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.
There's a Dickensian grandeur to Ice which is made all the more powerful by the way in which Nowra twists time's arrow. Those reading this solely as an historical fiction may be made uncomfortable by the way in which the reader is drawn into the story, placed in the role of the unconscious Beatrice; as silent confident. For those of us who like our fiction as rich, complex, and painful as possible, Ice is a tremendous story, and one which begs to be read more than once.
Ice
By Louis Nowra
Allen & Unwin
Paperback, ISBN: 9781741754834, Nov 2008, 336pgs
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