Review
ICE ROAD
by Gillian Slovo
Little, Brown, 544 pp.
Gillian Slovo’s latest novel, Ice Road, contains exactly one memorable phrase. An American character describes Russia in the late 1920s as "a country that has made a science of contradictions and called it dialectics." Unfortunately, this isn’t as taut as it might seem in excerpt; in context, it’s buried in an interminable stream-of-consciousness sentence that spans more than four lines of text. But Slovo can, when the need arises, chop her sentences mirthlessly:
They lift their Kirov. Blood leaking from the neck. No matter, he can no longer feel. They carry his dead weight, his head lolling so they must hold it up, to an office. Not his office. Chudov’s. Lay him on the conference table, the indignity of death. He doesn’t care. He is beyond caring. Let him be. He is dead.
This is the dramatic crux of the first third of the novel. The passage describes the assassination of Sergei Kirov, leader of the Communist Party in Leningrad. It’s also exemplary of Slovo’s prose: who is speaking here? Is there any discernible pattern to the punctuation? Must we add to the indignity of death that of a dangling modifier?
Ice Road is a sprawling epic set in Stalin’s Russia. True to form, it focuses on the lives of a small number of characters against the backdrop of the purges and the German invasion. Apart from a grating technique that changes person and number inexplicably, Ice Road doesn’t offer much in the way of stylistic exploration. The simple present and present continuous tenses in which the entire story is told give it an urgency that is tiresome at length.
Slovo’s characterization doesn’t lag far behind her prose. There must be a clause somewhere that requires one total innocent in every book by or about Russians. In the present novel, that innocent’s name is Kolya. He is presented as a dull-witted and proletarian version of Alyosha Karamazov: "he is exactly what he seems to be… a contented worker, happy with his job, his country and his life." His wife at one point describes him as "so archetypical" – thereby beating me to the punch.
Slovo’s characters exhibit a sort of dreary vitality until the Nazis arrive like saviours to wrap things up. While Slovo does focus extensively on her characters’ inner lives, they remain strangely lifeless. There is a crucial distinction between the animate and the merely animated.
Ice Road was nominated for this year’s Orange Prize, so it was popular in some circles. Why it was I’m not certain. Stalin’s Russia has inspired enough great books that Ice Road suffers by comparison. Why read it when there are so many better works on Russia? And if you must, absolutely, have a sweeping Russian epic, then you might as well do what Slovo did – read Pasternak.
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