Author Jacek Dukaj, and translator Ursula Phillips, bring a startling saga to fans of The Cautious Traveller’s Guide To The Wastelands. Based on the Tunguska Event in 1908 bringing the seeds of ice- beings to Siberia, or awakening them, Lód – translated as ICE – is an award-winning Polish work. From 1924 Warsaw, we board the Trans- Siberian Express, with the narrator, Benedykt Gieroslawski, an impoverished mathematician, who is sent by the Ministry of Winter to talk to his father, an imprisoned scientist. Filip Gieroslawski may be the only one who knows something about the gleiss, plural gleissen, that are bringing permanent winter. We start in midsummer, but you wouldn’t know it.
The idea of semi-living glaciers freezing not just Russian landscapes and cities, but history, is excellent. Revolutions foment but can’t succeed. The Russo-Japanese War rumbles into its second decade. War with the Germanic lands halted in its tracks. Food is scarce. Women have no status, and fellow passenger, activist Jelena Muklanowicz, intends to cause trouble. Famous names appear: Nikola Tesla is dragging crazy and dangerous inventions across Russia. Alastair Crowley tried communing with the gneiss. The mad monk Rasputin is apparently unkillable. Expansion is still on the Tzar’s menu: he proposes a tunnel under the Bering Strait to Alaska. While this would help Siberians flee the encroaching permafrost, it’s possible the gliessen could follow down the tunnel. At the same time, Siberian riches are increased by new metals called coldiron, capable of withstanding the intense cold, something like titanium. If the gleiss can be vanquished, some people stand to lose a lot, others to regain their lives.
I learnt so much. Mammoth is a word the native Siberian people use, meaning one who lives underground. They only ever found mammoths by digging the frozen bodies up while building. Cities can burn down during winter, because the available water is solid. For the average reader, there are a lot of Russian and Polish names to follow, between places and people. The conversation on the lengthy train journey wanders through philosophy, but the action at every stop is likely to include murder. It’s that kind of expedition. And when we see a gleiss, we can expect someone to die. Cold freezes the breath in the lungs. This is an adult fantasy, a political, geological and geographical satire, and just a starkly inventive adventure. As the hibernians and gleissniks scientifically explain their findings, the ICE just keeps on spreading. Stay warm while reading. The translator Ursula Phillips adds a note at the end, explaining the challenges she faced in bringing a Polish work with invented terms and Russian words to the English language. Jacek Dukaj has written his historical work in a style which will be familiar to readers of imperial Russian novels, which also had to be preserved, but is not simple for the modern eye, which is used to shorter sentences. The alternative reality has been carefully constructed not just by Jacek Dukaj, but again in the translation of ICE.
A Trans-Siberian odyssey through political, criminal, scientific, philosophical and amorous intrigues, and into an endless winter to confront something utterly alien.
14th July 1924: In a Warsaw buried under feet of snow and Russian rule, Benedykt Gieroslawski, a dissolute young Polish mathematician, is roused from his bed by two officials from the Ministry of Winter and dispatched to Siberia, on the Trans-Siberian Express, to track down his long-exiled father.
The catalyst for this frosty metamorphosis of 20th century history is the impact of the Tunguska asteroid, deep in Siberia, in 1908. From this Ground Zero, emerge the Gleissen, silent harbingers of an eternal winter that follows in their ponderous wake. As they spread across the continent, agriculture collapses and people flock to cities as they seek protection from the deadly cold. As the land freezes, so does history: the Tsar still rules Russia; the Belle Époque endures; and the First World War never happened.
But out there, on the ice, a new world is being forged. The extreme, alien cold has transmuted elements into strange new forms, a 'black physics' that is the catalyst for a new industrial and scientific revolution. At the heart of it lies Siberia – a 'Wild East', a magnet for all the political, religious and scientific fevers shaking the world at the dawn of the 20th century, the crucible where black physics, shamanic lore and the cold logic of winter combine. And Benedykt's final destination.
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