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.

This is a strange book and I’m not sure I’ll be able to describe it adequately! It’s probably not something I would normally have chosen to read, but this new edition from Pushkin Press caught my eye and as I’ve enjoyed other books from their Classics range, I decided to try it. Ice was first published in 1967, the last of Anna Kavan’s books to be published before her death a year later. It follows an unnamed narrator who has developed an obsession with a pale young woman with silver-white hair. The girl is also unnamed and described as delicate, glass-like and under the control of her sinister husband, who later becomes known as ‘the Warden’. Our narrator pursues her from place to place, hoping to rescue her from the Warden, occasionally catching up with her and then losing her again. There’s not much more to the plot than that – Christopher Priest in his foreword to this edition calls the novel ‘virtually plotless’ – but the book still has multiple layers that make it an interesting and worthwhile read. First, there’s the setting. The narrator’s pursuit of the white-haired girl takes place against a backdrop of apocalyptic scenes as the planet rapidly becomes engulfed by ice. I’ve seen this referred to as an allegory of Anna Kavan’s own addiction to heroin, although I don’t know enough about her to comment on that. It could also be seen as a warning of climate change, more relevant than ever today, of course. Either way, there are some beautiful descriptive passages as Kavan writes about the coldness, the glittering snow and the giant walls of ice closing in on the girl, the narrator and the world. Another notable thing about the novel is the way the reader (and the narrator himself) can never be quite sure of the boundaries between reality and a dreamlike or hallucinatory state. Sometimes the girl will appear seemingly from nowhere, just out of reach or about to be enclosed by the ice – only to disappear again just as suddenly, leaving us wondering whether she was ever really there at all. These shifts in reality occur repeatedly throughout the book, which is very unsettling! The Warden also never feels entirely real, but is always there as a threatening, oppressive presence; the narrator sees himself as trying to free the girl from the other man’s control, but his own infatuation with her gradually begins to feel just as disturbing. In the foreword, Priest describes the book as ‘slipstream’, which Wikipedia defines as ‘speculative fiction that blends together science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction, or otherwise does not remain within conventional boundaries of genre and narrative’. It’s certainly not a conventional novel and I have to be honest and say that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped to – after the first few appearances and disappearances of the girl, I began to find it repetitive – but it’s also a unique and powerful one. The cold, icy imagery will stay with me for a long time.

A cult classic. A dystopian nightmare of encroaching ice and a search for the girl he is obsessed with. But this wasn’t for me. I love cli-fi and dystopian fiction- The Road, The High House or The End we Start from, but this just felt like a very bad dream I was glad to wake up from. Or the ramblings of someone else’s dream, which they insist on boring you with. Unsettling and atmospheric it has similarities with the creepy stories of Edgar Allan Poe. So if you like the sometimes self-indulgent, surreal vibe you’ll love Ice.