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I was going to start off by describing this as dream-like, but it's actually a nightmare.

The Earth is rapidly covering with ice, a death sentence for its inhabitants. Meanwhile, our unnamed male narrator in an unnamed country has an obsession with a woman from his past. He feels compelled to save her, not only from the ice, but also from her rather jerky husband, then later from the more sinister "warden".

What I assumed would be a relatively simple plot in relatively few pages, is actually disorienting. Just when you think you know what's going on, you don't. The narrator says something about himself, and then a few paragraphs later you realise you're reading about something surreal happening to the woman that the narrator couldn't possibly know. She might be encased in ice, she might be alone, trapped in a room. Then you jump to another scene, maybe another place or time, maybe a dream. The narrator admittedly has a loose grip on reality. This has the effect of keeping the reader off balance, on slippery ground.

We never understand why the narrator is so hell-bent on following the woman around. It's certainly not for her personality (she has none that I could discern). All we learn of her is that she is the eternal victim. She is child-like, passive, with a history of being bullied and abused. And she's very white and very thin with sparkling hair.

About 20 pages in, I was scratching my head. While the descriptions of ice were kaleidoscopic in their refracting beauty, I felt like I was playing a bad version of pin the tail on the donkey. Someone had blindfolded me, spun me around till I was good and dizzy, and sent me walking with the ass-tail in hand, towards the edge of a jagged cliff.

I started to think about Anna Kavan. A lifelong heroin addict, her tennis coach introduced her to the drug to improve her game (??) in her mid twenties. She lived until the age of 67. That's 40 years using heroin, which goes against everything I think I know about heroin use (obviously I don't know much!). Kavan, who lived through many tragedies, was in and out of mental institutions for the last 30+ years of her life - for depression, for addiction, and attempted suicide.

The book started to make a lot more sense to me once I began reading it through more of a biographical lens. The detachment, the alienation, the encroaching ice. The sense of confusion and paranoia, of the weak woman running from oppressive abusers. The padded, soundproof rooms.

And then it occurred to me, what if Kavan's pale lady is splintered and fragmented into pieces of herself. What if the narrator is actually the part of her trying to act as protector, and the warden is the part that punishes and controls. If this is the case, the poor lady spends all her time in a nightmare world, chasing herself, saving herself, hating herself, escaping herself, and occasionally, through the haze, trying to keep it together long enough to feel at peace.

While her life experience had a huge impact on this work, I'm not suggesting that Kavan simply wrote this about herself. There's so much going on here. It's a complex and experimental post-modern novel. It has been described as apocalyptic, Kafka-esque, science fiction, and feminist. It's all those things, as well as a bewildering, frosty look, deep into the unblinking eye of death.

And I haven't even mentioned the lemurs. What a book!