On the surface a post-disaster novel such as John Wyndham was producing some years earlier, 'Ice' is notable however for its deeply stylised bleakness and the lack of description of the main characters - no names, no motivation, very little physical description beyond a trait or two for example the 'shining hair' of the Girl, as she is known - one of only three characters in the book really. Some people have compared this book with Franz Kafka but I felt the only real similarity was Kavan and Kafka's feeling of the pointlessness of armed bureaucracy - that the state and the body of armed men that back it up are an alien force that cannot be dealt with on the same terms that we deal with 'real' people. And to add to this feeling of enislement there is the Ice - it requires a capital letter - vast sheeny cliffs of ice marching from the poles towards the equator, to finally end 'man and all his works'.
There's a temptation knowing what we think we do about 'Anna Kavan' to think this is about her life, but if it is it is her at her most paranoid; by all accounts she was a major player in the creative world of her place and time (England in the 1950 and 60s), and the fiction was a place for her to retreat and lick her (considerable) wounds, although she spent some effort 'resisting biography' as the notes on her biography claim at the end of this edition.