From the blurb on the back: “No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it.”
This short novel – £1 from the Octavia Foundation on High Street Kensington – really annoyed me. A chronicle of unexplained obsession set during an unspecified disaster, it frustrates on every page.
Ice is creeping across the world. A man pursues a woman. Beyond those basics, it quickly becomes evident that none of the events described can be assumed to have definitively taken place:
“Reality had become something of an unknown quantity to me,” says the narrator. And: “The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams”. Because of the constant blurring between “objective” events (if there are any) and the narrator’s visions, you end up not believing in any of it. Indeed, the narrator’s unreliability is hammered home with tedious frequency. The nature of reality is an interesting theme that has been explored by countless authors in more engaging ways.
“My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.”
Yes, we get it! But two pages later he reports “an odd sort of fragmentation of my ideas”. But this goes on and on: “it dawned on me that this was the reality, and those other things the dream. All of a sudden the life I had been lately living appeared unreal: it simply was not credible any longer.”
“I fled from the room in utter confusion,” explains the narrator at one point, summing up the exasperating novel in a nutshell by adding that he “did not know what had happened, or if anything had”.
“All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.”
The characters are vague and sketchy. What we do learn of them shows them to be too unpleasant to care about. The “plot” does gather pace towards the end and it finally becomes engaging. I tried to read this while waiting for a delayed flight and it was absolutely not the engrossing book I hoped it would be – or needed in that situation. There are curious typos, as well. In two places, the word “re-started” is printed as “re-tarted”. You can only assume that Penguin scanned an old copy of the book and failed to check the results.
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