It’s hard to read Ice, Anna Kavan’s shimmering apocalyptic novel about a rapidly freezing world, without thinking of the closing half of Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”:
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Having linked desire and fire in the first four lines, Frost shifts to ice and hate as he destroys the world a second time. It’s a common enough pairing, used by artists as diverse as Maya Angelou, who describes her father’s girlfriend’s iceberg of hate in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and the band Foreigner (“You’re as cold as ice/You’re willing to sacrifice our love”). Say what you will about fire, but as an end of things ice has a certain inevitability to it — you know, the heat death of the universe and all that. I tend to like the universe, and would prefer that it keep on going, but at least any theoretical entropic ending is so far in the distant future that I don’t worry about it on a regular basis.
Not so in Ice, in which the freezing cold is one of the protagonists, a constant threat that drives the other characters into motion as they try to find sanctuary. Kavan’s novel exists in the liminal space between start of the disaster and the end of the world, the moment just before the avalanche falls or the bullet hits the body. The unnamed narrator is purportedly investigating the crisis but is soon distracted by the woman he was once supposed to marry. His quest to find her, save her, and separate her from the other man — either her husband or the shadowy Warden who replaces and/or stands in for him — provides the contours of the plot. The problem is that it’s all hopeless. There’s no way to actually save her from the frozen world that awaits them all, a situation acknowledged in the very first chapter: “When my impatience became uncontrollable I asked how she was. ‘She’s dying.’ He grinned spitefully at my exclamation. ‘As we all are.’ It was his idea of a joke at my expense.” If the world is ending, what is worth doing? If we’re to trust the narrator, all that’s left is to give oneself over to obsession.
Ice is the kind of novel that lends itself to psychoanalytic criticism. Much of it takes place in the dreamworld, where we weave in and out of the narrator’s recurring hallucinations. The woman he seeks is killed and then brought back to life, only to be killed again. His obsession with her grows as he struggles to find her on ships, in crowds, in hidden rooms in Kafkaesque castles, but then diminishes the moment he has possession of her. Here’s as typical a moment as any, just as some townspeople are prepared to offer her up as a human sacrifice:
I was completely concentrated on the trembling figure, half kneeling, half crouching, at the extremity of the rock, overhanging the dark water. Her hair glittered as if with diamond dust under the moon. She was not looking at me, but I could see her face, which was always pale, but now drained of colour right to the bone. I observed her extreme slenderness, felt I could enclose the whole of her with my two hands, even the rib-cage containing her heart. Her skin was like white satin, shadowless in the brilliant moonlight. The circular marks the cords had left on her wrists would have been red in daylight, but now looked black. I could imagine how it would feel to take hold of her wrists and to snap the fragile bones with my hands.
Leaning forward, I touched her cold skin, the shallow hollow in her thigh. Snow had fallen between her breasts.
Armed men came up, pushed me back, seized her by her frail shoulders. Big tears fell from her eyes like icicles, like diamonds, but I was unmoved. They did not seem to me like real tears. She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.
That’s an undeniably creepy passage, from the frail translucence of the woman to the narrator’s icy yet sexual touch to irrepressible violence that haunts the narrator’s thoughts. The twists and turns of Kavan’s imagery takes us from “I could enclose the whole of her with my two hands” — a little weird but we’ll give the narrator the benefit of the doubt, maybe he this is how he expresses his desire to protect the woman — to “I could imagine how it would feel to take hold of her wrists and to snap the fragile bones with my hands” and “the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.” It’s a Humbert Humbert1 kind of moment: we’ve been willing inhabitants of the headspace of the first-person narrator, going along with him on his rescue mission, happy to side with him against his rival, the Warden, only to discover that he’s the monster of the tale and we’re stuck with him the rest of the way.
To return to Frost for a moment, the key to Ice is that hatred and cold are symbolical equivalents. In no way is the narrator moved by feelings of love or desire. There’s something all-consuming here, but it isn’t fire. In the first chapter we learn that he was abandoned by the woman before their marriage and his attitude and actions only make sense if we view them as a prolonged quest for revenge, not over the other man, who he both admires and fears, but over the woman who he believes has wronged him. How else to explain his lack of concern for her in the passage above, his belief that her tears “did not seem like real tears.”
I generally try to avoid analyzing the ends of novels in these posts. There’s a lot you can say about a book without spoiling the finish, but despite all its digressions into spy craft and secret plots, the plot of Ice isn’t as important as its mood. That said, if you don’t want to read the ending, this is the place to stop. Kavan concludes the novel with these final, chilling lines:
I looked into her face, it was smiling, untroubled; I could see no fear, no sadness there now. She smiled and pressed close, content with me in our home.
I drove at great speed, as if escaping, pretending we could escape. Although I knew there was no escape from the ice, from the ever-diminishing remnant of time that encapsuled us. I made the most of the minutes. The miles and the minutes flew past. The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring.
I’m not sure that I really enjoyed the experience of reading Ice; I find repetitive, perplexing dreamscapes less compelling than I did as a younger reader, but this final moment is an incredible recapitulation of the novel’s theme. The narrator has achieved his stated goal, the woman feels safe and happy, time is running out, the narrator’s icy hatred surrounds the couple, there is a gun in his pocket. The final act of violence will occur offstage, the narrator’s obsession is his entire world, and the world is coming to an end.
Anti-hero of Nabokov’s Lolita.