Customer Reviews

Ice (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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I first encountered Anna Kavan's name in *A Reader's Guide to Twentieth Century Authors*. The bio on her life interested me in her writing. The salient points are (1) she underwent psychiatric treatment for suicide, (2) changed her name to that of a character in one of her novels, and (3) was an heroin addict for half her life. What kind of fiction, I wondered, would such a person write?

*Ice* answers the question nicely. The entry on Kavan describes it as "an impressive foray into the world of science fiction". The novel depicts a man's quest for an enigmatic woman in an apocalyptic world. Civilization is being reduced to basic elements by the encroachment of a new ice age. The heat of human emotions takes place against this looming backdrop.

It is the last novel in the second half of Kavan's literary career and is generally considered the best of that period. Although classified as science fiction, the book does not incorporate the usual futuristic gadgetry or extra-terrestrials encountered in that genre. The classification is a loose one. Just as Orwell's *1984* is more than a dystopian story and Jame's "Turn of the Screw" is more than a ghost story, so is *Ice* more than science fiction. The prose is lean, vivid; Kafkaesque in its elastic shift from realism to the bizarre.

The only flaw I find in the book lies with the publisher, not the author. Peter Dutton did not include an introduction which would have rounded out the reader's perception of the author's humanity. A finished piece of art - say, the Parthenon, van Gogh's "Sun Flowers", Kavan's *Ice* - comes to the viewer in seamless, silent perfection. Nothing of the labor and torment which begets art is revealed. To an extent, appreciation of Anna Kavan's unique artistry is stifled by the lack of a profile.

Several sites exist on the internet that provide information on the novel's author. One has several photographs of Kavan. The novel, of course, is the best introduction to this fascina! ting writer. If you like *Ice* Amazon.com advertises other works of hers. I have another on special order. For me she is an author worth reading.

How can one not discuss Anna Kavan first when discussing her work?Ice was last published novel in her lifetime, and also her masterpiece.The plot is quite simply, two men pursue a women who they constantly victimise, against a background of universal annihilation and destruction.However the book defies description, so surrealistic is the prose and so profound is the metaphor.Anna Kavan was a heroin addict for over thirty years, and had suffered two mental breakdowns which resulted in her being institutionalized. However she was a consummate artist who re-invented herself successfully as a avant garde writer (now sadly neglected). Ice is her crowning achievemnt,read it.

When I first read 'Ice' (from Brian Aldiss' published recommendation) I enjoyed it but didn't think it was great. It seemed to me to be about Kavan's struggle with drugs - a struggle she couldn't win. But this was a bit remote for me since I have never taken drugs. Some years later I read another Kavan novel - 'The Eagle's Nest'. This is a hot novel in comparison to the coldness of 'Ice' and, perhaps, more akin to my own personality. Anyway, it encouraged me to read 'Ice' again and now I saw it as so much stronger because it's (to me anyway) not about a futile struggle against drug addiction but something much more cosmic - the futile struggle that we all embark on against death.

I have read more Kavan since then - 'A Scarcity of Love' is great. 'Let Me Alone' is something else again. Will I ever dare reread it?

Anna Kavan's parable is nearly word and tone perfect. The economy of her writing strips the reader of one's hopes and preconceptions and deposits us in her frozen and impenetrable world. Her novel is as cold as anything Samuel Beckett wrote; cold in the sense of distance, and a hopelessness beyond despair and without frisson. Kavan has taken the perennial complaint about the human condition and refused to stoop to anything so simian. The eponymous Mr. Frost asked if the world would end in fire or ice, and then, by way of an answer, poked fun at the eschatology behind the question. Anna Kavan penned a book of doom that transcends eschatology. She writes with control, restraint and a terrible authority, a consequence of the immobilizing power that comprises the center of this classic work.

Copyright © 2010

I read Ice several years ago, and I recall it as a very intense experience, perhaps beacuse Kavan had altered her mind considerably through drugs by the time she wrote it and her own perception of reality and emotions was equally intense and she had to reduce it to the bare minimum before she could deal with it.

The story takes place in a future ice-age, and the text is as cold as the title. An incessant, obsessive search for a woman is what I remember best of the story, and that would not in itself make it very special. I think it is the treatment of an ardent passion with ice-coldness what makes Kavan a winner.