‘Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me’. This inescapable admission by the narrator of Ice, Anna Kavan’s career-defining 1968 novel, gives an early impression of its capriciousness. With its disjointed narrative and loosely-sketched characters the novel is not easy to define.
Yet this inscrutability is no small part of the appeal. I like that Kavan’s writing does not conform to genre conventions — a quirk that nearly hampered its original publication. Looking at the context of her career as a writer, the experimentation in Ice is less of a sudden break in style than the defining moment of her long foray into the avant-garde. This is just one reason why the sci-fi label often attached to the novel is misleading.
Set in a politically-volatile world approaching glacial apocalypse, it’s tempting to see it as a cold-war commentary, even a precocious statement on climate change. It might be a mistake to impose concrete interpretations on the novel, though, since Kavan deliberately avoids establishing a concrete reality. The bulk of the action — a shadowy narrator’s pursuit of a young woman amidst a world in turmoil — is rife with misdirection and defiant dream logic. Reading Ice puts you in a state of flux when even the following paragraph is an unknown quantity.
The setup
Our narrator, having returned to his home territory after years abroad, has the twin aim of studying an ambiguous natural disaster and finding ‘the girl’. He had ‘been infatuated with her at one time, had intended to marry her’, but she ran off with another man. He visits them, but she soon flees by boat just as the world is going into lockdown; she is taken off the boat by armed guards near a remote mountainous region, and he follows.
This takes him to the remote village near a repurposed stone fortress occupied by an ad-hoc military dictator, the ominously-named ‘warden’, who becomes her captor. Any official justification attached to the narrator’s visit is just a ruse to see the girl — a compulsion which takes him through an absurd series of stately, ritualistic and voyeuristic encounters. Trying to explain the plot further would not be helpful. By the penultimate chapter, you will feel like the narrator: ‘My head was aching, everything was confused inside it.’
The narrator and the girl
The incongruity of the plot appears to be accounted for early on, though. Kavan signposts the narrator’s dissociation in an image of the girl confused by his sense of medicated unreality:
‘The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams, in which she always appeared as a helpless victim, her fragile body broken and bruised. These dreams were not confined to sleep only, and a deplorable side effect was the way I had come to enjoy them.’
His relationship with her is about as straightforward as everything else in the novel. It’s unclear if the narrator can save her: the girl is self-victimising, bearing the trauma of a subjugating mother. She continually pushes him away, claiming he hurt her. But their relationship is even more fractious than that.
After the first of several fantasies of her death, he states:
‘I felt no pity for her. On the contrary, I derived an indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer.’
His repeated description of her as childlike, slight, even ethereal, also throws his motivations into question. He does not see her as an equal. Following a rescue sequence we are given this loaded sentence:
‘With one arm I warmed and supported her: the other hand was the executioner’s.’
This is particularly evident when, having finally escaped with her at the end of the novel, she becomes an annoyance. ‘Her white, stubborn, frightened child’s face got on my nerves.’ Does Kavan think men are cruel, or herself disposable? Possibly both.
However, the looming threat of total annihilation saps this relationship from redemption. Unlike an episode of the espionage classic The Avengers, there’s no secret switch to abort the great threat, no villain conceited enough to be overthrown in a stylish sequence of hand-to-hand combat. Heroism, if there can be such a thing, takes on a different dimension in this environment, and you can be excused for thinking chivalry is a dead horse.
After escaping the northern country, the narrator evaluates the conflict and his pursuit of the girl. ‘It was no longer clear to me which one of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of each other.’ Perhaps the reader is the victim.
Though she appears to be elemental, ghostlike with her silver hair and skin so reminiscent of the ice that is swallowing the earth, the girl’s interactions with the narrator betray a very different persona. The fairy tale crashes into reality. By the end of the story, the narrator concludes: ‘Only love might have saved her… But she was not looking for love.’ This is not really a revelation for the reader.
The warden
If the environmental mayhem has been brought on by humans, then it is probably leaders like the warden who is to blame. As the narrator notes:
‘There was a kind of insanity in his war-making. Conquest was not enough. He wanted a war of extermination, all enemies slaughtered without exception, nobody left alive.’
He is unwilling to resolve even domestic disputes and is the first to flee when his country succumbs to its icy fate. However, the narrator is not overly judgemental: ‘I did not think I would have acted differently in his place.’ After all, our protagonist has coerced others, including the warden, for his own advantage. Many readers have noted how the narrator becomes interchangeable with the warden, a domineering archetype of masculinity.
However, the warden goes much further by imprisoning and abusing the girl. When the narrator tries to rescue her, she resists, believing that going with him would be no different than being entrapped by the warden: ‘Why should I go with you?… There’s no difference — ’. She has told the warden the same thing, that both men are ‘selfish, treacherous, cruel.’ Beneath the recognition of her futility is an acknowledgement of certain doom for the planet. Both have been induced by men.
Setting and structure
Just as we usually expect novels to provide us with fully fleshed-out characters, we feel they should be grounded within defined locations, whether real or imaginary. However, the various locales of Ice are left ambiguous.
This is not to say there are no descriptors: we know the principal setting is a remote municipality in a country radically altered by the extreme weather; there is a ‘fortress-like mass’ as an administrative point, a ruined town and harbour, but Kavan does not take great pains to describe these in terms beyond the functional.
It’s not necessarily that setting is redundant. In avoiding realism and grasping for unconscious truths Ice oddly becomes more believable, because it allows us to fill in the details, whilst avoiding the usual conceits of descriptive fiction. It’s like the difference between a naturalistic painting of a landscape and a memory of that same place. The first might be highly evocative of the location, but the second, though ephemeral, is closer to the real thing.
At the same time, this device is useful in establishing the unreal. After describing the waste of the foreign town that he has followed the girl to, the narrator says
‘I was aware of an uncertainty of the real, in my surroundings and in myself. What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.’
Immaterial, the environment becomes an emotional state. An escape to a more tropical clime is only a brief flash of optimism before complete annihilation.
This is equally true for the interiors. The girl may have been placed in a prison-like room by the warden, but rather than imposing restrictions on her, the environment is possibly a projection of her victim mindset.
Ice could be described as a psychological fantasia. It presents itself less as a coherent plot than a sequence of images. Take the titular natural force which is, says The New Yorker’s Leo Robson, ‘an emotional landscape’. Like the grass in her short story ‘A Bright Green Field’ (1958), which the narrator concedes ‘had to be fought, fought; cut back, cut down; daily, hourly, at any cost’ the surroundings of Ice present an existential threat.
Ultimately, Kavan destabilises the concept of setting, like Kafka at his most elliptical. Unlike Kafka, however, there is a constant sense of movement.
Style
Kavan had asserted to her publisher, Peter Owen, that the novel ‘is not meant to be realistic writing. It’s a sort of present day fable…’. ‘Fable’ is an accurate way to describe the use of archetypal characters in conceited dramatic scenarios. Seen through the lens of the 20th century the fable, so reliant on universal truths, becomes fractured.
Fittingly, Ice has been described as a novel of the unconscious — a narrative that, whilst patchy on the surface, is rich with symbolism. Hallucinatory sequences and interspersions of fantasy — such as the inclusion of a ritual sacrifice involving a dragon and the narrator’s obsession with lemurs — make more sense this way. We know the protagonist’s perceptions are skewed by his medication, but the world itself is in such chaos that it’s not always clear where reality ends and his psychosis begins.
Kavan contributes this sense with an immediate, action-orientated narration style. Memories, distorted and real, are connected almost seamlessly to the present action, so that they are put on an equal hierarchy to it.
Kavan’s literary and personal breakthrough
It’s no accident that most commentaries on Kavan’s work also nose into her personal life — in some ways they are inseparable. Anna Kavan, previously Helen Ferguson, went so far as to name herself after one of her own, fraught characters — an act less of narcissism than self-awareness. Her life embellished with travel, a slew of men and reinvention of identity, while blighted with instability and addiction, the author Anna Kavan is an unavoidably compelling character. She readily finds comparisons: both her writing style and life echo Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.
A more interesting comparison, made by her contemporary Brian Aldiss, is with Thomas De Quincy, a 19th-century writer notable for documenting his opioid addiction. Although emerging later in her writing career, an exploration of mania, depression and substance abuse in works such as ‘Asylum Piece’ (1940) would define Kavan as a semi-autobiographical fiction writer with a dark and anxious style.
Ice itself has been described by numerous critics as an allegory of her heroin addiction. They point to the imagery of the white landscape and the narrator’s compulsive desire for the girl (‘a sort of craving that had to be satisfied’). However, the novel, like the author herself, seems to invite several contradictory readings at once.
Though critical attention of her work has waned since she died in 1968, writers like Kavan — marginalised, radical, prescient — are in vogue right now. While this is largely a good thing for her legacy, it also means that many commentators are reviving the view of her as a brooding, tortured drug addict, and accordingly, boiling down the bulk of her life’s work into the terms.
Of course, neither Kavan nor Ice is that simple. Her unique trajectory as an author mirrors her turbulent life and distinct creative perception. Only Ice, published in the year before her death, would bring her recognition. According to Kavan, this was because her style aligned with topical interests. But even this doesn’t explain the unique appeal of the novel, which draws as much from literary modernism as film espionage. The result is a book that long evaded mainstream attention for all the right reasons.
