Ice Shock is a novel about passionate love in a time of climate crisis

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Rodwell Makombe, Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies, North-West University

South-African born writer and world literature scholar Elleke Boehmer’s sixth novel, Ice Shock, is a breathtaking story about two lovers who, soon after they meet, find themselves separated to pursue different career choices in different parts of the world.

Niall Lawrence spends 14 months at a polar institute in Antarctica while Leah Nash pursues a writing career in London. This relationship, which starts when the two meet on a London train, sets in motion a philosophical interrogation of love, career choice and the sustenance of both in a turbulent world.

Through this love story told across two continents, Boehmer paints, in broad strokes, a picture of a planet in crisis, reflected through the melting ice in Antarctica, the Fukushima disaster in Japan and the volcanic eruptions that disrupt global air travel.

In this new world, the old distinctions between “here” and “there” – the centre and the periphery – are disrupted and new ways of inhabiting the planet are imagined. The changing climate intrudes into and disrupts private lives as Leah and Niall struggle to communicate across vast distances and in hostile weather conditions.

Ice Shock asks serious questions about choice, decision-making and the extent to which the unforeseen and the coincidental interrupt and change the courses of our lives. The central question is how the two manage to strike a balance between commitment to love and to career.

How is it that two people who are not looking for love become so strongly connected that their lives take a completely different turn? Is it possible some people are meant for each other? Soulmates?

Leah and Niall are entangled, we are told, like particles in quantum physics, which, once they have interacted, “remain intrinsically linked even when separated by astronomically large distances”. Their birthdays come one after the other – on 31 December and 1 January – and even their initials (NL and LN) interconnect.

As a literary scholar with an interest in travel and migration, I read my colleague’s new book as a radical re-examination of taken-for-granted distinctions such as north and south, here and there, us and them.

This book brings into sharp focus the urgency of the heating planet, showing that its effects are disrupting the most mundane human activities, incuding love relationships.

In Ice Shock, Boehmer combines the teasing style of romance fiction with the contemplative edge of a modernist novel to write about how both the global and the local are making an impact on the way people live, work and love.

Modernist novel

When I first read the book, my impression was “this is a modernist novel”. The modernist novel, which became popular at the turn of the 1900s, radically broke away from the traditional, realistic way of telling stories.

Modernist novels experimented with new narrative styles like stream of consciousness and fragmentation. Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce wrote novels that were not only interested in telling stories but also engaging with ideas and exploring the minds of their characters.

The backdrop of Boehmer’s story (global disasters and a warming planet) mirrors the backdrop of the modernist novel (massive industrialisation, technological innovations and global catastrophe in the form of the first world war).

Ice Shock deploys a non-linear narrative style and an open-ended plot. Typical of the modernist novel, it refuses to speak about anything with certainty.

It recalls Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, not only because of how it explores, in explicit detail, the minds of the characters but also because of the intensity of the relationship between Niall and Leah. Like Niall in Ice Shock, Peter in Mrs Dalloway loves Clarissa to the point of suffocation.

Epic love story

Ice Shock seems to ask the basic question about what it means to love. Is love the intense emotional connection between two people? Is it sacrifice? Faithfulness? Can one love without being faithful?

This is not only a story about the beauty of love but also the pain of it. Niall and Leah may be entangled like particles in quantum physics, but they are still human beings susceptible to human frailties.

They enter into and keep various flirtatious relationships and fateful romantic entanglements from each other and, somehow, readers are complicit because we do not want to see the lovebirds separate.

Still, they remain powerfully connected. The constant friction between them seems to be the fuel that keeps them going. Boehmer suggests that love, especially between soulmates, thrives in a state of constant but productive tension.

Leah is a free-spirited, self-driven personality while Niall is thoughtful and considerate. They both know and understand each other telepathically, without words. Across vast distances, they communicate with each other through the stars and the moon.

In her review of Ice Shock, South African literary scholar Barbara Boswell describes it as “a novel saturated with extremes”.

The lovers know their relationship is moving too fast, but they do not know how to slow it down. Is this a reflection of the preoccupation with speed in the contemporary world or the fast pace with which the planet is warming?

Perhaps the question that Boehmer is asking is how much love is enough to maintain a healthy relationship. Ice Shock is an intrusive novel that captures the inner thoughts (and reflections) of the characters in a way that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality, self and other.

Burning planet

Niall and Leah’s intense, ferocious love affair, in a sense, mirrors the seemingly irreversible catastrophe of global warming – as if to say, we all know the effects of unsustainable human activity on the planet but somehow, we keep going with the same ferocity and intensity. Leah and Niall’s love, like the warming planet, has no reverse gear.

Ice Shock is an attempt to rethink and rewrite how we inhabit the planet.

Rodwell Makombe is affiliated with North West University. He receives funding from Humboldt Foundation under the Experienced Researchers Fellowship.

– ref. Ice Shock is a novel about passionate love in a time of climate crisis – https://theconversation.com/ice-shock-is-a-novel-about-passionate-love-in-a-time-of-climate-crisis-277016