Ice Road - Gillian Slovo

A novel set in 1930s Russia might seem a bit of a leap for Gillian Slovo after her detective fiction and her powerful depictions of growing up in South Africa as the daughter of Joe Slovo, the South African Communist Party activist and journalist and activist Ruth First. But Ice Road is surprisingly consistent with her themes and experiences - political dissidents struggling to make a difference over the leaders who hold powerful authority over a country and at the same time trying to balance political activism with personal and family life.

The impact of historical upheaval on individuals is nothing new in novelistic fiction - particularly in Russian fiction, with War and Peace obviously being the summit to aspire to - so Slovo takes on quite a challenge here and could easily be well out of her depth, but her characters and their personal conflicts of interest are well depicted and quite authentic. There is the desire of Kolya to survive imprisonment for his wife and child, even considering denouncing himself through lies just to make things easier for his family. There is the struggle of his father-in-law, middle ranking official, Boris Alexandrovich and his desire to look after his family in contrast with the gradual awareness of his own political powerlessness. As the story develops, the male characters become less important, are rendered ineffectual or unsympathetic and the female characters take on far greater importance, winning through overwhelming suffering and emotional deprivation.

Through all the political and emotional upheaval though, one character emerges, the unlikely heroine and central figure of the novel – a cleaning lady, Irina. Like Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, she is the impartial observer with a simple message that she learnt at the very start of the novel on the Chelyuskin, a supply ship famously stranded in the Arctic, which she carries through to the end of the book; the only effective response to you can have to such conditions is to simply survive. While all the other characters are buffeted by the tides of history and personal struggles, her first-person narrated chapters hold the whole story together with her strength of character and balanced perspective on events.

Ice Road is a powerful book with strong characters, demonstrating strength of spirit and determination and it weaves the political and personal concerns of each of those characters tremendously well into a solid whole.