A young, white forehead boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss.
The opening sentence summons Steerpike for me, from the Gormenghast novels, Peake's references to his high forehead suggesting the sheer force of his will. But Siss, the primary presence in the remarkable The Ice Palace, is a very different character; equally important, while mostly absent, is her friend Unn. The intensity between them, and especially in Unn's room the one time they meet after school, trembles with the sense of all that's so vitally important and so unspeakable (including because so ungraspable, even in thought) for a certain type of child, perhaps a certain type of person.
The Ice Palace is deceptively simple, with its plain sentences and short sections, most following Siss - a notable exception is Unn's visit to the frozen waterfall which gives the book its title - and usually from her point of view. But what about the way it feels as though other perspectives and potential meanings and worlds are always thronging all around her, thrumming in complicated interaction with her own knotted internality and the way it seizes on certain symbols (the idea of the gift)? What about the strange intrusion of 'the bird' about two-thirds through, with its steel claws drawing a slanting stripe between two peaks in no time at all? What about the dream of snow-covered bridges, only the most explicit fall into poetry in a novel that operates throughout in a poetic register? (In translation from Nynorsk, one of the two officially sanctioned Norwegian languages, 1963.) What about the way it never reveals some of its most central mysteries - who is the other about whom Unn avoids thinking, and why does she fear she won't go to heaven? - in order to preserve its deeper architecture?
Most magically of all, in the end, it turns out to be as much about kindness, hope and the human spirit as it is about anything else.
The opening sentence summons Steerpike for me, from the Gormenghast novels, Peake's references to his high forehead suggesting the sheer force of his will. But Siss, the primary presence in the remarkable The Ice Palace, is a very different character; equally important, while mostly absent, is her friend Unn. The intensity between them, and especially in Unn's room the one time they meet after school, trembles with the sense of all that's so vitally important and so unspeakable (including because so ungraspable, even in thought) for a certain type of child, perhaps a certain type of person.
The Ice Palace is deceptively simple, with its plain sentences and short sections, most following Siss - a notable exception is Unn's visit to the frozen waterfall which gives the book its title - and usually from her point of view. But what about the way it feels as though other perspectives and potential meanings and worlds are always thronging all around her, thrumming in complicated interaction with her own knotted internality and the way it seizes on certain symbols (the idea of the gift)? What about the strange intrusion of 'the bird' about two-thirds through, with its steel claws drawing a slanting stripe between two peaks in no time at all? What about the dream of snow-covered bridges, only the most explicit fall into poetry in a novel that operates throughout in a poetic register? (In translation from Nynorsk, one of the two officially sanctioned Norwegian languages, 1963.) What about the way it never reveals some of its most central mysteries - who is the other about whom Unn avoids thinking, and why does she fear she won't go to heaven? - in order to preserve its deeper architecture?
Most magically of all, in the end, it turns out to be as much about kindness, hope and the human spirit as it is about anything else.
