The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble has an authority about it that is new to her work. In Realms of Gold she began to assume that the large designs of the English novel were there for the taking but allowed herself to get caught up in imitations of Murdochian games. In The Ice Age she handles an intricate plot with confidence and creates a cast of characters meant to reflect a range of attitudes toward modern day Britain…. The Ice Age is an extraordinarily open work with elegiac passages that create a public background for the enactment of private lives…. [Control] of history and acceptance of the facts is one pole of the novel. The other is a cinematic odd-angled view of the trashy modern improvements in a heartless urban landscape of cement, steel, lurid hotel interiors and cheap goods that reveal the anxiety of everyday life. Alison, traveling home, finds herself in an unfamiliar train station with no services, walking through a concrete tunnel which leads illogically to a dangerous traffic island. There, an injured dog with its side ripped to the raw flesh finds its way with dumb persistence through the cars. It is a terrifying vision that remains with us throughout Drabble's description of the passive depression that overcomes Alison Murray when she is safely home. Though she can endure her personal tragedy, the world is too much for her, too disturbing as it can often be for any one of us.

The careful patterns of accident opposed to intention in The Ice Age come directly from a novelistic tradition that demands solutions. Margaret Drabble is accomplished at finishing off the design: the little secretary who fell in with the ruthless real-estate man becomes a distinguished business woman associated with an architect who still maintains views of a humane cityscape; Alison's sullen, drop-out daughter is chastened by the example of the decent adults around her and studies to be a nurse. The characters who can never be transformed by events are the defective child and a hopelessly optimistic woman "determined as she is to ignore the implications of reality." It is only with Anthony Keating that Drabble goes wrong. Imprisoned, this ordinary man discards his personal life and enters into a spiritual state that justifies his suffering. He reads Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and like that medieval philosopher finds comfort "more in philosophy than faith." In a novel that refers to the over-arching myth of apocalypse so movingly, Anthony Keating's conversion to heroic stature by way of a superior inner life seems contrived, theoretical—like the mysticism Doris Lessing resorts to at the end of The Four Gated City. The finale of The Ice Age relies too heavily on what Maragret Drabble calls a necessary imagined future for Anthony Keating. (pp. 184-85)