The frozen disaster overtaking the planet in Ice evokes that Cold-War, bomb-dreading, postwar 20th century we still, in many ways, live inside; it echoes images as popular as episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone or Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. The presentation is scattered with scenes of war, civil unrest and collective societal dysfunction, both vivid and persuasive … Kavan’s commitment to subjectivity was absolute, but in this, her greatest novel, she manages it by disassociation … The book has the velocity of a thriller yet the causal slippages associated with high modernist writing like Beckett’s or Kafka’s. The whole presentation is dreamlike, yet even that surface is riven by dream sequences, and by anomalous ruptures in point-of-view and narrative momentum.
The story of Ice is reported by a nameless narrator who claims to be a former soldier and explorer. We soon realize that he is entirely unreliable, and perhaps mentally unstable … The reason for the disorienting vagueness of so much of Ice becomes clear only in retrospect. It is a work of traumatized sexual surrealism, and its true setting is its author’s haunted imagination … The novel’s title refers not only to the environmental catastrophe of the encroaching walls of ice but also to the emotional numbness of the victimized girl whom the warden and the narrator are vying to possess. The abuse of the girl and the abuse of the environment stem from the same driving male impulse for control and dominance … A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.
Ice was Kavan’s first major literary success and it is difficult to classify: it is post-apocalyptic science fiction with the caveat of ‘kind of.’ The subgenre that it shares most characteristics with is slipstream, in that it obsessively constructs an atmosphere of not-quite-realism. We are immediately made aware of a potentially delusional narrator … Essentially the book revolves around a love triangle, emphatically minus the love: the narrator pursues the girl against her husband, known only as ‘the warden’; the warden possesses the girl with an uncomfortable severity. Encircling them are the inexplicable, inhospitable glaciers. Attempts at actually characterizing the ‘glass girl’ always fall upon emphasizing her presumed victimhood … Certainly this is a book full of violence, but Kavan’s masterful and exacting prose never lets us forget that violence has to do with the human—specifically with the man—starting with the violence of language itself.
…[an] underrated masterpiece … The world Kavan builds is less a realistic 3-D model of a universe than what might be called ‘a field of strangeness,’ walled off not merely by the ice of the title, but by the concealment (and revelation, always the dance between the two) of the author. It is a work of ‘world-blocking’ rather than conventional ‘world-building’ … If Ice gathers to itself the properties of both a labyrinth and a mirror, the mirror is a clouded mirror — a glass in which we see, darkly, not ourselves, but shapes that may resemble us, outlines of a world that may be our world. Perhaps the best image for Ice is the funhouse mirror maze, where we are simultaneously lost and found, distorted and illuminated, blocked and blocked.
...a gem of speculative fiction. It is uncanny, hallucinatory, apocalyptic, a book crowded with glaciers and starlight … The novel’s dystopian world is hermetically sealed. Geographical information is withheld and we are never quite able to get our bearings in this landscape of snow and ruins, illuminated by the ever-changing lights of the aura borealis. The glass girl slips through the pages, tantalizingly out of reach, seen through the filter of the male narrator’s objectifying, sadistic, chimerical gaze … Ice is ambitious, unforgettable, and one of a kind. It demands to be experienced.
Here we have a woman obliterated through objectification. Not even the text gives her a name, or any dialogue other than protests. We see the entire story through the male narrator’s point of view … I see a story about stories, about who gets to be a hero, and how a man striding around the world, blindly flattening everything in his path and never examining his own motivations or the consequences of his actions, can wreak utter havoc … In Ice the way she writes about the helplessness of both of her main characters left me queasy. This was not an easy book, and I wouldn’t call it fun, but it is stunning.
Fog and ice and torrential rain dominate this surrealistic novel, blanketing an icicle-like woman from the man who cannot clear his eyes of her image … This last of British writer Kavan's books to be published in her lifetime is lashed with urgency and pulsates with an atmosphere of dread.
While elements of Kavan’s story feel sometimes like a science-fiction adventure and sometimes like a hallucinatory psychological nightmare, the whole never sits still as one or the other, and it is always slippery, bizarre, and meticulously written. Time is elastic and the horrors of reality and fantasy are rarely delineated, so the power of one scene falling after another remains unconstrained by conventional logic and is instead wielded for maximum visceral effect … A gripping and uniquely strange work of science fiction.
