Ice is a masterpiece characterised by its beautiful and haunting language and imagery. The novel follows a man who seeks an elusive girl, hoping to find her before the world is swallowed by an ice age. Reality is dissolved within the novel’s surreal atmosphere as the figure of the girl dies and is reborn over and over again. Ice is complex, unique, easily misunderstood, and one of the best things I’ve ever read.

If there is one classic of science fiction that can never be bettered or aped or repeated, this might be one of them. (Another is Samuel R. Delany’s similarly uncategorisable Dhalgren.) A science fiction book where the science is nowhere to be seen, it is instead a surreal elision of dystopian vision, dreams and flashbacks, set in a world and a time that is neither past nor future and certainly not the present. The unnamed narrator pursues the girl, thwarted and aided in turn by the same forbidding man, sometimes named the warden, while an impending catastrophe nears, somewhat military in nature, but always presaged by the ice, ice in all its forms: hail and sleet and glaciers that come alive; even as the narrator—who is probably a man—flees through daydreams and night terrors into past encounters between the three, or into scenes at which the narrator could have no first hand experience. Time is uncertain, no definite months, days, hours or minutes. Seasons pass from one paragraph to the next, and the place is unknown, a country somewhere in the north but where the ice is never this severe. The book is remarkable in the way Kavan keeps up the uncertainty, jinking and lurching between the narrator, the girl and the warden, never offering a sense of solid ground that tells you what this novel is about or where it’s going. A superlative performance on the page with rivals in film and television, but never in quite as bravura a text. Four and a half stars.

Not my usual kind of reading and felt this book wasn't very fluid. It jumped about a bit and I sometimes had to go back and read some parts again, to make sure of what Id actually understood. The positive for me was the landscape and the imagery that Miss Kavan described, even though it was dystopian. It conjured up amazing scenes in my mind. I cannot confess to truly understanding the main character and 'the girl' or their motives but the book was beautifully written.

Ice by Anna Kavan is a hauntingly beautiful and surreal novel that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Set in a frozen, apocalyptic world, the story follows an unnamed narrator as he searches for a fragile, ethereal woman who is constantly slipping from his grasp. The narrative is dreamlike, filled with shifting landscapes and ambiguous characters that mirror the narrator's obsessive and increasingly disoriented mind. It's an unsettling exploration of desire, power, and helplessness, written with a lyrical intensity that lingers long after the last page.

Anna Kavan was an English writer and painter born, Helen Emily Woods and first published under her married name of Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name of a character from one of her stories as her legal name in 1939 shortly after her divorce from her second husband. Kavan started using heroin in the mid 1920s having been introduced to it by either racing drivers on the French Riviera or by her tennis coach, reports vary.  It was an addiction that was to follow her throughout her life to the extent that, according to reports, when heroin was prohibited in the UK she stockpiled so much that at the time of her death in 1968 her flat in London's Notting Hill contained "enough heroin to kill the whole street' 'Ice' was written a year before her death and is a Burroughsian fever dream of broken perspectives and Kafka-esque monolithic impenetrability. Now regarded as a 'slipstream' novel - one that falls between the cracks of the various genres - it is notionally sci-fi in its post-apocalyptic setting as a sheet of ice moves inexorably to cover the Earth but Kavan's tale of helplessness, brutality, rejection and loss is very far from most tales that characterise the genre. Our narrator spends the book chasing after, occasionally catching, occasionally losing the young, fragile albino woman he claims to love, seeking to rescue her from the brutal 'warden' who keeps her cowed, but who is often just as violent and domineering in his ways. Such are the novel's vagaries, full of jarring perspective shifts and hallucinations, that it remains open to interpretation.  That it is a meditation on the role of women seems self evident but alongside this I felt like I was being offered an insight into the authors internal world as the various aspects of Kavan's psyche play out in one long heroin addiction metaphor. On a straight forward readability level this isn't a novel to pick up - as I did - for a quick read and indeed I found much of it to be a bit of a chore but equally that's not something I'm necessarily put off by and in the final analysis it was beautifully written and showed an imagination free and unfettered by common constraints.