Kavan's ice as dream narrative, horror story, and '60s rock song

Anna Kavan's novel Ice (1967) continues to read like a dream narrative. We have a vague sense of the protagonist - a man in search of a young woman with whom he had been in love and who is now being held captive by "the warden," the absolute ruler of an unnamed northern country. We also have a vague sense of a world at a point of impending doom: cities are in ruins from some recent past upheaval (perhaps a world war), and the world is threatened by encroaching ice (a climate-change warning that, though not grounded in science so much as in horror-fantasy, was decades ahead of its time). That said, the narrative, like most dreams, consists of a cascading series of events - narrow escapes, death and destruction, flight and pursuit, strange and incongruous observations, sudden appearance and disappearance of significant characters - rather than any true plot development. Your patience with this type of novel will depend on your tolerance for hearing long recitations of someone else's dream narratives; mine is pretty low. At times Kavan's writing is really good, and she has a place among gothic-horror writers such as Poe and Lovecraft, but any attempt to truly make sense of this novel is probably doomed from the start. It's not about making sense, it's about establishing a mood and an atmosphere - one of violence, disruption, and catastrophe. Reading this novel is much like listening to some of the lesser-ranked popular rock music of its time (the late '60s): Starts off great and draws you in, your clapping and swaying and singing along, but at about 4 minutes in you're thinking this is getting pretty boring, let's wrap this one up, and by the end the only folks still into the music are the boys in the band. Kavan seems to have had a tragic life, and a note on the back cover of the Penguin reissue of this novel suggests that in part she was writing about her struggle to free herself from addiction; that's hard for me to see so far, but I'll think about that in reading further into Ice, at least for one more day.