One of the astonishing feats of "The Ice Age" is the way in which Drabble incorporates the ever-increasing junk pile of current public disasters into a thematic background that never appears journalistic. The danger is, of course, that we all know about the economic plight of England, about the loss of hope, vision, empire, and that the facts she gives us may become a repeat of the evenings news. There is much open discussion in the novel about the "terrible times." A crude South African besieges Alison Murray, once a great beauty, with shallow attacks on her country. In the past Alison has always been able to escape hard facts by turning to her mirror, but that comfort is gone: "The country was growing old. Like herself. The scars on the hillsides were the wrinkles around her own eyes: irremovable. How could one learn to grow old?" Such direct and simple equations between the private and public world are frequent in "The Ice Age" and, surprisingly, they are not strained. The parallels between an ailing individual and the ailing society are acceptable because Margaret Drabble has given them full thematic and emotional support.

In the case of Alison Murray we know that she has sacrificed her first daughter, Jane—now a sullen, self-destructive young woman, to her second daughter, Molly, an eternal child with cerebral palsy, who "could not even sit tidily."… Like England she is listless, bankrupt, aging. "Alison has Molly. Her life is beyond imagining. It will not be imagined, Britain will recover, but not Alsion Murray."

Here, in the final words of "The Ice Age," is a recapitulation of one of Margaret Drabble's main themes: if we are honest with ourselves, freedom is an illusory proposition. We are as trapped by our options as we are by our limitations. (pp. 7, 40)

One of the great pleasures of "The Ice Age" is the cast of minor characters, each embodying an alternative mode of survival…. And England itself is a presence, beautifully portrayed—the run-down railroad stations and littered streets, the inhuman highways and Government housing projects, the lethargic spirit of a demoted power. It is a dying country in possession of an almost comic deus ex machina—those oil fields in the North.

It's inevitable that "The Ice Age" will be referred to as "the new Drabble." That is a danger that prolific writers run. It is a remarkably fine book that takes its life from the best traditions of the 19-century novel: elaborate plotting, coincidence, meaningful resolution—and it has a surface vitality that comes from Margaret Drabble's pure, old-fashioned narrative skill. In the best of her previous novels, "The Realms of Gold" and "The Needle's Eye," she has come across as a bit of a schoolmarm, lecturing us on the role of the narrator and the machinations of her story. Here such defenses are used lightly. She assumes an authority that puts her reader entirely at ease. Yes, we say, the social context is like Hardy, the interlocking lives she's borrowed from Dickens, the chain of circumstances from Charlotte Brontë. In a way, it is all very self-conscious, but Drabble's technique is to admit to the difficulties of a self-conscious art. She respects literary conventions as riches of the past, and so gives that outmoded form, the novel, new life. Her structure does not have the energy of Thomas Pynchon's, nor her inventions of coincidence the imaginative delight of Nabokov's, but she shares their belief in the form. Hers is not an apocalyptic vision: the world survived the Ice Age, after all, and in that epoch is recorded the rise of man. (p. 40)