I like me a good down and dirty crime novel as much as I like just about any other read. No one is going to mistake Scott Phillips’ The Ice Harvest for great literature any time soon, and that’s a shame because books this enjoyable often get overlooked by the literati. This crime noir moves fast and straight out of the gate with profanity and nastiness. We meet Charlie Arglist, corrupt lawyer and sleazy club owner who spends Christmas Eve moving from strip club to crappy bar and back to another strip club, sucking down the booze and snorting coke when possible.By chapter two, a man’s been clubbed with a bat, we’ve learned Charlie’s blackmailing some local politicians, and we hear of a bouncer’s plans to break a guitarist’s hands for blacking his (the guitarist’s) girlfriend stripper’s eye. It’s just that kind of book.The bouncer makes good on that threat, which is no surprise from what we’ve read previously, understanding just what it is we’re talking about here. Care for more? Well, here’s what the bouncer sounds like sweet-talking someone on the phone: “Well, if this isn’t the rat-fuck of the century, I don’t know what is! …As far as I’m concerned you can grease up that Yule Log of yours and shove it up your shithole!...You’ll rue the day you thought you could pull this shit on me, you toothless old whore! I promise you will regret the day you were fucking born!” He slammed the phone receiver down, then picked it back up and screamed into it at the top of his lungs, then slammed it down into its cradle again and again, until finally, breathing hard, he looked up at Charlie and Pete. “Sorry,” he continued, “that was my mom. She wants me to pick up my kids tonight instead of tomorrow.”Portraits of moral corruption don’t come any cleaner and dirtier than that. If there’s a character with a redeeming feature, I must have missed it. Though I suppose a couple minor incidents — a man asking if Charlie’s all right after he slips on some ice or an ex-roommate of one of Charlie’s old girlfriends — could count as two drops of the milk of human kindness amidst all the darkness and filth. Just barely.Often books with despicable protagonists are hard to get through. Your natural inclination to sympathize with and like the main character gets constantly sidelined. Here, you don’t technically “like” Charlie Arglist — you just dislike everyone else so much more that you do find yourself rooting for his success. He’s not a bad guy per se, even if he does, drunkenly, snort a couple lines of cocaine with his brother-in-law prior to dropping in to the Christmas celebration of his ex-wife’s family. He justifies this to himself by thinking he should see his kids one last time before he leaves town and by not wanting to slur in front of his them.So you see, he’s considerate in his debauchery. He even goes so far as to waive stage-fees for strippers screwed over by Christmas Eve’s slow turnout. Occasionally you might worry that Charlie’s softer side is going to get him killed, but combinations of dumb luck and unimaginably moronic bravado carry him through mostly. When he breaks into a friend’s home around 4am Christmas morning, the resulting scenario is partly the Grinch confronting Cindy Lou Who and partly slapstick of a nicely broad physical kind.Exactly what Charlie is up to isn’t entirely clear until The Ice Harvest has made it to past the halfway mark, but public and private corruption play major roles, naturally. While he clearly needs to get out of town at some point in the relatively immediate future, Charlie dawdles, and, in the process, manages to burn every bridge, to make a series of bad judgments and to nearly give away all his hole cards before his ticket is solid and his cash is in hand. As the speed of the double-crossing begins to heat up, Charlie loses more and more safe havens and resources.In that last respect, the book could almost present itself as a kind of allegorical deconstruction of a man, peeling away each successive layer of social and psychological wrapping until he’s left with only his own unadorned selfishness and ego. Phillips likely isn’t going that far, but to watch Charlie Arglist move ever further down, down, down is in itself a thing of black and amusing beauty. The conclusion of this comedy of disaster makes everything spectacularly worthwhile.
Reading this was a purely tactical choice to begin with. As in red alert, battle stations ready tactical warfare. Which best describes the cattle run on the London Underground where it is a no holds barred, take no prisoners, survival of fittest gladiator match twice a day. When wedged in the middle of this meat vice, headlocked under Big Bertha’s eau de Baconnaise infused armpit, trussed up like a Christmas turkey and that had BETTER be only an umbrella poking my ass, reading material has to conform to certain standards. A certain size, weight and shape are crucial, so I can prop it centrifugal like over a love handle and beneath a double D. Trial and error are crucial here, my dear Watson, but after many sardine sessions I knew The Ice Harvest would snuggle right in.A weird little book this: the first half is totally devoid of any action whatsoever. Instead, we have a slow, languorous layering of seedy character and their haunts descriptions. The main protagonist Charlie seems to spend an eternity driving up and down the main street in Wichita, Kansas on Christmas Eve, circulating between three stripjoints, a bar, and two houses, in some sort of grotesque noirification of Pleasantville. He’s clearly getting ready to skip town and seems to be killing some time before he goes. Everywhere he goes, some broad offers to blow him off or make him into a bona fide anal connoisseur. The cops all know him : they all toast whiskey flasks when they meet up on the highway. Sweet. Why would he even want to leave a place like this?The second half picks up a bit, which in any event isn’t hard to do considering nothing ever happened in the first half. Charlie still seems to be running around Main Street, except now theres a noticeable body count stockpiling in each of the places mentioned above. This frenzied rushing around is supposed to blind us to the fact that there is absolutely no plot cohesion whatsoever in this alleged crime thriller. Things seem to happen randomly, nothing makes any logical sense, the narrative descends into mish-mash. With one saving grace at the very end: a delicious little twist at the finale, which, however, in no way makes up for the disjointed rambling before.‘A venture into white noir’ it says right on the front cover. But wait, what the hell is white noir, apart from an oxymoron. I usually know my blek end uait but not this. White trash noir is more likely. Noir what you read: next time I’ll stick to pinot noir.(I’m not kidding, what is white noire?)
Do You like book The Ice Harvest (2001)?
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In such a short book, I got to know enough about the main character to carry the story, and even with all his flaws, I liked him. The ending was perfect, because the guy was an ass and he shouldn't have triumphed.
—Delaine Engebregtson
I don't think I would have liked this book a year ago. I preferred my quirky books more lighthearted and less noir. Now, I like my quirky in any form--funny, brutal, dark, sad. And this book is all of the above.Although this book isn't without flaws (the excessive amount of characters, the somewhat disbelievable dialogue from time to time, the unanswered statement about the cops being 'one of theirs', and Charlie's extreme amount of alcohol in one night without showing many signs of being drunk), it has far too many good points. The description is fantastic. The themes--both underlying and obvious--are well sought-out and really made the reader (ie, me) think a lot after I put it down. Although the ending made me say out loud, "WHAT?" and shake my head a lot, it was a very apt ending. Phillips also has a way of pushing the plot along and leaving the reader wanting more with every chapter--I was never bored and never skimmed any paragraphs, which is a rarity for me.I'm jealous this was his first novel. He's an extremely talented author.
—Abigail Hillinger
A quick, little immorality tale. I actually appreciate that Phillips makes no effort to make any of his character's likable, but rather just shows them for who they are. Because of it, even the slightest sign of humanity has weight.My one gripe is that although we are told that the book is set in Wichita in 1979, you wouldn't know it from reading it. For most of the story, Charlie (our hero) drives through the city and its outskirts, but it might as well be set in Anchorage for all the character of the city it invokes. Placing the story in the 1970s seems to be to remove the pesky cellphone from the story, which would have solved too many problems for the characters.Fast and cartoony, I thoroughly enjoyed the read.
—Johnny
