Charlotte Kersten

“Perhaps we were victims of one another.”

Year published: 1967

Category: Dystopian/post-apocalyptic/sci-fi

Summary: In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as the warden search for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed upon its 1967 publication as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

What I Thought

Ice joins Cloud & Ashes as a book that I’m very glad to have read while also being a book that absolutely defies my ability to write about it in a coherent review. My placeholder review simply read “this is great book if you ever wanted to know what an incel’s acid trip would be like” and that’s still my fundamental thesis statement to this day.

Ice is a claustrophobic, surreal nightmare where the world’s doom is as inevitable as it is senseless. The coming ice and vaguely defined “world crisis” seem just as inexorable as the protagonist’s endless chase after the pale, fragile girl of his obsessions and his absurdly repetitive ups and downs of fate and fortune as he travels from town to indistinguishable town one step ahead of catastrophe.

He is not alone in his obsession over the glass girl; she is pursued and possessed by a brutal man known as the Warden. The Warden is clearly influential and powerful – he is involved in the world’s coming crisis and rises to greater power during the devastation and conflict at the same time that he dominates and entraps the girl of the narrator’s obsession. The narrator tells himself that he must save the girl, but how different is he from the warden, truly? Are they perhaps one and the same?

The main character is obsessed with the girl’s victimhood. In just the same way that the world’s destruction is a foregone conclusion, in just the same way that he is bound to travel and search endlessly, it seems equally certain in his mind that she will continue to be possessed, abused, and made to suffer. Her past of abuse has shaped her nature in a way that cannot be changed, and her past of abuse is her also future. Why does he want so badly to believe that she can be nothing other than a victim? Why is the world’s destruction, its envelopment in ice, so inevitable?

Ice can be interpreted many ways. It can be about the author’s addiction to heroin; it can be about the Cold War’s dance with total annihilation; it can be about trauma; it can be about the objectification and brutalization of women. What I think lies at the heart of these different interpretations is the fundamental idea that we not only remain trapped in vicious cycles of needless suffering but also uncritically accept that these cycles are the natural state of things that cannot be successfully resisted. It is bleak, unsettling, and horrific in how it conveys this message, and it should not be anything else.