Ice by Anna Kavan (1967)

A bad first impression, or a lesson in how to read Ice

Ice by Anna Kavan is a strange, beautiful, and original novel, but I was dismayed when I got to the following line of dialogue on the first page, spoken by a garage attendant commenting on the weather:

“Never known such cold in this month. Forecast says we’re in for a real bad freeze-up.”

Nobody would ever say “in this month.” It would be “in May,” “in spring,” or “this time of year.” So my first impression was of bad writing.

But I kept going, and soon enough things began to click. I understood that “in this month,” beyond just avoiding mention of the time of year, was openly signalling this avoidance, preparing the ground for the consistent avoidance of all specifics throughout the novel. Not only the time of year, but places and people remain unnamed and vague, and all the way to the end the narrative is ungrounded in events, in people’s lives, in actual places, or even in an intelligible passage of time. We never know what is real, and Kavan is saying it’s fine, it’s meant to be like this. It doesn’t matter that the garage attendant’s words are unnatural, because this is not naturalism or realism. What Kavan is doing is perspective, not representation. We’re in the world of anti-mimetic modernism, in Brian Richardson’s terms:

By mimetic I mean fictional representations that resemble nonfictional ones. We can think of a mimetic representation as a generous conception of realism. It treats characters as if they were people, and the events they engage in as essentially similar to the kinds of events we might encounter in our lived experience. Space and time in such fiction are recognizable extensions of the spatial and temporal parameters of our world. The canon of probability that governs the universe is assumed to be largely the same in mimetic fictional worlds.

[…]

Represented events that are antimimetic … do not copy or extend but rather violate some of the laws of everyday existence; these events cannot happen in real life. […] In the real world, time flows forward and the past is unalterable. Antimimetic authors may run time backward and reverse the order of cause and effect; they may change the past or include incompatible versions of it; they may fabricate contradictory temporal sequences as time flows differently for different characters; and they may form temporal loops. Such authors may create impossible spaces and feature characters with too few or too many characteristics for them to be humanlike.

— Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century

Back to Ice. Just a few pages on, I got stuck again:

I had not seen all the things I remembered about her.

I couldn’t parse this line of narration at all. I read it repeatedly but couldn’t work it out. Again I kept going, and again it fell into place: the narrator is admitting that he — unexpectedly, the narrator is male — remembers things that he has no right to remember, events he had not witnessed, that he “had not seen”. A natural response to him is to think, well, the fact is that you don’t remember these things; you just think you remember them. But that doesn’t occur to the narrator, and we never get that sort of answer in the novel. This is a deeper disruption of realism than the usual technique of the unreliable narrator, in which there is a disjuncture between (a) what the narrator tells you happened, which might be the product of madness or deception, and (b) what really happened, which cashes out in the end, or which stands as the clear air that everything finally bubbles up to. For example, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, in the works of Gene Wolfe, or in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, all the clues are there to allow the reader to work out the truth, or else the truth is revealed towards the end in a “twist”. But in Ice, things never bubble up to the clear air of objective reality.

The consequence of the narrator’s apparent ability to describe events he was not a party to is that the narrative occasionally slips from first to third person. In one paragraph the narrator is telling us what he’s doing, about the glimpses he gets of the girl in the forest while he tries to follow her, and in the next he is telling us about a private moment between the girl and her husband, without any obvious switch to her point of view. I found this to be one of the strangest things about the book, something I don’t think I’ve seen before. In metafictional terms, with the narrator’s early declaration that “I had not seen all the things I remembered about her,” it’s as if Kavan is saying, “sometimes this is going to slip into the third person without warning.”

Kavan thus prepares us for what will come: first, that we will never get to find out the who, what, when, why and where; and second, that we will struggle to work out if the narrator is telling us about things that really happened to him, or … or what, exactly? It’s hard even to state the dichotomy because it’s never clear what is happening when he slips into the third person or when he has visions—is it fantasy, hallucination, dissociative identity disorder?

They say that great books teach you how to read them, and this seems to be what’s happening in the first few pages of Ice. The book is disorienting, but thanks to Kavan’s hints, not hopelessly so.

Plot and character

I should give an overview. But before describing the plot (such as there is), some orientation. Kavan’s defence of the novel’s surrealism, when her publisher expressed doubts, is a good starting point:

When I started writing, I saw the story as one of those recurring dreams (hence the repetitive voyages etc.) which at times become nightmare. This dreamlike atmosphere is the essence of the whole concept. […] It is meant to be a fantasy or a dream, and dreams are not logical; that’s what makes them strange and fascinating (frightening too).

Anna Kavan to Philip Inman, quoted in Piercy, Laurence (2014)

The plot may not be logical, but something can be said about it:

The narrator-protagonist tells the story of his search for a young woman, always referred to as “the girl,” who is pale and thin and has white-blond hair. She is described several times as translucent or brittle, like ice—which sounds corny and too on-the-nose as I write it down now, but doesn’t come across that way when reading. The narrator was once briefly involved or infatuated with her, but now he is positively obsessed, and he chases after her when she leaves her husband and goes overseas, moving from port to dreary, nameless port. He always finds her eventually, until she moves on to the next place or he is forced to go elsewhere for reasons beyond his control—and so on throughout the book. The trouble for our narrator is that when he does find her, she is always living with another man: first her husband and later “the warden,” who may or may not be the same person.

While this is going on, the world is falling into a nuclear winter following a brief war — or maybe some localized detonation of nuclear weapons somewhere in the world — and conventional wars are now breaking out as the climatic situation becomes more desperate. The global cooling seems to have caused a re-glaciation, such that every place the narrator goes is threatened by an encroaching wall of ice which is killing everything in its path.

There are really only three characters. They are not introduced or developed as in a conventional novel, and each of them is defined only by their relation to the other two. They are so abstract and symbolic, avatars for ideas and emotions, that we always feel the gravitational pull of the author’s personality, the only one that feels real. We are told a few facts about the narrator—he is a high-ranking military man, possibly an explorer, and he really likes lemurs—but that’s about it.

As I mentioned above, he is more than merely unreliable, and we don’t expect to discover that he’s deceptive or deluded and thus finally to see the truth. He is also more than merely morally ambiguous: he is a bastard, but perhaps just an ordinary bastard, an ordinary sadistic male. Often he is obsessive, and while he seems to care for the girl’s welfare and appears to be playing the role of the knight in shining armour, he also needs to possess her, in just the same way as his rival. Even more disturbing, he fantasizes about her suffering and destruction.

It’s not always clear if these fantasies are hallucinations, visions of the future, or expressions of his own sadism. Sometimes it seems like panicked concern:

I had a vision of an iron hand gripping a girl’s thin wrist, crushing the brittle prominent bones.

But later, when he seems to find the girl’s dead and broken body, he feels his property rights have been violated:

I came upon her by chance, not far away, lying face down on the stones. A little blood had trickled out of her mouth. Her neck had an unnatural twist; a living girl could not have turned her head at that angle: the neck was broken. She had been dragged by the hair, hands which had twisted it into a sort of rope had dulled its silvery brightness. […] I felt I had been defrauded: I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds. I leaned forward and touched her cold skin.

And other times, the visions are presented as violent fantasies:

I could imagine how it would feel to take hold of her wrists and to snap the fragile bones with my hands.

Crucially, the variation in the tone of these visions and fantasies is not presented in the novel as a gradual progression from benevolence and love into violence and madness, because it’s made plain from very near the beginning that he is motivated by something much worse than loving care:

I watched the ice climb higher, covering knees and thighs, saw her mouth open, a black hole in the white face, heard her thin, agonized scream. I felt no pity for her. On the contrary, I derived an indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer. I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was. Various factors had combined to produce it, though they were not extenuating circumstances.

So there is no trick, twist, or revelation in Ice. We are not lulled into rooting for the narrator, only to be shown later on that we’ve made a terrible misjudgement. The problems in his character are pervasive. We suspect from early on that he is a wounded, resentful man out for revenge, addicted to his own hate.

I treated her like a glass girl; at times she hardly seemed real.

This indicates both the questionable reality of an object of obsession—it is always a mental construct rather than a real person—and obversely, the unimportance of the girl’s actuality from the narrator’s perspective. We never really get an idea of her personality, rarely hear what she has to say (although when we do, it’s crucial). Mostly she is entirely filtered, or even defined, through the narrator’s confused desires, fantasies, or projections.

The narrator becomes the author of the girl, a figure of authority that constructs her as a palimpsest, hence reifies her.

— Céline Magot, “The Palimpsest Girl in Ice by Anna Kavan”

So, all of this makes him look pretty bad. There’s an interesting section in which he organizes the construction of a transmitter tower in a neutral country close to the war zone, to broadcast messages of peace:

To pass the time and for want of something better to do, I organized the work on the transmitter. It was not far from completion, but the workers had grown discouraged and apathetic. I assembled them and spoke of the future. The belligerents would listen and be impressed by the impartial accuracy of our reports. The soundness of our arguments would convince them. Peace would be restored. Danger of universal conflict averted. This was to be the final reward of their labours. In the meantime, I divided them into teams, arranged competitions, awarded prizes to those who worked best. Soon we were ready to start broadcasting. I recorded events on both sides with equal respect for truth, put out programmes on world peace, urged an immediate cease fire. The minister wrote, congratulating me on my work.

He does a good thing, but only “to pass the time,” and later he gets bored and defects to one of the belligerents in search of the girl. Again we see that the narrator is not so much a villain as an ordinarily crappy person, and this is the foundation for the book’s condemnation of human relationships, and especially men — Kavan is not writing about a freak, but about an ordinary man.

Metafiction and experiment

From what I’ve seen, the metafictional aspect of the novel, mentioned above, doesn’t get much attention from reviewers. Maybe it’s too obvious. Maybe it’s part and parcel of experimental literature. In any case, Kavan continues to drop hints about the narrative while also describing mental states. There are many examples, but here are a few:

At the same time, there was a curious unreality about the memory of that scene, as if I could have dreamt it.

The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next.

In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.

Then another shock, the sensation of a violent awakening, as it dawned on me that this was the reality, and those other things the dream.

As an aside, it’s significant that some of these, such as the last one above, have the character of revelation, the moment when the truth is revealed. But that’s never the way it goes. Things are never tied up neatly, and we’re never closer to finding out what’s really going on. The reader is at least as lost as the narrator, who begins the whole story with “I was lost,” and never gets himself unlost (his tone of satisfaction and at-home-ness at the end strikes the reader as either unconvincing or insane).

In these comments about what is and what is not real, which are peppered throughout the novel, we feel Kavan herself addressing us through the words of the narrator, such that he could be referring to the book in which he is a character as much as to his state of mind and grasp on reality. To a degree this is always the case in the first person point of view, since the narrator is presented as the storyteller, as the author—but here, Kavan has intentionally made it impossible for the reader to identify the narrator with herself, so the narrator is far from being merely her mouthpiece. Perhaps this is why I label it as metafictional rather than just the usual self-consciousness of a first-person narrator: there is a disconnect between narrator and author, and Kavan draws our attention to this often.

Maybe metafiction is not the right focus. Kavan is first and foremost experimental, and experimental fiction is always somewhat metafictional anyway, just because it draws attention to itself and is most of all concerned with itself. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the experimental novel is about itself, or about storytelling. Maybe that’s true of the purest metafiction such as Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, but Ice is, I think, most of all interested in the real world—it’s just that in the real, modern world, what is real is not always easy to work out. And when we do see the world clearly, we see that it’s broken. Therefore, the kind of storytelling appropriate to the modern psychological, social, and planetary situation is not straight realism, but something reflective of uncertainty, entropy, and doom.

On the other hand, maybe you could say that storytelling is precisely what Ice is about, because it’s concerned with things in which narrative is highly significant:

1. The maintenance of personal identity

According to the theory of narrative identity in psychology, to form an identity you create a story out of your life—an internal reconstruction of disparate memories, your perception of the present, and your disposition towards the future, to form a logical narrative. Kavan is interested in when this is problematic, as it is for many individuals alienated by and struggling with modernity, that is to say, those with mental health problems.

2. The connection, or disconnection, between motivation and action

A logical narrative depends on clear connections between motivations and actions. It is the traditional stuff of storytelling. But the irrationality of modernity might lead us to question whether our conventional models of intention and action are correct. Does the attempted mimesis of realist fiction—in dealing with the phenomenon of obsession, the behaviour of SS death camp guards, the development of nuclear weapons, or the destructiveness of capitalism—actually represent reality adequately at all? Is it even possible to faithfully transcribe reality? At the very least, shouldn’t literature attempt to evoke situations where motivations and reasons are obscure, and to show how narrative breaks down in the face of contemporary reality?

Not long before the publication of Ice, Kavan explained her motivation in writing anti-mimetically:

Haven’t we had enough of realistic descriptions by now? I thought they’d been done so well as they can be done over and over again, and as long ago as Zola etc. I find it hard to make out a convincing case for the continuance of factual writing, when the microphone catches reality and transmits it to millions, who thus acquire their facts far more easily and quickly than by reading the shortest book or seeing a one act play. It certainly seems time for a movement away from realism. [. . .]

You know I’m very interested in this reality thing – in the changes that continually shatter the seemingly objective world, which only our mental and physical health hold together in some sort of equilibrium, and which the least indisposition causes to slip and dissolve in confusion.

— Anna Kavan to Raymond Marriott, 1964, Anna Kavan Papers, quoted in Walker (2023)

The purpose

At every level, Kavan is experimenting. Aside from the content—obsession, patriarchal domination and abuse, the fractured personality, the apocalypse of ice and war, to pick a few—it is formally innovative, experimenting with time, character and identity, narrative point of view, and so on. But it’s not experimental just for fun; there’s a point to it.

So, what is it? I’ve already suggested an answer above, namely to write in a mode appropriate to broken realities and broken minds, eschewing the deceptive security of realism. But there’s more to it than that. I’ve noticed a few academics saying that Ice is intended to have moral force. Laura de la Parra argues that it is “a devastating portrayal of a world torn apart by nuclear power, capitalism, and patriarchal ambition.” And Victoria Walker, in her book Anna Kavan: Mid-Century Experimental Fiction, discusses the “ethical value of experiment” in Ice, claiming that the novel is a sincere moral response to the real world. She quotes a revealing passage from a 1944 book review by Kavan:

Any experiment whatsoever, which may shock people into awareness of their responsibility to those undefended ones is of supreme importance. The ethical value of this book can hardly be exaggerated in that it tends, in disturbing the reader’s emotional norm, to force upon him acknowledgement of his own profound implication in the matter.

— Anna Kavan, quoted in Walker (2023)

There is a moral indignation in the background of this comment. That’s surely a good response to the Second World War, which she lived through and whose effects she was familiar with from working with mentally damaged soldiers, but what is remarkable is that she sees literary experimentation as a tool to oppose such evils. Walker makes the reasonable claim that this is exactly the kind of thing she is doing in Ice, even though it was written twenty years later.

There are at least two aspects to it. One is at the level of personal behaviour and relationships, and the other is about humanity as a whole. First Walker points out that Kavan’s use of the first-person implicates the reader in his acts of brutality and makes it difficult to know who to root for—this is an example of “disturbing the reader’s emotional norm, to force upon him acknowledgement of his own profound implication in the matter”. This, by the way, is lot like the point-of-view character, Bron, in Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton, which I reviewed a short while ago—although Delany uses a close third-person POV rather than first-person.

Second, “the matter” that the reader is implicated in can also refer to the end of the world, enacted by the human race in a spectacular planetary murder-suicide.

I’m on board with this. It does seem that there’s a moral to the story, that the book has an ethical beating heart and that Kavan really wants you to get it. It becomes pretty clear in the book towards the end, where humanity comes in for some heartfelt (and beautifully written) condemnation:

Instead of my world, there would soon be only ice, snow, stillness, death; no more violence, no war, no victims; nothing but frozen silence, absence of life. The ultimate achievement of mankind would be, not just self-destruction, but the destruction of all life; the transformation of the living world into a dead planet.

In a sky which should have been cloudless and burning blue the sombre, enormous structures of storm cloud looked inexpressibly sinister, threatening, like monstrous ruins on the point of collapse, hanging impossibly overhead. Icy crystalline shapes began to flower on the windscreen. I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world, now everything was about to crash down in ruins.

It’s interesting that Kavan used the narrator to say all this, since he is, to put it mildly, an ambiguous character. It occurs to me that a more conventional thing to do here would be to put these words in the mouth of the girl, finally giving her a voice and making her some kind of righteous hero. But that would be too easy. That would wrap things up more than they ought to be.

The human world for Kavan is, both individually and collectively, a great manifold of violence and destruction. It’s a common observation that the Second World War continued to haunt writers in the 1960s, that in fact this was the time when writers were just starting to face up to the enormity of what had happened. This could be why Ice feels traumatized.

So all the experimentation with form is fruitfully entangled with the content in a way it’s not in, say, Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. In that book, Pynchon condemns capitalism in the strongest terms, but the experimental form of the novel—which switches between the literary modes and tropes of boy’s adventure stories, musical comedy, spy thrillers, and so on—seems to have nothing much to do with those ethical and political points. When it’s time to express his sincere hatred of capitalism, Pynchon stops playing around and settles on a Dickensian kind of realism to make his points, using the grotesque villain of Scarsdale Vibe.

But in Ice, the experimentation and the story are inextricable. To use some technical Russian terms which are used in narratology (and because I’ve just learned about them and want to look smart): the syuzhet is the fabula. That is, the story’s telling is itself the story that is being told.

The prose

In the foreword Christopher Priest says, “Her prose is beautifully measured, sometimes fey, sometimes muscular.” I agree, and here’s where I’ll allow myself a little negative criticism. Occasionally the feyness got too much for me, particularly in the repetitive descriptions of ice and snow. And after the bad first impression it did take me a while to get into Kavan’s groove. But when I did, most often the impression I had was of absolutely first-class writing. Here is an example:

She hurried along a street in an unknown town. She looked different, less anxious, more confident. She knew exactly where she was going, she did not hesitate once. In a huge official building she made straight for a room so crowded she could hardly open the door. Only her extreme slimness enabled her to slip between the many tall silent figures, unnaturally silent, fantastically tall, whose faces were all averted from her. Her anxiety started to come back when she saw them towering over her, surrounding her like dark trees. She felt small and lost among them, quickly became afraid. Her confidence had vanished; it had never been real. Now she only wanted to escape from that place: her eyes darted from side to side, saw no door, no way out. She was trapped. The faceless black tree- forms pressed closer, extended arm-branches, imprisoning her. She looked down, but was still imprisoned. Filled trouser-legs, solid treetrunks, stood all around. The floor had become dark earth, full of roots and boles. Quickly looking up at the window, she saw only white weaving meshes of snow, shutting out the world. The known world excluded, reality blotted out, she was alone with threatening nightmare shapes of trees or phantoms, tall as firs growing in snow.

I have one more semi-complaint about the prose. She uses asyndeton, or asyndetic coordination, which is the omission of conjunctions between clauses. Frank Herbert does it a lot in Dune. Here are some examples from Ice:

To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; […]

He frowned, looked at his watch before he put down his palette.

The windows of my room were still wide open, the curtains streamed into the room. Outside the treetops were streaming, the sky had gone dark.

Notice the lack of and.

I disliked this all the way through Dune, and I’m still not a big fan of it, but in the case of Ice I think I was temporarily won over.

Influences and affinities

I can see the influence of Kafka, but so can everyone else, so I’ll mention some others. But it feels so original that aside from Kafka I can only think of authors influenced by Kavan, rather than authors who influenced her.

When the narrator begins to follow the girl by sea, everything is dreamlike and indistinct, and feels uncannily similar to The Dream Archipelago by Christopher Priest. He wrote the foreword to my edition of Ice, and it’s now obvious to me how deeply influenced he was by it.

I can see Kavan’s influence in a more recent book by an author from the same tradition as Priest: M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again has that same slipstream feel, although I found Harrison much more irritating in his intentional vagueness and ambiguity than Priest or Kavan are in theirs.

Ballard sprung to mind too, particularly The Unlimited Dream Company, with its long descriptive passages, crammed with similes, about Shepperton being overrun with tropical vegetation (his catastrophe novels would be a more natural comparison, but I haven’t read them). I’m beginning to see that the whole British New Wave of science fiction might have been centrally inspired by Anna Kavan. In any case, Priest, Ballard, and Brian Aldiss all had good things to say about Ice, and it’s clear that it had a lasting influence on SF writers more widely, even though it’s doubtful whether it can be categorized as SF itself.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled has a similarly disorienting first-person narrative about a man traveling about while his identity, his relationships, and his circumstances shift and jump, and we feel a constant pressure and anxiety that never lets up, almost like the encroaching ice.

Last but not least, Robert Aickman’s “strange stories,” as he liked to call them, share with Ice an unmoored, uncanny mood, and a refusal to let the reader get a grip on places and identities.

Conclusion

In Ice, things are grim, and there is no hope. Even so, I found the book compelling and enjoyable. I didn’t think the world would be saved in the end or that the hero would get the girl, but I was fascinated from start to finish.

There is a lot more to say. Ice is so rich that it’s difficult to know how to approach it, and it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll definitely read it again, and when I do I’ll probably write a fresh review. As a reminder partly to myself, here are a few things I didn’t cover:

• The settings: grim crumbling seaside towns in Britain or somewhere like it, superstitious fishing villages in Norway, and somewhere further south that I can’t remember now
• The girl: as mostly silent, as victim, as human sacrifice to a sea-dragon, as object of male obsession, as property, as absent centre of the novel
• The warden: is he just an aspect of the narrator? Is he the husband? Is there an answer to these questions?
• The indris: the lemurs that, together with their idyllic rainforest setting, seem to be the only ray of light in the whole novel—symbols of life
• The trial, a memorable scene that’s quite different from the rest of the book
• The use of genres and tropes: SF, espionage, James Bond, Gothic horror, historical fantasy (Vikings and human sacrifice)
• Mental illness, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry
• Maybe the ethical force of the novel is not so simple as I’ve made out: the lemurs are symbols of life, but it’s the narrator who loves them and the girl who hates them
• Is it a happy ending?
• Did Kavan drop hints and warn the reader about the novel’s weirdnesses to satisfy the demands of the publisher? Generally, is it possible to intelligently guess what she changed to get it published?

Notes

• Brian Richardson, A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century, Ohio State University Press, 2019
• Victoria Walker, Anna Kavan: Mid-Century Experimental Fiction, Edinburgh University Press, 2023
• Piercy, Laurence (2014) Fiction and the Theory of Action. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.
• Laura de la Parra, “An Ecofeminist Reading of Anna Kavan’s Ice”, in Avenging Nature: The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020
• Céline Magot, «The Palimpsest Girl in Ice by Anna Kavan», Miranda [Online], 12 | 2016 | URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/8675 ; DOI : 10.4000/miranda.8675

My edition of the book under review:
Anna Kavan, Ice, Peter Owen Publishers, 2006