I periodically reread Ice because I love the writing and the uneasy feeling it gives me – like reading a really good ghost story.

This isn't a plot spoiler in fact, it's almost impossible to give a spoiler to this book. It's not many pages into the book that we realise that this isn't a story about characters negotiating a war-torn country, but rather about the narrator fighting his paranoid, panic-stricken mind as it threatens to overcome him. The narrator is supposed to guide us but he slips into daydreams and hallucinations and we don't know what to trust or believe. In Ice, countries, places, buildings and roads are also anonymous, adding to the sense of instability and uncertainty we are completely lost in an oneiric dystopia without a single signpost to orientate us or show us the way out. Kavan doesn't often name the characters in her books, instead giving them descriptive titles or nicknames. She's being held by her husband, 'the warden', a high-ranking military man who, with an army of obedient and bullying administrators, polices the country. Roads are blocked and the waterways of the world frozen solid, hampering the unnamed narrator as he pursues a nameless 'ice maiden', as brittle as Venetian glass, with long white hair. The landscape is bleached snow uniforms the landmarks and smothers the towns, cities and dilapidated buildings. An ice shelf, brought about by some sort of nuclear war, is engulfing the world – Kavan's pun on the cold war may not be subtle but it is terrifying. The story follows three characters as they struggle against one another and almost certain annihilation.

Ice by anna kavan