4 hours ago
6
The opening sentence of this remarkable novel announces that the reader is in for an intriguing experience. “On the fourteenth day of July 1924, when the tchinovniks of the Ministry of Winter came for me, on the evening of that day, on the eve of my Siberian Odyssey, only then did I begin to suspect that I did not exist.” It may hint at Kafka in the ominous arrival of officials, or Borges in its metaphysical conundrum, but stranger things are afoot. In 1924 there was no tsar, let alone his bureaucrats, the tchinovniks. The date is significant, but I don’t mind admitting I had to find out why online. The time, as Hamlet says, is out of joint.
The rudely awakened sleeper is Benedykt Gierosławski, a Polish philosopher, logician, mathematician and gambler whose debts will be erased if he undertakes a special mission for the Ministry. He is to travel to Siberia, “the wild east”, and find his father, Filip, who was exiled there for anti-government activities. This is not clemency. Filip is now known as Father Frost, and as a geologist, radical and mystic, he might have a connection with what has occurred. The reader is drip-fed the details. A comet fell into Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, as it did in our universe. But here the event has caused the emergence of an inexplicable, expanding, possibly sentient coldness called the “gleiss”. Ice, which won the European Union prize for literature, came out in Poland in 2007, well before the Game of Thrones TV adaptation made “winter is coming” a meme; but in this novel, it certainly is.
The “black physics” caused by the comet’s impact has created new materials and technologies: superconducting “coldiron”, “frostoglaze” and “blackwickes” that emit “unlicht”. More than that, it has created an entirely new geopolitical situation. Neither the Russian Revolution nor the first world war has taken place. It is not just history that has been reconfigured: ideology has also been transformed. The great fissure is between the Ottepyelniks, who advocate Thaw, and the Lyednyaks, who wish to preserve the gleiss. This is not a simple transposition of the idea of a “cold war”. Some Siberian entrepreneurs rely on the gleiss for their technological advantage, while others see in its absolute frozen stasis a kind of religious transcendence. The tsar seems to favour its elimination, with Russia becoming part of a European “Summer” cluster of powers. The gleiss sharpens dichotomies: Slavophiles and westernisers, imperial tsarists against Polish and Siberian nationalists, anarchists against autarchs, materialists against spiritualists.
Benedykt, as a gambler and scientist, is intrigued by how chance operates under the gleiss. Basically, randomness and probabilities are certainties; quantum fuzziness becomes crystal clear. He is not alone in his fascination: a fellow passenger on his journey is none other than Nikola Tesla. And Tesla is not alone as a real person in the fiction: we meet Aleister Crowley, Trotsky and Rasputin, among others. The novel has three acts; firstly, Benedykt on the Trans-Siberian express train (there are plots, deaths, spies, double agents), then his time in the political hotbeds and laboratories of Irkutsk, then finally his journey into the wastes along the mysterious “Ways of the Mammoth”.
The publishers should be commended for giving the translator, Ursula Phillips, an appendix in which to discuss her translation. Her choices, compromises and ingenuity are made clear, especially since the style reflects Gierosławski’s opening, where Benedykt thinks he might not exist. The first person, the “I”, is therefore dropped: “Stand facing … release air from the lungs …” Phillips argues against accusations of “untranslatability”, though the cultural references are problematic to convey. But her decisions provide an anchor for the reader amid an almost obligatory obliquity. A novel about the world’s complexity needs to be complicated; the truth is sometimes slant. It is telling that Dukaj recommended Phillips read Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon during her work.
Ice is not just a cerebral romp. There are moments of hilarity and horror; chapters full of pathos, a moment unfurling a life of regrets. It is a gloomy, sharp, dazzling work. If things had been different, Dukaj asks, would they just turn out the same?
Ice by Jacek Dukaj, translated by Ursula Phillips, is published by Head of Zeus (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
