“I should have been inured to climatic changes; but I again felt I had moved out of ordinary life into an area of total strangeness. All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.”

“The Marble Index isn’t a record you listen to. It’s a hole you fall into.” So said producer Frazier Mohawk on Nico’s bleak and beautiful masterpiece, 1968’s The Marble Index. Anna Kavan’s similarly bleak and beautiful masterpiece Ice was published a year earlier in 1967. Mohawk could just have easily been talking about Kavan’s novel. Both of these remarkable women created an all-encompassing, genre-defying work of art that threatens to consume those brave enough to experience it. And both of them have had this work reduced to symptoms of their mental illnesses and their struggles with heroin addiction. It’s true that both Kavan and Nico would struggle with mental illness throughout their lives, and would self-medicate with heroin. But to reduce their artistic achievements to this is to woefully misunderstand their singular work. Ice, like The Marble Index, is monolithic. Aspects of it can be read allegorically, but ultimately it is too strange and disorienting to be tied down by such a reading. Like The Marble Index, you can see how it emerged from the popular and avant-garde traditions that birthed it, but at the end of the day, much as that record doesn’t really sound like anything but itself, Ice stands in a category of its own. Even in Kavan’s remarkable oeuvre, Ice stands as her most powerful and uncompromising artistic statement, and one of the key works of speculative fiction of the 20th century. It would be the last of Kavan’s own works published in her lifetime, before her death from a massive heroin overdose in December of 1968, a month after The Marble Index was released. 

Long-time Hive followers will know that Anna Kavan is one of my favourite authors. Born Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name Anna Kavan from a character in one of her books. Her first book published as Kavan, Asylum Piece (1940), tore up the rulebook for fiction, combining Kavan’s own experience of institutionalization with a bold, experimental approach that elided the boundaries between hallucination and reality. She proceeded to produce some of the most incredible and uncategorisable fiction ever written, from short story collections like I Am Lazarus (1945) to the dreamlike novel Sleep Has His House (1947). But Ice remains her most powerful and lasting artistic statement, as well as her novel that has had the most impact on the field of speculative fiction. It’s a work of post-apocalyptic fiction, a genre that was having a golden age in the 60s thanks to science fiction’s New Wave. Works like J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) eschewed the “cosy catastrophes” of earlier works like John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and redefined and reconfigured the genre into powerfully disconcerting new forms. Ice can certainly be read in this context, and indeed it was, rightfully celebrated by genre big names from Brian Aldiss to Arthur C. Clarke. But Ice is much too strange and singular to sit comfortably in any literary tradition. 

Some two decades later, Bruce Sterling would include Ice in his original list of slipstream books, his attempt to coin a genre for works that use the estrangement of science fiction for very non-science fictional ends. This feels like a more accurate description of what Ice does, how it extrudes its malevolent tendrils into the reader’s brain. There have been attempts to understand Ice as climate fiction, which is tempting because of its visceral evocation of a world freezing over. But, as Christopher Priest, a long-time fan and supporter of Kavan’s work, points out in the introduction reprinted in the new Pushkin Press edition, this isn’t quite right. Like Ballard’s writing in The Drowned World and his other post-apocalypses, Kavan isn’t writing about science – the relentless walls of ice closing in on the protagonist are not of the realm of understandable climate science, nor are they straightforwardly a reflection of the protagonist’s troubled inner psychic landscape. Rather, this is a novel about what the end of the world would feel like, what the inescapable sensation of those walls of ice closing in might do to us as people. It’s a very personal apocalypse, which is perhaps why it’s so disturbing. 

The plot of Ice centres on the relationship between three unnamed characters. This is a trick Kavan has used before to complicate her readers’ relationship to her characters, to make them strange and unknowable. Ice is even more extreme in this than her other work. There is the narrator, who seems to have some kind of job with the government or military. He is relentlessly chasing after this girl, fragile, pale skin, long, almost white hair. The girl is in an abusive relationship with another man, sometimes described as an artist, but more often described as the warden, a figure of masculinity and authority who seems to have total control over the girl’s life. The three characters chase each other, interacting with each other in various guises and iterations, as the narrator pursues the girl across a world which is succumbing to a wall of ice that will soon envelope the entire planet. The narrator discloses to the reader fairly early on that his grasp on reality is not all it could be:

“Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me. At times this could be disturbing. Now, for instance, I had visited the girl and her husband before, and kept a vivid recollection of the peaceful, prosperous-looking countryside round their home. But this memory was rapidly fading, losing its reality, becoming increasingly unconvincing and indistinct, as I passed no one on the road, never came to a village, saw no lights anywhere.”

Is the narrator completely psychotic? Are he and the warden separate people, or two aspects of the same person? As the novel progresses, he frequently wanders without warning into dreams and hallucinations, fantasizing about the girl’s death and the warden’s hands or his. Images of countries destroyed by war and unrest populate the novel, dystopian settlements overseen by the warden or other malicious government or military forces, but these melt into the shadows just as regularly. There’s a sense of the dystopian hopelessness of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), but perhaps more of the punitive bureaucracies of Kafka’s The Trial (1925) – the military and government forces that circumscribe the characters’ lives and options don’t have any clear, rational goal as much as they are agents of paranoia and deception. What Kavan creates, then, is less a portrait of psychosis, but a world in which reality itself is inherently untrustworthy and unreliable. Another comparator might be the paranoid, ever-shifting realities of Philip K. Dick, but it wouldn’t be until much later with 1981’s VALIS that Dick would craft a work of metafiction that destabilises the reader’s sense of reality as aggressively as Ice does.  

Kavan’s prose has always been remarkable, but here it achieves its apotheosis. We can see similarities with Ballard in the sharp sparseness of her prose. But at the same time, she is capable of spinning wild hallucinatory fantasies the likes of which Michael Moorcock could only dream of. Her command of voice is at its absolute best. From the way she deploys a deadpan patrician tone similar to H.G. Wells only to brutally undermine the sense of her “sensible” male viewpoint character, one can easily see her influence on Priest and Nina Allan. The narrator sees himself as inherently rational, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and his sense of his own reliability, his role as the voice of reason, is constantly being deconstructed. Perhaps what is dying here is not so much the world itself, but the idea of the world as an understandable entity, as the very idea of the truth becomes swamped in a clamour of competing, compromised voices. Ice is a novel about abuse. The girl is only seen by the narrator and the warden as a desirable object, something for them to control and possess. She is constantly infantalised by both the narrator and the warden, neither of whom grant her any agency in their all-consuming fantasies. However, the novel makes it clear that this view of the girl is an affect of the male characters’ pathological psychologies. Whenever they meet her, they react with confusion, as her reactions to their presence don’t go by the script they are expecting. The girl in Ice is a cipher, but that is because of the inherently deranged way in which these egocentric men perceive the world around them. Extrapolating this further, the walls of ice that are destroying the world are frequently attributed to some unspecified action of humanity – we can read this pathological egocentricity as a malevolent force that is destroying the world due to these men’s inability to understand and control it. 

The powerful imagery of a world being blanketed by enveloping ice is a hard one to shake off. Certainly, one can read the ice crystals that numb all the evils of the human race and leave behind them a blank serenity as a metaphor for heroin, the white substance that Kavan was addicted to. Similarly, The Marble Index’s sonic world of Nico’s haunting voice, her droning harmonium and John Cale’s bells and viola, all merging to create a surprisingly serene soundscape, can be read in this way. The Marble Index’s lyrics are even full of imagery of frozen borderlines that eerily parallels Ice – I have no idea if Nico and Kavan were even aware of each other’s work.. But both works are too complex, too singular to be reduced to this one meaning. As works of art, they tap into something primal and deeply affecting. With both of them, there is this sense of something quite beautiful, if terrifyingly unhuman, glimpsed over the edge of the ruin of human experience. One cannot listen to The Marble Index and not be changed by it. Similarly, once you have read Ice, you are no longer the same person that you were when you started the book. I can think of no higher compliment to give a work of art. 

Ice is available now – you can order your copy HERE