Mercury by Anna Kavan

This was published posthumously in 1994, and I think it was written around the time of Ice in 1967, perhaps in the years just prior to that. I was expecting a companion piece, but to me it reads more like a rough draft. Although it contains many of the ideas of Ice, they are still only partially realized. As a result, even though I loved Ice, I found Mercury tedious. I have not seen anyone emphasize its vast inferiority in reviews, but to me this is the most important point to make about it.

In its undeveloped form, it is different in important ways. Ice is in the first person, narrated by “the man,” but Mercury is in the third person, alternating points of view between Luz (“the girl” in Ice) and Luke (the narrator in Ice). This is interesting for a few reasons.

First, we get to know the girl a bit better. Rather than an empty centre and a constructed focus for the man’s obsession, we get to read her thoughts, fears and motivations. However, I can’t say this makes her any more interesting; on the contrary, her lack of assertiveness and her general vagueness of affect are quite irritating, and reduce her from something mysterious and enticing to something mundane.

Second, we get a glimpse of how the unique sliding from first to third person in Ice might have developed. I imagine Kavan at some point realizing that by dropping the girl’s point of view and employing primarily the first person instead — making the man the narrator — she could turn a fairly pedestrian story exploring the interiority of two mentally ill people into something much more strange and original, in which the narration sometimes drifts insensibly in a way that cannot easily be explained away as dreaming, hallucination, or madness. However, at least for me, such an insight into the creation of Ice seems only to weaken rather than reinforce the final work.

There’s another thing I found quite interesting, which I don’t recall seeing in Ice. Luke is sometimes described as a sort of victim himself, resenting and attempting to suppress his own sadistic urges and fantasies. There is a juicy ambiguity here: is he actually such a victim, or is he just a self-centred man feeling sorry for himself?

There are some beautiful passages, such as the opening chapter about the lemurs, and there are moments of well-defined narrative that almost succeed in maintaining interest, but as a whole it is all rather insipid and lacking in drive or passion.

I rolled my eyes when I got to this:

Her grasp of reality seems to be slipping.

This comes on page 107 of a 136 page book in which reality is constantly slipping for both characters, in which this slippage has been described exhaustively and repeatedly in various ways. We do not need to be told that her grasp of reality is slipping. It’s nothing new and we’ve already been told a hundred times.

Aside from the question of reality, we get constant mention of nameless dread, indescribable horror, and vague monstrous presences, more annoying even than it is in Lovecraft. Then there’s the snow and fog blowing around like “wraiths,” which is repeated so often that I suspect Kavan had just abandoned the work and moved on to writing Ice instead of going back and doing the necessary revision. Worst of all is the constant re-introduction and re-description of the characters in each section. They start out as “the man,” “the traveller,” “the girl,” etc., and the girl in particular is described as skeletal, ice-like, and so on (and on); but finally, within the same section, they become “Luke” and “Luz” — before again losing their names at the beginning of the next section. In Ice, similar oddities feel intentional, and one therefore feels challenged to rise to the level of the novel; but in Mercury one just begins to doubt the author.

While Ice is crafted and muscular, Mercury is as vague and wraithlike, as weak and irritating as the characters. While Ice is a dreamlike work of art, Mercury is like being forced to listen to someone describe their dreams one after the other.

I don’t blame Kavan for all this; I just think the book shouldn’t have been published.

Not recommended if you haven’t read Ice, and even if you have I’m not sure I’d recommend it. It doesn’t really fill any big gaps or answer any big questions, so unless you’re a scholar I wouldn’t bother. Ice is a masterpiece and should be left to stand alone.

Notes

See my review of Ice.