Well, this wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It opens conventionally enough with an unnamed narrator driving through an unseasonably harsh ice storm, looking for a remote house where he is anticipating meeting a girl that he his infatuated with and her controlling, possibly abusive, husband who is variously described as an artist or a warden.
From there, things get stranger and more dreamlike, with a series of vignettes that may or may not be dreams, with our narrator growing ever more obsessed in his pursuit of the girl through a series of war torn locales and threats from the enigmatic warden who now seems to be some sort of warlord or fascist leader, and all the time vast walls of ice are pressing ever closer.
The book is narrated in an appropriately cold and clinical style, reminiscent of the confident first person scientific narrative style of authors like HG Wells, but it quickly becomes clear that this is most definitely an unreliable account.
I had thought that this was a bit of climate sci-fi like Kim Stanley Robinson’s later work, but even though there are allusions to the ice being caused by some sort of apocalyptic war it’s an allegorical backdrop rather than any sort of hard science examination of a nuclear winter. The narrative moves through different countries, without explicitly mapping the geography, although at one point references to Norse history and fjords are made.
The main theme is rather the pursuit of this mythical girl, verging on the manic pixie archetype with silver hair, who always seems out of reach and continually rebuffs any attempts at a “rescue” from the clutches of the warden. Indeed, sometimes it’s suggested that the narrator and the warden are either the same person or identical in their violent, male urges to possess the girl, with some disturbing sections implying rape or other physical abuse.
The ending is somewhat abrupt and ambiguous, implying a grim conclusion and I’m still not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s been described as ’slipstream’ fiction rather than conventional sci-fi which seems as good a description as any.
