Ice – Reality often has something of an Unknown Quality

HARRISON PITTS | CONTENT WRITER

Anna

Kavan’s Ice is a feverish foray into a world on the edge of extinction, told through the splintering mind of a nameless man whose waking life is oft interrupted by violent existential nightmares not constrained to the world of sleep. The man is haunted from the outset by an inexplicable yet all-consuming preoccupation with a beautiful, fragile, and equally elusive woman from his past. The novel revolves around him dropping all comforts of his previous life to chase her around a globe crumbling under both political and environmental crises. Custody, for that is certainly all anyone aspires of her, is fought between three men (or two? One?), our nameless seeker, her uncaring husband, and the ice-eyed warden, a warlord of an Eastern state facing the brunt of a poorly understood conflict. Contrastingly, the woman, without a name as everyone and everything else is, seems barely human, a trophy to be claimed by starkly similar, abusive, and domineering men.

The narrator’s deteriorating mental state leaves him both prone to hallucinations, and insecure regarding his identity. He is shown to alternate between detailing simple aspects of his journey and vivid descriptions of fierce battles and surreal events happening to the woman (including him discovering her frozen corpse moments before she steps through the doorway). Often, novels intended to read as a “fever dream”, appear poorly edited and lacking in a coherent structure. Ice, however, is constituted of loosely gathered shadows and an ephemeral stability that reads like a nightmare, depicting a journey of claustrophobia of both a fractured world and mind.

Kavan’s transitions are abrupt, creating perplexing changes from present to dream to past to hallucination in an ever-repeating cycle of confusion. By blurring the boundary between reality and the fantasies of a failing mind, Kavan forms a labyrinthine narrative of dead ends and misdirection.

Kavan’s work is an artful examination of abuse and conflict, commenting on the roles of gender, politics, and our small place in the world. She examines destruction and human suffering ranging from the personal pain inflicted between the protagonist and his obsession, the ever-looming threat of international war, to the inevitable encroaching frozen apocalypse of the word entire. Startingly precognisant of our current social and environmental anxieties, Kavan taps into the existential terror of our seemingly ever shrinking capacity as individuals in the face of the overwhelming might of higher powers to decide our fate. Seemingly loosely autobiographical, Kavan speaks with an entirely unique voice and tempo, thoroughly succeeding in making the equal parts obscure and terrifying story a deeply memorable one.