Ice (1967)
Anna Kavan (1901-1968)
193 pages
The narrator of Anna Kavan’s novel Ice describes a world on the brink of apocalypse, some unspecified scientific overreach having unleashed a wave of cold that threatens to bury the Earth under steadily advancing mountains of ice. He proves, however, to be undaunted by this spreading destruction and the dystopian world that results, as he doggedly pursues a girl who had captured his attention years before. Such is his preoccupation with this girl of his dreams that for him the collapse of the physical world, and with it civilization, only barely registers --- an inconvenience interfering with his pursuit.
He recalls his bitter disappointment when the girl left him in their youth for another man. In the intervening years, his disenchantment has transformed into a bipolar obsession for her that leaves him swinging wildly between deep concern for her well-being, and imagining her subjected to extreme violence. This internal confusion becomes apparent in his relationship with her: each time he finds her she rejects him so strenuously that he eventually gets fed up with her and leaves to get on with his life --- only to be helplessly drawn back to searching for her again, at seemingly any cost to his welfare or sanity.
The narrator complicates our understanding of these events already in the opening pages of the novel, however, giving us fair warning of his general unreliability: “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.” (4) A few paragraphs later he reveals that he was so impacted by the girl having left him that his “drugs prescribed for [headaches and insomnia have] produced horrible dreams … not confined to sleep only.” (6)
These nightmarish visions introduce a surreal aspect to the story, as they come upon him without warning. In the middle of describing some scene --- driving down the road, walking through a town or simply considering what to do next --- his description will suddenly descend, without warning, into a startlingly bleak and often violent subsequent sequence of events. Then, just as abruptly, he will shift back to the actual present and continue narrating his story, without any acknowledgement of the disturbing digression that has occurred.
Our only clue to his mind’s shifts from reality into “horrible dreams” is the sudden recognition of the outlandishness of what he is describing. The effect is very much like the tendency for a person’s thoughts to be suddenly derailed by concern about some potentially bad outcome to what is happening, eventually followed by a sudden snap back to reality. The difference lies in watching someone outside ourselves head down the rabbit hole, and the extreme desolation and brutality of the resulting hallucinations.
These visions impact not only his relationship with the girl, but also with a character known as the Warden, with whom the narrator finds himself grappling for much of the story. The leader of a small nation, the Warden has taken the woman in, and seems to have a profound dominance over her. Though the narrator and the Warden both express a desire to protect her, they also both infantilize and patronize the “girl”, as the narrator refers to her. At one point the Warden states coldly that “she only needs training … to be taught toughness, in life and in bed.” (153) For his part, the narrator rationalizes to himself that the girl in fact wants the awful treatment she receives, telling us: “Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore.” (82)
The narrator, despite his claimed aversion to being led to such “dark places [he] had no wish to explore,” more often seems to find pleasure in the fervid fantasies he has of the girl: “Like a perverted child she ran past, soliciting me with big eyes, tempting me with the pleasure of watching her pain, elaborating the worst imaginings of my desire.” (165) And, over the course of his repeated skirmishes with the Warden, from whom he is ostensibly trying to save the girl, the narrator even begins to identify with the Warden and his harsh treatment of her, saying at one point: “I suddenly felt an indestructible affinity with him, a sort of blood-contract, generating confusion, so that I began to wonder if there were two of us…” (85)
The girl herself barely has a voice in the story, and what little we do learn about her comes to us through a narrator of uncertain credibility. The men in the story who purport to have her best interests in mind show little concern for what she might be thinking or feeling or wanting. They use their own self-serving image of her as an excuse to treat her cruelly, rationalizing their resulting harshness as not only for her own good, but as what she in fact desires. Thus Kavan portrays the girl as little more than a pawn trapped in a misogynist nightmare.
After a bit of a slow start to establish the back story, and to introduce the narrator’s questionable hold on reality, the novel races ahead at a feverish pace. The surreal aspect of the narrator’s nightmarish visions pervade the novel, even those parts in which he has not apparently lost his hold on reality. Other than the Warden, Kavan gives no one a name or even title, and leaves the locations in the story vague and largely unidentifiable; in addition, whether in her descriptions of the disaster destroying the world, or her portrayal of the cat and mouse game between the narrator and the Warden, she presents the story with a kind of high contrast imagery. The result has a bit of a feel of the written equivalent of a glossy graphic novel.
Ice seduces a reader with the powerful force of the narrator’s fearsome obsession for the girl. Following him as he relentlessly pursues the girl through a disintegrating world leaves us with a powerful sense of vertigo, as we are forced to cling --- with the narrator --- to a tenuous and elusive reality.
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Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
