity. She is also until the very end invariably a victim, crushed by the men, trapped within walls of ice. She represents something thwarted but never quite destroyed; the “real me,” perhaps, the person one knows one might ideally have been. The narrator always tries to free and rescue this persona but almost always finds himself provoked into furious cruelty by her flight or passivity; it is this which creates his uneasy fellow feeling with the ruthless and physically dominant “other” figure of the warden a sympathy made stronger by the fact that the narrator, too, is a former soldier, employable by and useful to the warden in his many different roles of power. These two male figures represent, perhaps, different urges toward maturity, a state to be reached either by compulsion (via the warden) or by persuasion (via the narrator): except that the force of persuasion can never be trusted not to run amok and send the whole process back to the beginning once more.

Many other theses might be propounded. Are the three characters Id, Ego, and Superego? Are they Good Angel, Bad Angel, and Soul? Whatever the answer, several facts are clear: These characters are not “rounded”; they have no history; their motivations are perfunctory; they do not exist in their own right, but rather demand interpretation.

Critical Context

In reading this novel, one should not forget that Anna Kavan was for many years a heroin addict, and that she committed suicide very shortly after this book was published. The simplest way of reading it is to see it as an account of a disturbed personality trying to express fear of the outside world together with a desperate (if ultimately unsuccessful) ambition to break through to it, to come out of ice, entrapment, and mental confusion to a place in the sun. In this view, Ice would take its place as one of many modern documents of disturbed states, together with, for example, the poetry of Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, the fiction of William Burroughs or Franz Kafka.

To this view, however, two further dimensions may be added. One is that Ice remains a work of science fiction, which has been highly praised by Brian Aldiss, and has many points of resemblance to the futuristic visions of J. G. Ballard, especially The Crystal World (1966) and the short stories of The Terminal Beach (1964). The other is that Ice is clearly a work of the late 1960’s, a period in which “consciousness-raising,” often by use of drugs, became a cult activity believed to permit glimpses of a truth inaccessible to sober realists.

The achievement of this novel may be, accordingly, to have combined in one work three different forms of nonrealism: one personal, to do with the author; one generic, stemming from its science-fiction mode; and one ideological, dictated by its period. The three are fused in a highly characteristic style which moves abruptly from banality to bizarrerie and is animated by unforgettably surreal images.

Bibliography

Aldiss, Brian. “Introduction,” in Ice, 1973.

Aldiss, Brian, and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, 1986.