Ice

 

I profess that I was (and am) an SF fan. I’ve read a lot of it. But judging from some of the videos I’ve seen on YouTube, I can safely say that I’ve only read a sliver of what is out there. Honestly, that’s a good thing. If I’d focussed on SF (and Fantasy – which I’d also read my fair share of – that once subgenera of SF that has now all but overwhelmed its supposed parent) I’d have missed out on far more personally inspirational works.

But that, here, is neither here nor there. What is, is that in those heady days when I passed by the bulk of the bookstore for those SF/Fantasy shelves, I had once perused a great many of what’s now considered classic SF titles and authors: Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein; Burroughs, Bradbury, and Ballard. To say nothing of the new kids on the block, then: Bova, Gibson, Sterling, and Robinson. To list them all would be tedious, so let’s just say I thought myself well versed in what was out there.

Need I say that after that lengthy preamble that I was wholly unaware of this now classic 1967 SF novel by Anna Kavan. Indeed, I have to say that I can’t even recall Anna, herself. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that Anna Kavan was not an SF writer.

I can’t concretely say when I first became acquainted with her novel Ice. It may be as recently as Charlie Kauffman’s surrealist film I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Kavan’s book was one of a number of somewhat famous/somewhat obscure works of art referenced within it. I did not pick it up then. I can’t say it (or many other of the works referenced) made much impression then, while I struggled to understand the unreal things happening on screen while its plot twisted in and out of my grasp. I only began to search for this novel after seeing it referenced and critiqued by a number of YouTubers singing its praise.

Now that I’ve read it, I question whether it is indeed an SF novel at all. It certainly is one on the surface. It’s post-apocalyptic: an undisclosed world war has come to its inevitable conclusion, and in its wake a nuclear winter is racing across the globe, a runaway mile-high ice advancing upon populations either in frantic denial, or succumbing to totalitarian autocracy, fracturing everywhere. The story is less about that than about a man obsessing about a woman, chasing after her, desperate (in his mind) to find her, protect her, to save her. As the story unfolds it becomes apparent that he wishes, not to protect her, but to possess her. She is forever being whisked away by another character, the Warden, of whom she is a prisoner, locked in rooms, abused, nearly catatonic in his “care.” She hates the Warden. But she also hates our unnamed protagonist, who is equally as brutal and abusive as is the Warden.

Everything is not as it seems, however. It’s right there, in black and white, at the very start, when our unreliable narrator declares: “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.” ― Anna Kavan, Ice

Kavan is telling us that nothing is here as it seems.

A couple pages later, our narrator tells us: “the consequences of the traumatic experience were still evident in the insomnia and headaches from which I suffered. The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams, in which she always appeared as a hapless 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.” ― Anna Kavan, Ice

Everything unravels from there. It takes a while to reorient oneself while navigating the oddly fragmented timeline – unless the above excerpts jumped out at you. Whole passages appear as dreams within the text, seemingly out of context from the narrative. Are they memories, imaginings, fantasies? Then, the story resumes. It’s all a bit unsettling. Hallucinogenic.

What’s germane here is Anna Kavan, herself. Kavan’s life was a bit of a tragedy: an unhappy childhood, failed marriages, drug abuse, suicide attempts, hospitalizations. Which brings me to what I believe the book is really about. Her style has been called slipstream fiction. And Ice is a great example of it. It is supposed to be unsettling, hallucinogenic, because, like much of her work (none else of which I have read, I will admit; I got most of her biographical information from the book’s introduction, and Wikipedia) it is perhaps an exploration of her self. Bear with me. Others have come to the same conclusions, I’ve discovered.

Everything in Ice is allegory. The Ice is heroin. The Warden is her periodic hospitalization. And our unnamed “protagonist” is her addiction. The Ice closes in. The Warden whisks her away, locks her up, the confinement painful. She hates the Warden, but is reluctant to leave her repeated confinements. Our narrator always finds her as the temperature plunges and snow falls, the Ice mere miles away. He “rescues” her, yet he too treats her roughly. She does not want to go with him. He insists. She hates him, and tells him so; yet he persists in his pursuit of this meek and compliant woman, regardless of her stated desire that he leave her forever. He refuses to listen. His rescues are all but kidnappings. But even when he “abandons” her she waits for him. She knows he will come back for her. And he does. Obsessively. She appears to love him. Taken this way, it all makes sense: the surreal context, the hallucinations, the obsessive nature of the love/hate relationship.

So, is it SF? It is. It is not. Is Ice a difficult read? It could be. But it is not.

Could I have read this in my early reading, had I know about it? No. Not at all. I would have been helplessly adrift. I preferred hard SF then. Less so now. Now, I prefer explorations of the human condition. More Bradbury, say, than Clarke. So, it is probably a good thing that it took me as long as it has to find this book, the last of Kavan’s published in her lifetime.