A catastrophe of some sort has occurred, ill-defined but almost certainly the result of a nuclear conflict, and as a result the world's climate has been knocked all to cock and some sort of sudden and intense ice age is in progress, gradually progressing from the poles towards the equator.
Our unnamed protagonist is clearly a tough and resourceful sort of guy with links to senior figures in government and military organisations. He's not on official business at the moment, though; for one thing the fabric of society is starting to unravel as the ice grinds its way remorselessly downwards (or upwards, depending on your point of view and which hemisphere you're in), and for another he's nursing an obsession with a strange, fragile, silver-haired (and, I think we can assume, much younger) woman who he seems to have had some sort of prior relationship with.
So is he hoping for some rekindling of former sexy sexy times with this girl, perhaps as a sort of defiant last hurrah for humanity before the glaciers engulf everything and everyone's bits freeze off? Well, maybe, but it seems a bit more complicated than that; much of his internal thought process in relation to her seems to involve having an urge to hurt her in some way, and there are dark references to traumas in her past, maybe involving him, maybe not.
Anyway, his pursuit of her requires him to travel from country to country, including some locations that are a bit close to the encroaching ice-front for comfort. During one of his longer stays he comes into contact with another nameless individual (basically no-one has names here, or, rather, presumably they do but we're never told what they are) known only as "the warden" who seems to occupy a position of some power and influence in society (or what remains of it) but also seems to have some hold over the girl, who currently resides, not entirely willingly (but not entirely unwillingly either), at the castle where he lives.
So, storm the castle, rescue the girl, nick a car/boat/whatever, flee to warmer climes, have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over, right? Well, it's not quite as simple as that for a few reasons: firstly the complex and ambiguous nature of the warden's relationship with the girl, but also, more confusingly, the complex and ambiguous nature of the warden's relationship with our protagonist. Despite them seemingly never having met before there is some oddly fluid melding/merging of their personalities going on - the protagonist openly muses on whether they might actually be the same person, and the girl seems to have had the same idea. Whatever, eventually a crisis point is reached and the warden takes the girl away southwards by car (a trip they barely survive intact). Meanwhile our protagonist is airlifted out by the (presumably government) organisation he still - in some nebulous way - reports to.
Deposited in another country further from the approaching ice he is subjected to a strange Kafkaesque trial on ill-defined charges, escapes, falls in with a group of technicians setting up some sort of radio antenna near a border with a neighbouring country which his (presumably military) knowledge allows him to help with, hops the border and finds himself face-to-face with the warden again. What are the chances?
And so it goes on: another unnamed country, another seemingly-miraculous encounter with the warden and the girl, an escape, sometimes with the girl, sometimes not. And all the time the ice grinds onwards and time is running out. Eventually the scene repeats itself in a beachside cabin, and subsequently a headlong car ride through the driving snow, and it looks as if this may really be it this time. Or is it?
Firstly, let's do the list of novels on this blog where there's been some sort of apocalyptic event before the narrative even starts, in no particular order and with no particular hope that it'll be complete: In Watermelon Sugar, Virtual Light, The Road, Riddley Walker, O-Zone, Barefoot In The Head, On The Beach, The Pesthouse, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Death Of Grass, Station Eleven. Just to pick out a couple of obvious parallels, the inexorable approach of doom across the whole world is very reminiscent of On The Beach, and the distinct possibility that humanity's time may be up in the fairly near future is similar to The Road. But Ice exists in a weird little dream-like bubble of its own, and could very easily be a metaphor for something completely different. But what? An obsessive and abusive relationship? The author's own lifelong heroin addiction? In an odd way the book on this list which it most resembles is none of the ones listed above but instead Christopher Priest's The Affirmation with its odd dream-like quality, the sudden jarring shifts in perspective, weird coincidences and the voyage through a series of unfamiliar and unnamed countries (coincidentally Priest wrote a foreword to an earlier edition of Ice). There's also a whiff of JG Ballard about the whole thing, and a bit of a parallel with The Ice Palace: short book, icy title and setting, dream-like quality, enigmatic young female characters with opaque motivations. None of that quite captures its strangeness, though, and it certainly passes the "lingers oddly in the mind" test that I've mentioned before. It was the last thing Kavan (not her real name) published during her lifetime; she died in 1968, a year after its publication.
Anyway, it's very good, very short (170 pages) and I recommend it, as long as you're not wedded to ideas of strictly linear narrative or satisfyingly-resolved plots.
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