Occasionally, during the reading of Ice you’ll need to pause and run a cool piece of ice across your brow, as this is a fever of a novel. There are two storylines which bisect neatly, running across the timeless trajectory of lost love. The one which opens the book takes place in the 1880s, and follows the development of Malcolm McEacharn, a real life explorer/businessman who, in collaboration with his friend Andrew McIlwraith brings an iceberg to Sydney. At this point in the novel the only hint that we have of a second story is the odd interjection of the narrator to someone named Beatrice, referring to the dinner party we’re immersed in as something from the past.
Later, the second story becomes clear. Set in modern day (21st Century) Sydney, the narrator is Rowan Doyle, and his wife Beatrice, a biographer, lies in a coma. It is Beatrice’s biography of Malcolm McEacharn that Rowan is finishing, and his story and Malcolm’s develop an odd parallel as Rowan begins to read his work to his comatose wife, willing her to wake up and correct him.
The narrative structure is relatively complex, with an extraordinary number of links between the two stories, and indeed between the reader and the characters, giving it a strong post-modern quality. At the same time, both stories are linear and simple, so that it’s easy to read this book as both an historical fiction, and a modern day realist tragedy. That Louis Nowra manages this balance in a way that is seamless to the reader, without impacting on the fictive truths of either story, is credit to his great skill as a novelist. The historical context of Malcolm’s story is fascinating, and very well researched. The reader becomes engrossed in the present tense of Malcolm's affair, the intensity of his loss, and the odd co-mingling of his growing hunger for what he’s lost, as well as his hunger for success and power.
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