Ice by Anna Kavan, Kate Zambreno (Afterword), Jonathan Lethem (Foreword)
There are some books that are classics of the Science Fiction genre that transcend the era they were written in and feel timeless. Amazing works of fiction retain all the power they were written with even as decades passed. Often they are ones that are respected beyond the genre ghetto. For me I Am Legend, The Dispossessed come to mind. The last book like this I discovered was Canticle for Leibowitz. A book that is respected beyond the genre, but undeniably Science Fiction. Add Ice by Anna Kavan to that shortlist. Beyond the fact that it has a penguin Classics edition, it has had many editions that have gotten forwards from Sci-fi Royalty like Brian Aldiss now Jonathan Letham who has feet in both literary worlds but capped with an excellent afterword by Kate Zambreno who is not a genre writer.
Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901, to wealthy expatriate British parents. Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson. Her life was a bit of tortured existence, suffering from Heroin addiction and being in and out of mental hospitals. I first read about her challenging life in the pages of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds. I immediately put a hold on it at the library, which delivered this excellent 50th-anniversary edition with the very good Fore and Afterword.
For me reading Ice was like the literary equivalent of a well-structured and brutal death metal song. The power of the prose left me feeling breathless and nodding my head constantly in approval. I can’t speak to Kavaan/ Ferguson's other novels but it is my understanding that this is alone work of the genre, but not the lone work of genius. Being alone work of genre is another thing it has in common with Lebowitz.
The story of a weird apocalypse is at times almost surreal. A supernatural cold is slowly creeping across the landscape entombing the earth in a sheet of thick ice. We are told this story by a nameless narrator who goes on a hero’s quest across this cold and dying landscape in an attempt to save the “Glass girl” a blue-eyed super goth lilly white-skinned woman who is on the cover of this edition. His motivation is simply to save her from the fate of being enslaved by The Warden.
The prose is wonderful. Powerful and clean, the beauty and horror are woven together like the threads in a basket, one that carries a grim world…
“Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees around the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armor.”
There were pages and pages throughout the short but powerful novel that I stopped and read multiple times. As our unnamed point of view character travels the world, we see more misery and destruction. There is a tight balance between story and vibe. The tone overpowers the story at times but to me that made perfect sense as mirrored the slow creep of the ice.
The novel does an excellent job of balancing the weird with the uncomfortable reality that gives the novel a feeling of creeping horror. Dead silence, white peace.
“It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.”
Unlike any novel about the end of the world, Ice has a feeling of creeping misery and depression that would be a natural thing to feel. I have read stories that captured that feel, but it is rare to stretch that feeling over a complete novel.
“As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.”
At the same time, the mechanics of the adventure never fall to the wayside, and using beautiful and heartbreaking to tell action is a magic trick that Ice performs over and over…
“In the deepening dusk every horror could be expected. She was afraid to look, tried not to see the spectral shapes rising from the water, but felt them come gliding toward her and fled in panic. One overtook her, would her in soft, clammy, adhesive bands like ectoplasm.”
To say this novel is unique is a terrible understatement. The themes the novel explores are vast and deep. From isolation, disconnection with society, climate change, feminism, and fascism. It is all tied together with some of the best and most elaborate prose. It has both moments of epic almost cosmic level terror that hit like a sledgehammer and moments of world-building that are surgical and exact. It is the reason this review is almost more quotes than me writing about it. Nothing I can say can sell this novel better than the beautifully dark prose.
At the same time, the parallel to our world is strong, but it is the reversal that makes it haunting. Each year the forest fires rage, the heat waves kill more and the shoreline creeps up higher. Ice presents an end that is as cold has her relationship to the world and presents us with a catalog of what-ifs. Do we live with the creep or do we see through it as it spreads….
“I realized that the destruction must have been on a gigantic scale. Little could have survived. The local broadcasters were cheerfully reassuring. It was official policy, the population had to be kept calm. But these men actually seemed to believe their country was safe, no matter how far removed from the present devastation, which would spread and spread…”
Thanks for sharing! FWIW I have 2 crackpot 'theories' about 'Ice' (SPOILER ALERT): It's about The War, and the three characters don't have names because they're all the same person, parts of the author's fractured mind. Still, what do I know?
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