Ice was published by Peter Owen in London in 1967, the year before Kavan’s death. The novel defies genre classification: it has been claimed by science fiction (the ice, the apocalypse), surrealism (the dreamlike logic, the dissolving settings), literary fiction (the prose, the psychological complexity), and feminist criticism (the girl as object of male obsession). It is all of these and none of them.
An unnamed narrator searches for a girl — never named, always described by her fragility, her silver-white hair, her vulnerability — across a world that is being consumed by advancing ice walls. The ice is simultaneously literal (a new ice age is destroying civilization) and psychological (the narrator’s obsession freezes everything it touches). The narrator pursues the girl; a figure called “the warden” — an authoritarian leader who controls a territory — also possesses her; the girl moves between them, always passive, always endangered, always on the verge of destruction.
The narrative shifts without warning between registers that might be reality, memory, hallucination, or fantasy. Scenes repeat with variations: the girl is captured, the girl escapes, the girl is found broken, the ice advances. The repetition is not careless but deliberate — Kavan creates a loop structure in which pursuit and loss cycle endlessly, and the reader, like the narrator, cannot reach the girl because reaching her would end the obsession that drives the narrative.
Kavan was a heroin addict for most of her adult life, and the novel’s compulsive repetitions — the pursuit that can never end because its satisfaction would be its death — have been read as a metaphor for addiction. But the novel resists single interpretation: the ice is also nuclear annihilation, ecological collapse, the freezing of the heart, the impossibility of genuine contact between people who can only relate through power and possession.
Brian Aldiss championed the novel throughout his career, calling it one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. It has been continuously rediscovered and reissued, most recently by Penguin Classics, and its reputation has grown steadily since Kavan’s death.
Collecting Ice
First edition (Peter Owen, London, 1967): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $1,000–$3,000
- Very good: $400–$1,000
- US first (Doubleday, 1970): $100–$300
- Penguin Classics reissue: $15–$30
The Peter Owen first edition is genuinely scarce in fine condition. Kavan was not widely known at the time of publication, and the print run was modest. The jacket — white with a blue ice design — is fragile and prone to damage.