It is set in a future (?) world of unnamed countries which are facing the threat of being overtaken by ice, the result of some unspecified nuclear catastrophe.
The protagonist, who has a number of issues himself which emerge during the book, is obsessed by a mysterious woman with silver hair - a "glass girl" of "albino paleness" who he pursues through wartorn territories, escaping from numerous perilous situations and always drawn on by the need to see the woman and perhaps 'possess' her.
Anna Kavan has written a number of other books but this was her last one, and the most well known.
There are plenty of theories of the real meaning of this quite surreal book which I discovered on reading more. I waited until reading the book as I wanted no spoilers. It has a dreamlike quality and has been described as slipstream fiction. It's not quite science fiction. There are also some troubling themes as well, which are outlined in the New Yorker article here. This helps to explain some of the themes in the book so perhaps read it afterwards.
One of the theories is that it is an extended metaphor for the heroin addiction which the author herself suffered from for part of her life.
"The book has a febrile, hallucinatory disregard for conventional storytelling, and a habit of blurring the lines between the literal and the metaphorical. Not one character is named; with a single exception, none of the settings are identified beyond the barest details."The descriptions of the landscape and the falling snow and piercing cold are excellent, along with the desperation of people who continue to live as if nothing is happening elsewhere in the world. By the end of the book, the ice is closing in on the sub-tropical regions, and we even see the advancing wall of ice from the air. The idea that people would ignore, or not be told the full extent of the approaching catastrophe is one we can now appreciate of course, showing that the book was well ahead of its time...
“The situation was alarming, the atmosphere tense, the emergency imminent.”The narrator is supposed to guide us but he slips into daydreams and hallucinations and we don't know what to trust or believe. It's not many pages into the book that we realise that this isn't a story about characters negotiating a war-torn country, but rather about the narrator fighting his paranoid, panic-stricken mind as it threatens to overcome him. This isn't a plot spoiler; in fact, it's almost impossible to give a spoiler to this book. Its meaning shifts with each reading.
My copy was published by Penguin Classics in 2017, but was first published in 1967, which makes it 55 years old.
Would be interested to hear from anyone else who has read it.
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