Ice

There has been an event of some kind, some man made catastrophe and a wall of ice is slowly covering the world. In this strange, bleak dystopia our unnamed, unreliable narrator searches obsessively for a girl he once knew, sliver haired, slight and psychologically damaged.

This haunting novel of the end of the world is cyclical, dreamlike. The narrator pursues the girl from country to country, encountering devastated landscapes, refugees, warlords. The girl is under the control of “the warden”, a powerful man who our narrator keeps encountering throughout the course of the story. The girl is not much more than a cypher, someone to project their desires, brutalities and frustrations onto. She is constantly escaping, being forcibly rescued, hiding, hating the men who control her.

The story shifts perspective constantly, sometimes within the space of a few paragraphs, as though we are seeing the narrator’s flights of fancy, his nightmares. It can be disconcerting, confusing and to be honest there’s no real plot to speak of. It’s and almost endless quest across a freezing, dying earth for one man’s desire.

But that’s not the point of this novel. It’s all atmosphere, a headlong rush into devastation and madness, war and destruction. A stunning novel of the New Wave, echoing Kafka and the writings of Ballard. This may not be to everyone’s taste, it is challenging and at times not an easy read, but it is well worth persevering with.