[For] epigraphs to The Ice Age, Drabble chooses to quote a long selection from the famous passage in Milton's Areopagitica that begins "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep …" and to follow it with some lines from Wordsworth's stirring sonnet on Milton. The title of the novel is a metaphor for the economic and social "freeze" of 1974–75, during which most of its events take place, the novel focusing on Anthony Keating…. Anthony muses about the "terrible times we live in" and "the sense of alarm, panic, despondency which seemed to flow loose in the atmosphere of England." For Anthony, at this point, such musings are certainly understandable, but the author's voice supports him without equivocation. Instead of qualifying Anthony's point of view, Drabble uses its intensity as typical, gains complexity by anatomizing all the various responses (despair, perverse enjoyment of austerity, shabby official indifference, political opportunism) to the "freeze," as if to assume that the metaphor is a perfect representation of the condition of England. Other imagistic connections also seem too heavy, too obvious. For example, Anthony frequently thinks of his owning a long, spiky gasometer (a gas holding tank) that came with some property he had bought from the Gas Board and planned to re-develop, a gasometer that reaches far into the sky, as his "finest achievement." He connects the gasometer, in linear reach and in social contrast, with the spire of the cathedral in the shadow of which he, the son of a cathedral schoolmaster, grew up. The grandiose suggestions of England changing from allegiance to cathedral spires to allegiance to gasometers are repeated throughout the novel, as if we all leap from one grand vertical obeisance or apocalypse to another with no qualifying horizontal space or muted achievements.

To dwell solely on the exaggerated metaphors of The Ice Age would be to miss a great deal that is valuable, suggestive, and intelligent in the novel. The development of Anthony's background, from schoolboy and early marriage through television work to the excitement of property speculation, is both convincing as the depiction of an individual and perceptive about a generation…. At her best, Drabble can summarize historical directions, social issues, and the fortunes of her characters…. (pp. 230-31)

In addition, many of Drabble's other historical metaphors are comically qualified or carefully particularized, not left in the stark simplicity of the change from cathedral to gasometer. The legendary British lion, for example, now "shabby, mangy, old," its tail easily tweaked, is seen sometimes as pathetic, sometimes as emitting a humane gesture, sometimes as petulant. (p. 232)

[At the point of Anthony's] resolve toward recovery … the novel fails to carry conviction. The recovery, like some of the extreme metaphors of the "ice age," seems only gesture, something pasted on, not earned through the development of the characters and events in the novel. Although Anthony is given sufficient choice to make a conscious recovery plausible, other characters are not, and the detailed, socially interrelated, referential nature of the novel, the sense of Britain, works against a reading that could establish Anthony as the single changing human being in a fictional world of stereotypes that represent possible choices or traps for him. Rather, the novel, in its texture, is dependent on complex and changing relationships; yet what we are given, for all the characters except Anthony, is a set of inflexible determinations. (p. 233)

The Ice Age also indicates a shift in Drabble's perspective, one that has, perhaps, been growing in recent years. In what, to me, are still her best novels, those of the middle and late sixties, The Millstone, Jerusalem The Golden, and The Waterfall, her perspective could be characterized as a knowing, sensitive, and obdurate refusal to judge her characters. In these novels, depicting young girls struggling to define themselves against rigid northern backgrounds or easily permissive cosmopolitan parents, wondering about the responsibilities involved with lovers, husbands, and children, and invariably chronicling the social world surrounding the characters, Drabble maintains a sense of hard and focused insight that never damns or sentimentalizes. The Ice Age, in contrast, allowing people fewer choices, establishing a world in which, except for Anthony, most human action is predetermined, also, quite inconsistently, scatters judgments…. The tone throughout the novel sustains this judging perspective, a constant ascription of "proper" or "not proper" to characters' actions, a constant sense, from the author's perspective, that characters in various situations are behaving well or behaving badly. I am not here objecting to the perspective of authorial judgment in itself, certainly judging his or her own characters is part of any author's prerogative; rather, I am saying that the perspective of judgment when combined with a world in which the nature of most people is determined, in which choice is severely restricted or non-existent, makes the possibility of "recovery" all that much more tenuous, more a matter for the fantasies of shoot-em-up foreign adventure and the fiction of fictions. (pp. 235-36)