Despite the magical realism that underlies Malcolm’s story, there is enough verisimilitude to encourage the reader to do his or her own research. Malcolm traverses very real settings, from the evocative Yorkshire town of Goathland (used as the setting for Harry Potter films, and the Heartbeat TV series), to Glasgow, the streets of London, Queensland, Japan, Sydney, Melbourne, and Antarctica, all of which are described poetically, with original metaphor enriching the beauty of the scenery:
In the mornings a delicate lacework of ice had settled firmly on the decks and masts, and when the dawn broke it was as if the ship had been constructed of diamonds during the night. In wild weather spray rose from the sides of the vessel into tall columns of white mist that fell onto the deck, covering it with a silvery veil. (100)
Malcolm does more than bring ice to Sydney. He also brings refrigerated meat from Australia to London, electricity to Melbourne, and order to the Tokyo electric tram system. He's a man of science and technology, able to make a locomotive go, and so interested in biology that he amasses the biggest collection of foetuses and embryos in Australia. But he's also haunted and obsessed by his first wife's death, so much so that he temporarily gives himself up to the occult and slowly slides towards a kind of fevered madness that also begins to affect the narrator as both stories progress. As we learn more about why the modern day Beatrice is in a coma the stories begin to parallel one another. One of the key links is the ice which pervades the story, not only in the form of the iceberg that opens the novel, but also ice the drug, ice as refrigeration and a symbol for modernity, and the more theoretical notion of being frozen; arrested; put on hold:
Not a day goes past when there aren't newspaper articles about global warming, melting ice caps, hundreds of icebergs moving relentlessly towards New Zealand and about bodies that have lain in ice for decades, even centuries, but are now emerging from their graves and which confirm what is in this book... (320)
The real ice and metaphorical ice begin to blur, just as the real history and the fictive history; the real Ann and the progression of fictive Anns begin to blur. This is where the story becomes something more than simply a good historical tale. It's a story of love and loss, and the ephemeral nature of happiness. The story traverses a wide terrain, taking in, among other things, the seamy underbelly of a timelessly drug-riddled Sydney, a fancy dinner with Queen Victoria, or the outrageous excesses of an icy battlefield training dome in Imperial Japan. The minor characters are also well drawn, from the flamboyant inventor dandy Eugene Nicolle, the wild lovestruck psychic Elise, or the well endowed drunkard (mostly on the alcohol used to preserve specimens) Ford.
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