Ice by Louis Nowra
(Allen & Unwin) Pp. 322
In the 1880s British
entrepreneurs Malcolm McEachern and Andrew McIlwraith tow an iceberg to Sydney
and introduce locals to ice. It goes down a treat, but as the iceberg melts,
the frozen body of a young sailor is found within it. Malcolm is lost in grief
for the death of his wife, Ann, and he attempts to preserve her memory. A
parallel story is narrated by a young man who takes over his partner’s research
work (she was writing a biography of Malcolm McEachern) after she is frozen in
a coma. Images and metaphors of arresting time resound throughout the novel.
Early Sydney comes alive through
the impressions of the young men as they first arrive. It is a character in
itself, defying description and confounding assumptions; full of possibilities as
people flee the Old World and try to reinvent themselves in a land of
opportunities. Malcolm is always chasing the
latest business venture: he brings refrigerated meat from Australia to London,
electricity to Melbourne and order to the Tokyo electric tram system. He is
attracted to what he calls Australia’s “dirty prism of classless democratic
optimism” which allowed him to succeed in business.
Malcolm is clearly a man’s man, dismissing
women as inferior and the representation of women within the novel is astoundingly
weak. Malcolm’s mother remarries and excludes him from her life, and his second
wife, Mary, is unkindly portrayed as some sort of harpy, despite the fact that
his treatment of her is appalling. He mourns his first wife, Ann, building her
a mausoleum – a weird subterranean world of bottled embryos – and Mary
disappears into the background to lead a separate life.
The telling of Malcolm’s story is
full of things that biographers could not have known but must have imagined; as
the tale proceeds the narrator becomes increasingly unreliable. Ann dies, which
is convenient, because live women are so messy, and Malcolm is distraught, but
is the narrator talking about himself or about Malcolm? “Until he’d married her
he had been unloved and she had awoken love in him, as surely as if it were a
delicious, sweet emerging from melting ice. She had given him a purpose, a
sense that he was human and loving, but a callous God had snatched her away
from him, scooped his insides out and rendered him hollow.”
The references to being frozen in
form and time are both literal and metaphoric as the lines between subject and
biographer blur. The frigid purity of ice is contrasted with the warm sensuality
of the body. Malcolm makes a wax effigy of Ann and keeps it in his catacombs
where he builds a room for her and visits her for necrophiliac purposes. “It
was as if she was frozen, like the perfectly preserved American sailor
excavated from the iceberg.” The similarities with the drug – “the drug that
ruined your life and mine” – are not accidental.
Malcolm’s
time is one of great change and discovery and he himself is a man of science and technology. The scientific developments
of the age – X-rays; atoms; telephones; electricity – become confused with
spiritualism and mesmerism because “The boundaries between the possible and
impossible were quickly narrowing at an astonishing pace.” Mary believes that, “Scientists belong in the
darkness of their laboratories, not in the bright light of society.” Darkness
and secrecy, however, lead to obsession and madness, which will always be revealed
when exposed to the light.
