Anna Kavan – Ice

May 23, 2025

Oh. My. God.How come this novel isn’t up there alongside Ph. K. Dick, Asimov, and the rest of the greatest sci-fi works of our time?

Oh, yeah, it might be because it talks about violence over a woman.

This anxious, delicate masterpiece follows an unreliable, possibly schizophrenic narrator through a world ravaged with violence and unravels its gradually falling apart, while ice relentlessly advances and threatens to cover everything. How? Why? It’s not important. What’s important is the Girl, a woman the narrator is obsessed with, and whose fragility he’s morbidly attracted to. Claiming he wants to save her, he speaks of abuse and control with the same tranquility he uses in detailing the end of the world, of physical violence and the denial of autonomy, flawlessly describing her brittle bones and delicate appearance as the cause for this obsession. Obviously it’s going to be the girl’s fault. That, or the ice.I

It’s a must read.

It should be studied at school.

Ice is a novel by British writer Anna Kavan, published in 1967

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