The Ice Saints - Frank Tuohy

 THE ICE SAINTS - FRANK TUOHY

In an age where practically any book imaginable if you know where to look and you're willing to pay is available somewhere on the Internet, what dictates that you choose to read one book above another? There's a number of reasons, isn't there? Hype, word of mouth, availability, synchronicity, visuality. If you have a decent-sized library of books, when it comes to choosing which one to read next can often be an instinctive decision, a kind of gut feeling. Almost as if the book chooses you rather than you choosing the book.

And so to The Ice Saints by Frank Tuohy, a book found one day in a second-hand bookshop and purchased on the strength of the pictures on the front and back covers depicting a pretty miserable looking woman wrapped in a shawl. And that's it but that was enough because to go into a book 'blind', without knowing exactly what it's about can also be of appeal and a deciding factor in choosing what to read.

Set in Poland in 1960, The Ice Saints is about life in Poland at that time, caught behind the Iron Curtain and caught in the cross-fire of Russia and the West. Using the character of a British woman visiting her sister in Poland where she now lives with her Polish husband, writer Frank Tuohy describes and somewhat explains the social landscape where poverty reigns supreme, upheld by the pillars of politics, ideology, paranoia, acceptance of fate, and loyalty to the one-party state following the scourge of the Second World War.

The British woman brings news that her sister's son has been left a substantial sum of money in the will of their departed auntie but it's news that once understood what it will entail brings calamity and disruption, adding additional unhappiness to the unhappiness already there.

Frank Tuohy was a lecturer for a time at Krakow University and it's this experience that informs and drives his book. There's very much a 'stranger in a strange land' feel about it and throughout conveys the feeling of being in the company of people talking a foreign language that you only have very little understanding of, leaving you therefore misinterpreting what is being said and misunderstanding what is going on. On top of this is also the ever-present awareness of constantly being monitored, spied upon and reported to the authorities. It's the perfect scenario for catastrophe to occur and occur it does, though leaving everyone in the end just as isolated from one and other as at the start and with no lessons learned.

Tuohy raises a very pessimistic question mark over Polish society and indeed paints a pretty bleak picture of it though thankfully it's a picture that can be said to no longer apply as Poland has now changed beyond all recognition, particularly following the democratic upheavals of 1989. As a testament to Communist era Poland it still stands, however, as a very human picture due to filtering the outcomes of war and politics through the lives of individuals and successfully depicting the very real but profoundly sad results.

John Serpico