sf, page 15 of 33

The unnamed narrator of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice returns to his (unnamed) home country “to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending emergency in this part of the world”. But immediately he becomes gripped with an obsession for a young woman he was formerly infatuated with, a girl (she’s known throughout the novel as “the girl”) whose “timidity and fragility” made him want to “shield her from the callousness of the world”. Her rejection of him left him traumatised, and he still suffers from insomnia and headaches, the medication for which gives him “horrid dreams, in which she always appeared as a helpless victim”, dreams which are “not confined to sleep only”. Even as he drives to the house that the woman shares with her painter husband, he sees her before him, helpless, surrounded by encroaching cliffs of ice — the first of the novel’s many slips into a different sort of reality.

His visit is unsatisfactory — he hardly sees her, and when he does, she hardly speaks to him — and soon after, he learns she has fled the country. Ignoring his mission to understand “the coming emergency”, the narrator follows, ending up in an (unnamed) nordic country semi-ruined by war, where the girl seems to have been taken by a militaristic leader known as the warden. The narrator poses as a historian, looking for sites of potential archaeological investigation, and manages to convince the warden to let him see the girl. He wants, of course, to take her from the clutches of this overbearing, controlling man, but when he’s finally taken to her, she’s plainly afraid of him. When the political state in the country worsens, the warden flees, taking the girl with him. Again, the narrator follows.

All this time, the strangeness of the narrative is escalating. The narrator continues to have even more vivid, elaborate, and violent fantasies about the girl being endangered and his trying (and failing) to save her. In one, told that she’s dead, his main feeling is of having been “defrauded”: “I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” He also finds, at times, his identity somehow merging with that of the warden; also, with the girl’s: “It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.” Sometimes, his narration slips to include scenes in which he is not present, but the girl is, and in which he can somehow know her feelings. There’s a dreamlike blurring of boundaries between the narrator, the girl, and the warden who, at times, because they’re left unnamed, seem not so much fleshed out characters as roles being played, or, perhaps, fragmented aspects of an absent whole. Is the narrator projecting his fantasies of saving/“shielding” someone onto the young woman he’s pursuing, despite her obvious fear of him, or is the young woman projecting her fear of others onto the narrator? Whenever he does get to be with her, his actions are hardly those of a protector, more those of the sort of abuser who tells his victim, “I’m doing this for your own good.”

We never learn the origins of the “coming emergency”, only that:

“Day by day the ice was creeping over the curve of the earth, unimpeded by seas or mountains.”

At the same time, though, the world is descending into militaristic chaos, “a senseless mania for destruction” even in the face of the coming environmental annihilation. There are rumours about “a self-detonating cobalt bomb, timed, at a pre-set, unknown moment, to destroy all life”. It’s as if, the narrator says:

“An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.”

It all focuses on “the girl”, even though she makes only brief appearances (usually to flee from the narrator as soon as she can). Early on, we’re told the origins of her permanently terrified state:

“She was over-sensitive, highly-strung, afraid of people and life; her personality had been damaged by a sadistic mother who kept her in a permanent state of frightened subjection.”

She has a permanent “victim’s look”. Fear, we’re told, is “the climate she lived in” — a fitting word, “climate”, for an ecological disaster novel. And:

“The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.”

Just as the world is heading towards extinction — through ice or nuclear fire, it hardly matters which — the girl is heading towards her own inevitable fate. The ice in the world echoes her inner numbness to her own condition, driven by a lifetime of emotional helplessness; the lack of names given to countries and characters echoes her disconnection from the world around her; the narrator’s unstable sense of reality echoes how “Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of [the girl’s] personality”.

The characters, and the world they’re in, all become echoes of one another, reflections of one another. The boundaries between them are unstable, just as a child victim’s are with an abusive parent. Victims of abuse, reduced so utterly to powerlessness, take their abuser’s side in a last-ditch attempt at psychological survival. It’s quite possible Ice’s male narrator is in fact the girl’s own narrative voice, seeing herself, through another’s eyes, objectified and victimised because it’s the only way she can see herself and not experience that paralysing fear. (Which would explain the narrator’s initial trauma on being rejected by her — it wasn’t a love rejection, but a shattering of the self.) Meanwhile, the ice encroaches — the chilling distance between herself and her own emotions, freezing the world as she herself is frozen inside, forever trapped at the moment of her victimisation. (Hence, she’ll always be “the girl”, the victim of her mother’s bullying, and never a grown-up woman in her own right.)

And all this takes place in a world of power, possession and increasingly mindless violence, a totalitarian, male-dominated world on the brink of chaos, all too ready to pander to the girl’s “I deserve no better” siren call to be terrorised, victimised, brutalised.

This was Kavan’s last novel before her death in 1968, and it’s all too easy to read it in the terms laid out in biographical sketches, which include a lonely, neglectful childhood, a probably abusive early marriage, battles with heroin addiction (which began in the days when heroin was an over-the-counter drug; she was apparently persuaded to try it in the belief it would help her tennis serve) and depression. Even her name — adopted as a pseudonym, then taken on in real life from one of her own fictional characters — could be seen in the same terms as the self-distancing use of “the girl” in Ice: an attempt to divorce oneself from one’s unhappy past, an attempt to outrun one’s shadow, to numb the pain through dissociation.

I came across this book while looking for something similar-but-different to the last disaster novel I reviewed here, John Christopher’s Death of Grass, but it was a cover quote from J G Ballard that clinched me into reading Ice. Its vision of a world being slowly encased in ice echoes Ballard’s The Crystal World, but in Ice the examination of the human story in the face of worldwide disaster is deeper (though Ballard’s is also, curiously, a tale of love triangles being fought out while the world freezes).

Kavan’s novel, with its unnamed characters, unnamed countries, and never-fully-defined disaster, has a sort of Kafkan purity of fable to it, but at its heart there’s a weird, hallucinogenic feeling in which it’s impossible to fully separate any of the characters from one another, or from their unstable, violent, ecologically-endangered world — each seems a facet of the same central, frozen crystal, a prismatic illusion thrown off from the ice-hard heart of unhealed, perhaps unheal-able, psychological abuse that seeded this novel.

Chilling.

John Christopher’s Death of Grass (published 1956) came out five years after John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. Both are about how the precariousness of modern life can so easily give way to a tooth-and-claw battle for survival when civilisation breaks down. Christopher’s chosen disaster — a virus that destroys all grass-related plants, including wheat, rye, barley, oats and rice, and which soon threatens the world with starvation — isn’t as instantaneous as Wyndham’s, but that’s only to give its English characters a brief chance to look on in combined pity and superiority as China, where the virus originates, descends into chaos. As the virus spreads, the Brits tighten their belts and roll their eyes at the thought of going back to war-time rationing, sure they’ll handle the situation with the same dignity:

“Yet again,” a correspondent wrote to the Daily Telegraph, “it falls to the British peoples to set an example to the world in the staunch and steadfast bearing of their misfortunes. Things may grow darker yet, but that patience and fortitude is something we know will not fail.”

But when our hero, John Custance, learns the government’s latest efforts to combat the virus aren’t working, he, his family, and a small but growing band of taggers-along, head for his brother’s farm in the north. Situated in a narrow-entranced valley, it should be easy to defend as the country goes feral — as long as they can get there in one piece.

They certainly can’t do so peacefully. Leaving London, they’re faced with a military roadblock. By this point, Custance is convinced the government are planning to drop hydrogen bombs on the major cities, including London, to bring the population down to the sort of levels that can be maintained with new levels of food production, so he knows it’s a matter of kill or be killed. This close to WWII, Custance is the sort of man who has had some experience of this:

He brought the rifle up and tried to hold it steady. At any fraction of a second, he must crook his finger and kill this man, unknown, innocent. He had killed in the war, but never from such close range, and never a fellow-countryman. Sweat seemed to stream on his forehead; he was afraid of it blinding his eyes, but dared not risk disturbing his aim to wipe it off. Clay-pipes at a fairground, he thought – a clay-pipe that must be shattered, for Ann, for Mary and Davey. His throat was dry.

The most significant addition to Custance’s group is Pirrie, an older man whom they encounter when they try to first buy, then rob, guns for their trip up north. After the robbery fails, they explain what they know and Pirrie agrees to provide them with guns in exchange for him and his wife being able to come along. He proves to be a crack shot, and soon becomes their most valuable asset. He is also quite ready to take advantage of the new lawlessness to his own advantage — not to the point of betraying the group, but certainly in getting his own, sometimes brutal, way. His pragmatism quickly becomes the embodiment of what this new world is going to be like. John Custance comes to rely on, and trust him, more and more.

There’s an uneasy air of compliance, in the book, in Custance’s shift from civilised man to survivalist leader. Perhaps because we started it off by taking his side — he was the reasonably-sounding, civilised one in the early chapters, as opposed to his friend Roger’s pessimism — but as we rarely get to see inside his head, we don’t witness the inner moments when he gives in to the way the world is going to be. We just see his actions getting darker and darker. At times it’s hard to tell if Custance is taking a certain pride, or grim satisfaction when, for instance, he finds his children being that much more obedient to him — and the women too — now he’s taken on the role of leader of a band of survivalists.

So, it’s an uneasy book. But, of course, it’s meant to be.

Day of the Triffids was far more about the ecological disaster, the loneliness of the survivors, and the many different types of challenges they’d have to face in order to survive. Although it addresses the same sort of moral issues as Christopher’s book, Christopher’s is more wholly, and brutally, about the moral issues alone. In Death of Grass, there’s no real concern for the idea of trying to preserve civilisation, or mourning its loss, just a cold looking on as it dies. As Roger says, “We’re in a new era… Or a very old one…” and everyone seems quite happy, after an initial inner tussle, to take that as read and join in:

“It’s force that counts now. Anybody who doesn’t understand that has got as much chance as a rabbit in a cage full of ferrets.”

It’s easy to see Christopher’s characters as the sort Wyndham’s might meet, try to talk to, and quickly need to escape from. Wyndham had no illusions about the depths human beings could sink to, but he did believe that some might (successfully) choose not to sink all the way — which is, after all, the basis of civilisation. Christopher’s book doesn’t really debate the point. The pragmatists are the most eloquent, and they are the ones with the guns. They survive, but we do, at the end, get to see some of the cost of that survival. (It should also be said that Christopher’s characters suffer more than Wyndham’s. Not only do they kill others, but two of the women are, early on, kidnapped and raped, something that Wyndham would never have included in a book. It’s not dwelt upon, but it certainly sets a grim tone for the mental state the group falls into.)

There was a 1970 film adaptation, named No Blade of Grass (after the US retitling of the novel), which is mostly faithful, and fits in neatly with the 70s fascination with ecological disasters and survival scenarios. The smaller cast changes the dynamics of the group, even improving on Christopher’s plot at one point, when Pirrie (here a younger rather than an older man) chooses Custance’s daughter Mary to replace his wife (instead of, in the book, another young woman picked up on the way), which makes Custance’s acquiescence all the more damning — or it would, if only Custance (played by Nigel Davenport) wasn’t so stolid and matter-of-fact throughout the film. The whole mood of the film really depends on how Custance is portrayed, and Davenport doesn’t bring the slightest hint of moral doubt to the role. The group might as well be out for a country stroll, for all the horrors (made all the more horrific by being depicted in lurid 70s fashion) they meet with, and perpetrate. (It doesn’t help that, with his eyepatch, jacket, and moustache, he’s the mirror image of Julian Barrett’s 80s action-star parody Mindhorn.) Plus, there’s a rather silly stand-off near the end with a motorcycle gang, who seem to be there simply to use up the film’s stunt budget. You can see its trailer at Trailers from Hell.

It’s been a while since I wrote about “things that frightened me as a kid”, but I thought I’d revive the practice for a Halloween mewsings. The Play for Today adaptation of Robert C O’Brien’s 1974 novel was broadcast on 28th February 1984 (and this was the last year for Play for Today, a strand of one-off dramas that had been broadcast by the BBC since 1970). I didn’t see it at the time, but was shown it, perhaps later in the same year, in an English class at school — meaning it also falls into the narrower category of “things that frightened me in the classroom”, which includes a forced watch of another 1984 teleplay, Threads (still the bleakest thing I’ve ever seen), and a far more pleasant classroom watch of the 1977 BBC adaptation of Dracula. (And I’ll also add to the list a story a supply teacher, Mrs Mud (or perhaps Mudd), told us at the end of one day in my penultimate year at primary school — probably making it up on the spot— called “The Ear”, about a man persecuted by a reanimated Van Gogh-style severed ear.)

This adaptation of Z for Zachariah moves the events of the novel from the USA to a remote valley in Wales, whose isolated weather system protects it when the rest of the world is destroyed and/or poisoned in a nuclear war. 15-year-old Ann Burden’s parents go off to check for survivors in the locality but never come back. Ann (Pippa Hinchley) soldiers on, keeping the farm as best she can, then one day sees a weird tent set up on the road that leads into the valley.

She retreats up the mountainside and watches as a man in a radiation suit (Anthony Andrews), lugging a survival kit on wheels behind him, enters the valley, tests the water, and, finding it radiation-free, disrobes and jumps into a stream. Ann, watching, realises his mistake — the man only tested one stream, which she knows to be clean, but didn’t test the other, the one he’s jumped into, in which she found dead fish. (One stream has its source in the valley, the other brings in water from outside.) The man soon falls sick with radiation poisoning, and Ann overcomes her fear to come down from the mountains and tend to him.

He describes the symptoms of his coming sickness to her:

“It goes through stages. First you have two or three days’ vomiting. Second stage, radiation causes intercellular ionisation. Molecules within the cells are destroyed. Cells can no longer grow or divide. Plus, you’ll be much sicker. With a high fever. Blood cells are damaged. They can no longer reproduce, resulting in anaemia. No resistance to germs or infection… Susceptible to… mild impurities in food and water, resulting in vomiting, and, more seriously, dysentery.”

He is John Loomis, an organic chemist who, before the bombs dropped, had been helping develop a form of magnetised plastic. The magnetism wards off radiation, hence his radiation-proof suit and tent, which allow him to survive in the post-holocaust world. In his fever, it soon becomes evident that his story of how he got the suit may be more complicated. There were two researchers — John, and a man called Edward, who was his senior on the project — but only one suit.

As he recovers from the sickness, John tries to instil in Ann a sense of the delicacy of their situation. This valley, he says, is now a colony, the one chance for the human race to survive. He gets her to think about the sort of crops they’re going to need — wheat for flour, beets for sugar. And, somewhat mockingly, he says of her regular visits to the valley chapel: “Next time you go to your church, pray for a bull calf.”

Things take a darker turn after Ann celebrates her sixteenth birthday. She wakes up one night to find John sitting on her bed, touching her. She escapes his assault, and the next day offers a truce, saying she’ll continue to help farm the valley, but she’ll be living elsewhere. John, though, starts to impose control, keeping the key to the tractor, padlocking the local shop they’ve been using for supplies and, finally, using Ann’s own dog to track her to her hiding place. The play ends with Ann taking John’s radiation suit and survival kit and leaving the valley to find other people, rather than continue to live with this dangerous man.

It’s a bleak story, feeling like one of the darker one-off episodes of Terry Nation’s Survivors from the previous decade. It’s hard not to watch this adaptation of Z for Zachariah and feel pretty little hope for mankind. John Loomis seems too little like an unbalanced individual, too much a representative of men in general, or scientists in general, or adults in general, casting them all as a bunch of control-hungry rapists and murderers.

Reviews of the teleplay over at IMDB rate it low in comparison to the book, certainly for its lack of moral shading (the book is written as Ann’s diary, and she can be read as an unreliable narrator, a possibility the TV adaptation doesn’t address), as well as the general coldness of the two main characters’ relationship. But I suspect it got the green light at the Beeb not because of its potential for moral complexity but for its basic message — one that was desperately hammered home throughout the 1980s, in a barrage of pop songs (“Two Tribes”, “99 Red Balloons”, many others), films and TV dramas (Threads being the main one, but the nuclear threat was omnipresent, and the standard threat in thrillers like Edge of Darkness and Defence of the Realm), documentaries (two major ones about nuclear war were shown the same week as Threads), and so on — that nuclear war is BAD, that it could be the END OF EVERYTHING, and, if it happens, it’s all MANKIND’S FAULT.

We can become fond of and familiar with most characters from supernatural horror. No one, I think, would be too shocked at seeing a kid dressed up as a vampire for Halloween. But I can’t imagine anyone ever being comfortable at seeing a kid dressed up in a radiation suit, with a clicking Geiger counter in their hand…

Play for Today: Z for Zachariah can be watched at Daily Motion. (It’s just under two hours long.)