This was my first foray into one of the more obscure of Moorcock’s characters that is considered an aspect of the Eternal Champion. An interesting stage is set: a world covered in an impossibly long ice age, humanity adapting and struggling to survive, and a sinister fate awaiting all. Or so it seems. Considering I started reading this book during the height of winter and a particularly arctic few weeks, I felt myself drawn into the world even more. The people and society that were created in this book were very interesting. Generations living in a desolate frozen wasteland had developed sort of city-states that were burrowed into the ice, caverns dug into ice crevasses and descending to great depths of vertical living and community spaces. Only one major city is truly explored in the book, and includes familiar facilities like taverns and estates that make it feel very human and alive. The nature of travel has also evolved to mostly include humans on skis and also ships on skis. Hence the name of the novel. Major sustenance is found through hunting whale-like creatures that have evolved to roam over the ice. The economy is largely controlled by the city that can field the most ships, hunt the most whales. And that’s where our Champion comes in, Konrad Arflane.
Konrad is the former master captain of a whaling vessel, and by all accounts a very accomplished one. However when we meet him in this book he is ashamed, having just lost his ship. It is a very interesting way to introduce the character, as our first impressions are of a stoic and resolute figure, determined to take control of his own destiny. As it goes with Eternal Champions, he quickly finds out he has no control at all, and he quickly loses his cool. Konrad kind of flips back and forth between a character with integrity and grit and one with fleeting and manic emotional responses that put himself and others in serious harms way.
Attempting a journey that Konrad feels will restore balance to his world and prove that the ice is not melting (yes, they want the ice to remain), he sets out as captain on one of the great ice ships. The story of this journey takes up essentially the entire second half of the novel, and is a really fun adventure to read, albeit marred a bit by the anxiety of our faithful captain’s distinct mood swings. This is where another one of the more compelling aspects of this book becomes clear. In most of the Eternal Champion stories, the Champion is attempting to prevent a doom so great, so unavoidable, that it would consume all. And in Konrad’s case, this doom is represented by the potential melting of the world’s ice, causing societal collapse for people who know nothing but living in a completely frozen landscape. The idea of plants and dirt actually disgusts them as unnatural. A conflict is drawn throughout the book between those that claim to the faith that the ice will last forever and those that have accepted that the world might, in fact, be changing. Konrad reaches his destination and learns his answer, which I think I enjoyed learning much more than he did.
Select listening while reading:
“Whiteout: A Side Quest” by Vandus
The Reliquary Notes Online 