Ice - Anna Kavan, a review
Nightmarish.
Ice is a novel saturated with atmosphere and just as thickly cloaked in ambiguity and all the discontinuity you get with the average nightmare, wrought out of the most wonderfully foggy prose and with a constant stream of dread that build and builds throughout the book.
The story is essentially about a man who tries to track down a women he apparently (apparently) loves in a world where the apocalypse is coming in the form of ice slowly encroaching the world, killing everything. Reminiscent of the Cryogenian period, and in ways both cosmic in scale and yet fundamentally understandable, Anna Kavan carves such a potent and emotive world with very little direct worldbuilding that it is astounding that the world of Ice is not more talked about when thinking about apocalyptic novels.
The book to me most closely resembles the 1986 malayalam film "Amma Ariyan" where a man moves to go to Cochin to inform the mother of a stranger that the stranger has died, moving through a Kerela often shot in brilliant white and deep blacks1, though both Ice and Amma Ariyan are seemingly worlds apart, to me they both very close to each other in atmosphere.
None of the characters (most importantly The Narrator (the main character) The Warden, The Girl and The Husband) are ever given names2, which only adds to the disorientating reading experience the book wants to encourage, and the fact the narrator often undergoes violent daytime hallucinations which we are shown as they come, with no warning and often no explanation afterwards of whether they really were hallucinations or just another twisted consequence of the apocalypse.
The characters merge and change and change their personalities drastically (we do not even know if the narrator, warden and husband are different people or not), and while the narrator tells us he wants to save the girl, she is always hesitant around him, often fully telling him that she detests him and wants him to go away. That is not to mention the fact that the narrator often mentions the violent things he would do to her, believing her to belong to him and him only.
We are subtly painted the picture of a psychopathic man, driven by the desire to control and to impose his will onto the woman he is obsessed with and has been stalking around the globe, though at times he tells us that he has been working for the girl's best interests, and at other times seems not to "love" her at all.
Ice is a strange, weird, often depressing book and is a stunningly beautiful work of fiction. On of my favourites.
The plot of this film is basically this, and it is one of the most profoundly beautiful films I have ever seen. The movie is on youtube with english subtitles so definitely go watch it!↩
Anna Kavan is the name of one of Anna Kavan's characters in a previous book, with her birth-name being Helen Ferguson. I wonder if the reason she stopped giving characters names was the fact she was afraid she would take these names on if she did.↩