Clearly we are meant to take The Ice Age seriously, not as a diversion, and readers must indeed be prepared for a good deal of moralising as they follow the adventures of a collection of singularly unsympathetic characters. Since she is writing about England in the Seventies, Miss Drabble is presumably making her ice age symbolise the current period of economic stagnation, and if her grim-faced prose is anything to go by, moral stagnation too. She does not, alas, give any hint as to the direction in which our economic and moral recovery will move when the eventual thaw takes place, contenting herself with the glib assurance in the final sentence that 'Britain will recover'. This cliché, which is inevitably perpetrated at every political party's annual conference, seems a feeble punch-line for a novel so ambitious in scope….

Predictably perhaps, Miss Drabble focuses her spotlight on a small...