At first, The Snow depicts a barren cold reality in which the narrator, Tira Sahai, an Indian woman approaching middle age separated from an adult daughter born out-of-wedlock, finds herself managing to survive beneath the snow within a London building that provides the basic necessities of foodstuffs and somehow circulating air to breathe, and not much else. She shares this muffling shelter with a single companion, but, the relationship is that of mere presence, not mutual comfort.

This leads to some serious introspection, if only because what else is there to do?

But this is how life is. It doesn't land you all at one, like the house in the Wizard of Oz that flattened the witch -- or perhaps for some people it does , but not for most. For some, maybe, I guess, I can see that some instant catastrophe, their own illness or some disaster knocks them down, concertinas them into a hat and feet. But for most, for the many, it doesn't come all at once. It drifts down, tiny torn-up pieces of you heart, of your job, your body, your weariness, responsibility, pressure, expectations, and little day-today specifics, of ordinary setbacks and difficulties. It settles and settles and then, one day, you look out of your window and you see all of that stuff has covered the ground all around you, has built up without your noticing, And then, another day, you look to your window and you realize you can't even see through them, that the snow has cataracted the glass, and your only surprise is that the panes can withstand the pressure of all the snow pushing in from outside. It is not that you really care either, Some miniature, mandrake-shaped core of you cares, perhaps, but the perispheres -- the face and the limbs, the heart and the brain -- are too numb, and cold, and weary to care.

You really have no idea.

One day -- and it's uncertain how long Tira has lived underground, though it becomes evident that being underground is a metaphor for her life both in the past and her immediate new future -- miners from the surface in search of food and valuables discover her. There is life on the surface. There is also a new government using the pretext of the need to keep citizens safe secure as a rationale for dictatorship.

This is where it could start to get silly, but, again, because this is a Roberts novel, you have deeper expectations. And you won't be disappointed. Indeed, the first person narration is interrupted with documents presumably retrieved from a government archive. The use of meta-text is standard operating procedure for Roberts, and while you might find yourself wishing the author would try another approach for a change, you can't deny the effectiveness of its use here. There are hints that the snow was a result of a secret government project that went awry, that Australia is one part of the globe where the devastating snow did not hit, and that the new government, for reasons of its own self-preservation, needs to keep details such as these from the general populace. (It is perhaps also why Roberts has abandoned the habit of one-word novel titles: use of the article in The Snow implies not only a "final" or "ultimate" snowfall, but also the sense of a government cover-up in the sense of a "snow job" of wide scale proportions.)

Tira has insights into both perspectives, as she becomes both the wife to a government leader and the lover of an insurgent seeking to topple authority even through terrorist acts. You learn these things through what appears to be the testimony of Tira and the lover who betrays her to the government. Typical of government documents, they are heavily censored, with the names of important personages deleted (which at times makes it difficult to distinguish among who is whom, though of course the point is that regardless of individual names, they are all the same nameless miasma of political corruption).

Okay, so now you're in Orwell's 1984 territory, with perhaps a satiric swipe at the homeland security mindset. But, as you might expect, it's not that straightforward, and soon you're in the shakier climate of Philip K. Dick, complete with a druggie high on UFO conspiracy theory who thinks the snow is the result of an alien invasion, a terraforming to make the planet more hospitable to their biology. And, of course, the government doesn't want anyone to know. Also, of course, it's hard to tell who the real crazies are.

So here you have a mix of what might be described as "high" literary prose blended with a range of science fictional conceits that make for heavy weather conditions. Roberts himself hints at exactly what he's doing when in a postscipt where all has been revealed and a new world order restored, the narrator observes:

Science fiction... has become the new realism, with historical fiction (as all books about the pre-Snow years must necessarily be called) looked down upon as lamentable escapism. We try to come to terms with what has happened to the world.