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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

This is the opening line of William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer. It also sums up how I felt as I read Anna Kavan's Ice. I felt like I was watching an old analog television tuned to snow.



If you look at it long enough it's kinda mesmerizing, isn't it? You begin to see patterns, things coalescing and breaking up. Kind of like the shades in this novel. I can't rightly call them characters as they never felt that way to me. They were empty vessels waiting for someone to bring life to them. Only in the final chapter did this happen. On its own, the final chapter would make a nice standalone short story. But everything that preceded it was a wash of -- nothing. My eyes scanned the pages, but there was nothing there. I felt nothing. Not cold, warm, horror, excitement. It was random scenes strung together by random events. Lots of "suddenly"s, like an old ghost story. Or Marsha Brady. "Something suddenly came up." But the something never led to anything, and in the end the something felt like -- nothing at all.

There were moments when, as I read, I could tell that I was supposed to feel horror. There were words like "blood" or "slap" or phrases like "stacked two feet high." But when these words are placed besides empty vessels, the vessel still remains -- empty.

I read this with my buddy Mary and about halfway through I asked how she was liking it. This is a short book and I knew that if by the halfway mark it wasn't clicking, it probably wasn't going to. Mary enlightened me. She told me how she saw the events arranged, and I gotta admit, if Mary wrote the story the way she described it to me, I think I would have enjoyed it. Not enough to be mind-blown, but at least 3-stars worth. On its own, the novel to me is worth a single star. It's that final chapter that raises it to two.

In the final chapter I finally saw a semblance of characterization. All of a sudden there was something worth paying attention to. The characters spoke, they spoke in a meaningful way. I found myself slowing down to take everything in. It was almost like enjoyment. Would the chapter itself stand toe to toe with the best short stories in the world? Heck no. Was it worth reading? Yeah, I think so. But by the same token, everything before it was worth skipping.

There were glimpses, in random words and scenes, that made it seem like Kavan was on to something. The book was published originally in 1967. Vietnam. The threat of the Cold War. Nuclear annihilation. For a sentence at a time, spread maybe fifteen to twenty pages apart, I had an inkling there was something going on. A comment on the state of the world at that time. In many ways, I feel that sixties and the present day are mirroring each other in a sadistic sort of way. That should have made this a very interesting read. But by the next sentence the scene was changed, some random happening was happening, an empty vessel moved from here to there. The new place was just as staticy and unclear as the previous one. And -- nothing.