{"id":44,"date":"2022-11-02T17:56:33","date_gmt":"2022-11-02T17:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/?p=44"},"modified":"2022-11-07T10:36:08","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T10:36:08","slug":"but-she-seemed-miles-away-a-dream-figure-inaccessible-and-unreal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/2022\/11\/02\/but-she-seemed-miles-away-a-dream-figure-inaccessible-and-unreal\/","title":{"rendered":"“But she seemed miles away, a dream figure, inaccessible and unreal”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Ice<\/em>, Anna Kavan, Penguin Modern Classics 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Written in 1967 during the emergence of genre fiction such as science fiction, Anna Kavan\u2019s Ice <\/em>weaves a world of political turmoil and climate catastrophe on the brink of \u201ca mysterious impending emergency\u201d. The reader traverses this domain through the unreliable narration of a man hellbent on tracking down the nameless girl to \u201cshield her from the callousness\u201d of Kavan\u2019s twisted freezing world. Instantly worrying from the start, the narrator\u2019s obsession with the girl grows throughout the text as he repeatedly comes close to her before being forced to forgo his progress by the changing climate, both political and natural, of the world around them. Joining the narrator and the girl in the novel\u2019s main narrative is the Warden, a character that feels an ownership of the girl mirroring the plight of the narrator. Between the two male characters, Kavan creates a cross-section of what today one would term \u2018toxic masculinity, apparent in their behaviors not only toward the girl but also toward each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being. Everything else in the world seemed immaterial.\u201d<\/p>Kavan, 2017, pg. 25.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While the content of the novel can come as a shock to the reader given the morbid and harmful narrative surrounding the characters of Ice<\/em>, there is certainly plenty of joy to be felt regarding Kavan\u2019s writing itself. Diving in and out of glorious dream sequences, Kavan\u2019s descriptions of the world around the characters are equivocal of the world-building of a great fantasy epic, or the symbolism in late 19th<\/sup> century French poetry and later Anglophone Modernism. A passage that particularly draws attention to the wonder of Kavan\u2019s writing, while simultaneously intertwining the text\u2019s narrative with the overarching ecological themes of the novel, comes at the beginning of the fifth chapter: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her.\u201d<\/p>Kavan, 2017, pg. 54.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Kavan\u2019s personification of the forest surrounding the girl in this passage captures the impending terror of the claim the men of the text feel towards her, while presenting through nature to evoke the fear of the climate crisis that the novel also explores. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Another aspect of this selected passage is the suggestion that the girl\u2019s life may have been different had she known \u201ckindness\u201d. Confronted with this, the reader can take a psychoanalytical approach to Ice<\/em>, given theories based on Freudian ideologies that link trauma faced back to childhood. Having been subjected to a childhood alongside a \u201csadistic mother\u201d, the narrator claims this has left the girl in a state of permanent \u201cfrightened subjection\u201d.  Kavan herself faced an upsetting upbringing, therefore it\u2019s hard to imagine that the trauma of the girl is not in some part autobiographical. The Girl herself proves to be a complex character, however, breaking free of the bonds of psychoanalytical theory by being able to find temporary happiness later in the novel. In doing this Kavan does not limit her only female character to being the plaything of the Narrator and the Warden, although her role as their object of desire does define her place in the text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I considered that imperative need I felt for her, as for a missing part of myself, it appeared less like love than an inexplicable aberration.\u201d<\/p>Kavan, 2017, pg. 23.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

            The climate catastrophe that creeps its way ever closer to the characters throughout the text can be linked to the mental state of the Narrator throughout the text, further entwining a psychoanalytical theme throughout the text. The Narrator himself admits this connection to the reader, as he states, \u201cit was bitterly cold, and I became aware of a connexion between this fact and my increasing uneasiness\u201d. The Narrators need and desperation for the Girl grows throughout the novel as the doom of the ice grows closer. One could interpret this as an allusion to the growing fears of nuclear war during the sixties, as Russia and the US seemed to be on an atomic bomb fuelled collision course. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe government would not disclose the facts. I was informed privately of a steep rise in radioactive pollution pointing to the explosion of a nuclear device\u201d<\/p>Kavan, 2017, pg. 21.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

            Kavan\u2019s novel stands as an outstanding piece of literature that is deservedly returning to the literary canon for works written\/set in the post-war period, following a republication by Penguin in 2017. For me personally, her writing offset the morbidity of the text\u2019s main plot fantastically well, as it is admittedly a hard read and one that should be accompanied by cups of tea a plenty, and comfort biscuits abound. It is a book that I look forward to returning to in the future, and would happily recommend it to anyone interested in the origins of genre fiction, especially from the often-overlooked female authors of this period. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written in 1967 during the emergence of genre fiction such as science fiction, Anna Kavan\u2019s Ice weaves a world of political turmoil and climate catastrophe on the brink of \u201ca mysterious impending emergency\u201d. The reader traverses this domain through the unreliable narration of a man hellbent on tracking down the nameless girl to \u201cshield her from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1162,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77,"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.coventry.domains\/booksbybookmarks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}