Ice

Someone driving late at night in bad weather calls in at a filling station. He - because of the author's gender we might assume at first that the narrator is female, but it soon becomes apparent that he is male - talks to the pump attendant. They speak of ominous events: the weather is remarkably cold. The roads are frozen, and the village the driver is heading for is remote and difficult to reach. Much is left undefined. We learn almost nothing about the driver, and we don't know in which country the scene is set or even the time of year. 'Never known such cold in this month.' It seems an unnaturally vague way of chatting about the weather, but for the reader of a novel the strangeness, even awkwardness, of the phrase 'in this month' raises an extra uncertainty. Which month are they talking about? Is it early or late winter, when snow might be unusual? Or is it a summer month, when nothing at all like this should happen? We never find out.

In fact, the cryptic quality of the opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the novel. There are three principal characters: the narrator, a young woman and a man who is probably her husband. None of them is ever named. The woman's husband seems to be an official of some kind (he is sometimes described as a warden, although at others he is a painter or a dilettante), while the narrator is a military man, perhaps in an intelligence role for a government.

There follows an extended pas de trois across the landscapes of a world rapidly freezing over. The narrator appears to move on whim or at hazard: he accepts lifts, follows his instincts, follows orders. Wherever he turns up the young woman and her husband are there, too. Sometimes he only glimpses the woman, but she eludes him. At other times he manages to speak to her and at one point even manages to escape with her in his car. The husband is sometimes compliant, sometimes aggressive.

Because of the way Kavan describes her nameless characters, and because she is so apparently intent on physical and emotional uncertainty, the reader is frequently left stranded, if only momentarily. Her prose is beautifully measured, sometimes fey, sometimes muscular.

Dreams and memories (or are they flashbacks?) obtrude into the main story, without warning, without explanation or even without being given a rationale within the context of the other events.

Clearly, Ice is not a realistic novel in which the conventions or formulas of popular fiction are adopted. Approached with the usual kind of expectation, Ice will seem crudely constructed, even arbitrary, because the story lacks cause and effect. At the same time, the background is not realistic. Kavan's depiction of a new ice age owes nothing to current fears about global warming, which she might well have known about, since although the concept of climate change has recently entered common parlance it is a process that has been monitored scientifically since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Nor even does it show any realistic relation to the opposite fears: reglaciation theories were fleetingly in vogue in the decade in which she was writing, but they were nothing like Kavan's world of towering ice mountains, steep valleys blocked by snow and so on.

Her icing-up world is one of encroachment: the ice creeps towards you, surrounds you, invades you, captures you. Even flight to equatorial regions provides only a temporary relief: the ice inevitably catches up.

Slipstream shifts science (and its effects) into the realm of the unconscious mind, into metaphor, into emotion, into symbols. Slipstream literature is a response to science (and scientific effects), an exercise of human feeling about science, if not an understanding of it. But it is not allegory.

It is tempting, for instance, to take the known fact of Anna Kavan's years of heroin addiction and suggest that the white ice that engulfs the characters is a literary device, a symbolic representation of the pure-white crystals whose solution she injected daily into her veins. Maybe that comes into it, and maybe that was even in her mind as she wrote, but to work as allegory there has to be an exactness that the reader can grasp. In Ice the symbols are more elusive, mysterious, captivating. It ends as it begins, with nothing that is practical or concluded. The man of action is united with the passive young woman, but their destiny is nowhere near resolved. The encroachment of the ice continues.