The KILLER CHILLER
The clink of cubes in your glass sounds delightful, but ice in its other forms is utterly deadly, grinding mountains to dust, sinking ships and even destroying a secret American nuclear bunker
A Cold Spell: A Human History Of Ice Max Leonard Bloomsbury €28
What does ice conjure in your mind? The clink in your glass? Torvill and Dean? Perilous pavements perhaps? For author Max Leonard it is nothing less than a window on the trials and triumphs of humanity. In A Cold Spell, his millennia spanning survey of our relationship with this frosty matter, ice is a geographical feature, food stuff, preservative, anaesthetic, political pawn, business opportunity and artist’s muse. ‘It grinds mountains to dust and sinks ships,’ notes Leonard. ‘Yet it is also ephemeral and delicate.’
The tale begins, of course, with the Ice Age. Mankind’s response to such extreme weather was the needle: ‘They were made of bone and were used to sew together hides using animal sinew or gut – haute couture animal skins that kept people warm at night and protected them when out hunting on the icy tundra’.
In 1991, some 5,000 years later, hikers in the Otztal Alps discovered one of those early hunters slowly defrosting out of a glacier like a turkey on a sideboard. ‘Otzi the Iceman’ is now kept spritzed with sub-zero mist in a freezer in an Italian museum.
Glacier tourism took off in the early 19th Century, with its combination of ‘romanticism, scientism and athleticism’. Goethe and Chateaubriand went for a slide. Napoleon’s lover, Joséphine de Beauharnais, arrived in the Alps with ‘68 guides and eight porters’.
During the 20th Century, unhinged characters got drunk on a cocktail of ice and warfare. The Nazis appropriated ice-climbing as dubious proof of Aryan superiority. And, in 1959, the Americans built a secret nuclear bunker under the ice in Greenland. Within a decade the shifting ice caps swallowed it up.
Cultural figures have long been drawn to icy scenes. Dutch Golden Age painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp created a ‘blizzard of pictures’ in which the toil of winter – trudging through snow, huddling around fires – was leavened by social pleasures on the frozen ponds. ‘There are bare bottoms. There is love-making,’ writes Leonard of these sex-and-skates compositions. ‘There is stink and death and drunkenness and revelry.’
It is a shame that the book doesn’t
consider more icy art or fully explore the rich tradition of Arctic literature. Frankenstein appears – in which Mary Shelley blotted snowscapes with ‘dark imagery’ of her creature – but not the later Nordic classics of Tove Jansson and Tarjei Vesaas.
Ice revolutionised food production and aspects of scientific and medical research, Leonard explains. Yet, simultaneously, it became mundane. ‘No longer a thing of shining and transparent wonder, it is a commodity we quietly grow in a small box in the corner of the kitchen.’
Leonard’s previous books on high-altitude architecture and mountain cycling combined endurance, performance and topography to entertaining effect. He does something similar here, using humour and extraordinary stories to invigorate academic material (references range from Aristotle to Where’s Wally?).
And he is objective about hyperbolic voices: Freud’s idea that the Ice Age caused humanity’s anxiety issues is dismissed as ‘a humdinger, not even remotely grounded in observational reality’.
The author engages like a slightly batty professor. ‘I developed a love for hanging around in out-of-season ski resorts,’ he confesses. Fittingly, his narrative is full of ‘visionaries and obsessives’ who have ‘succumbed to ice fever’. Perhaps the most memorable is Geoffrey Pyke, the wartime inventor who proposed building aircraft carriers out of ice and steel. He worked on his sadly never realised ‘bergship’ project
‘Ice-climbing as dubious proof of Aryan superiority’
in a frozen meat locker under London’s Smithfield Market.
This is a book about the marvel of nature and our intrepid, frequently crazy, efforts to understand and harness that marvel. It is an ongoing story. Leonard explains how the dawn of the ‘Anthropocene’ – a proposed new epoch shaped by manmade climate change – has complicated our attitudes to ice. It is now a barometer to an emergency and a bracing factor in geopolitical debates about the polar regions.
Explorers and writers have long struggled to encapsulate ice in words. Leonard manages to crack his slippery subject.