Ice - Anna Kavan [2]
Slipstream shifts science (and its effects) into the realm of the unconscious mind, into metaphor, into emotion, into symbols. Slipstream literature is a response to science (and scientific effects), an exercise of human feeling about science, if not an understanding of it. But it is not allegory.
It is tempting, for instance, to take the known fact of Anna Kavan's years of heroin addiction and suggest that the white ice that engulfs the characters is a literary device, a symbolic representation of the pure-white crystals whose solution she injected daily into her veins. Maybe that comes into it, and maybe that was even in her mind as she wrote, but to work as allegory there has to be an exactness that the reader can grasp. In Ice the symbols are more elusive, mysterious, captivating. It ends as it begins, with nothing that is practical or concluded. The man of action is united with the passive young woman, but their destiny is nowhere near resolved. The encroachment of the ice continues.
'Anna Kavan' was a pseudonym for Helen Ferguson, the married name under which the author wrote and sold her first few novels between 1929 and 1937. She continued to write through the Second World War but mostly short stories, and many of these dealt explicitly with her unhappy and unstable psychological state. She made attempts on her life after her second marriage failed and when her son was killed in the war. She spent two long periods in mental hospitals. Some of her most disturbing stories can be found in Asylum Piece, published in 1940. She suffered from a painful spinal disease and began taking heroin for pain relief.
But she also lived an active life. She travelled around the world and lived at different times in New Zealand, Australia, Burma, Switzerland, France and the United States. She eventually returned to London, where she was living at the time of her death. She was a renowned interior decorator. She bred bulldogs. She was an excellent painter. Towards the end of her life she became a small-time property developer, buying, renovating then reselling houses in London. She was fascinated by cars and racing, and in her stories her fictional characters frequently drive around in powerful cars (as they also do in Ice).
Anna Kavan was under-regarded in her lifetime and was just starting to gain critical recognition when she died. It is a great pleasure to introduce this wonderful, compelling and extremely influential novel to a new generation of readers.
Christopher Priest 2006
ONE
I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol. The idea of being stranded on these lonely hills in the dark appalled me, so I was glad to see a signpost, and coast down to a garage. When I opened a window to speak to the attendant, the air outside was so cold that I turned up my collar. While he was filling the tank he commented on the weather. 'Never known such cold in this month. Forecast says we're in for a real bad freeze-up.' Most of my life was spent abroad, soldiering, or exploring remote areas: but though I had just come from the tropics and freeze-ups meant little to me, I was struck by the ominous sound of his words. Anxious to get on, I asked the way to the village I was making for. 'You'll never find it in the dark, it's right off the beaten track. And those hill roads are dangerous when they're iced-up.' He seemed to imply that only a fool would drive on under present conditions, which rather annoyed me. So, cutting short his involved directions, I paid him and drove away, ignoring his last warning shout: 'Look out for that ice!'
It had got quite dark by now, and I was soon more hopelessly lost than ever. I knew I should have listened to the fellow, but at the same time wished I had not spoken to him at all. For some unknown reason, his remarks had made me uneasy; they seemed a bad omen for the whole expedition, and I began to regret