At thirty, Will is the epitome of the New Man: his love of mountaineering provides him with transcendence, while political life and his ?equal and open? marriage to Joanna give him the roots he needs. He fully expects this charmed life to continue when he embarks on an affair with Kathleen, one of his tutors and ten years his senior. But neither he nor Kathleen have bargained for the strength of their passion for one another or their inability to control it. Envy, joy, self-scrutiny, the compulsive lure of melodrama and the vertiginous risks of surrender - through letters, psychoanalytic dialogues and obsessive narratives, Alison Fell charts the perverse fortunes of love in a dislocated postmodern world. Set against the mythic and dangerous peaks of the Alps, Mer de Glace - which takes its name from one of the most famous glaciers on Mont Blanc - strips the eternal triangle to its bare bones.