Ice

Ice is a novel by the British writer Anna Kavan, published in 1967 and the last of her books to appear in her lifetime.

The book is generally described as genre-defying, and the description is fair: it has been read as science fiction, as a formal experiment in the manner of the new French novel and as slipstream writing, but it is organised like a recurring dream, which is what Kavan herself said it was. Countries are freezing, bureaucracies are collapsing and the narrator's pursuit of the girl keeps beginning again with the details changed, so the reader learns the pattern instead of the plot. Much of the atmosphere comes from the ice itself, which is treated as an administrative fact as well as a catastrophe, and from the way the powerful characters exercise their authority over a person who has no say in what happens to her. The manuscript went through several drafts and was turned down before Peter Owen took it, and Kavan defended it against the objection that it lacked character and narrative by saying it was not meant to be realistic. It is her best known work and the one that brought her a wider readership; Penguin Books published a fiftieth-anniversary edition in 2017.