Then by Julie Myerson

Posted on: May 03, 2012

Then by Julie Myerson

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors

 

Julie Myerson spent much time being talked and written about when her book The Lost Child was published two years ago. The book chronicled her son’s decline from a bright teenager into a surly and difficult drug addict who was eventually thrown out of his own home by Myerson and her husband, for fear of the effect he was having on their other children. Many criticized Myerson for selling out her son and taking advantage of his troubled life to reach her own ambitions. Her previous work has been eclipsed by The Lost Child, and it is no wonder that her latest book, Then, is also being received ambiguously, and no question that Myerson is a writer who takes risks.

 

Then is the story of an amnesiac woman who finds herself in a world devastated by a cataclysmic climatic event. There isn’t too much detail given on why this event took place and it is only half way through the book that we learn ‘…there was a sound like a blade tearing through the sky’; ‘the sun disappeared. The air turned ice. Thick fat snowflakes started to fall’. In this newly formed ice age of sorts, the protagonist finds herself trying to survive and to piece together the fragments of who she is and where she has come from. She is somehow sequestered in what was once an office high rise building with a few other survivors, none of whom are familiar to her yet each holding secrets about her past. She is nameless for much of the book, yet she remains a sympathetic character. This can only be attributed to Myerson’s ability to write a strong narrative voice – here is a first person narrative from a nameless protagonist who has no idea who she is or why she is where she is, and yet it is easy to feel the confusion she does. Myerson’s narrative is not cloying or cold, its sits somewhere in the middle, never comfortably enough to let a reader relax, but very, very interestingly.

 

The fragments of the protagonist’s memory that surface are both intriguing and frightening – the image of a toddler buried in ice, her eyes still gleaming through to the surface; a young child vanishing around the corners of a devastated city; the linea nigra that leads her to realise she was a mother once. Who are the children she sees in the building she sleeps in? Why is she only one who can see them? Myerson cleverly superimposes her post-apocalyptic vision on one of the world as we know it, full of complicated relationships, murky emotions and in this case, some horrific consequences.

 

To say dystopic fiction has had a sudden rise in popular in wrong – it’s always been a popular part of speculative fiction. There is something very romantic about the apocalypse – it can either bring people together, bringing out the best and worst in them or it can mean a completely new start. Either way, dystopic fiction, when done well, can be thrilling and frightening, just as Then is. Myerson has created a narrative that is an eerie mix of Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and of course, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which also looked at survival in a world destroyed by extreme climate change. But Then is not a straight up speculative or science fiction novel or even just a ghost story– other than the sudden ice age caused by climactic change here is no other element of science in it and the ‘ghosts’ are not that simple. Myerson’s vision is also very different from James’ or McCarthy’s in that Then is oddly a very female narrative. It is not just because the protagonist is a woman, but because her memories are very much to do with her being a mother and a wife. Her role as a mother to the children she may have had is vital in her own understanding of who she is and what she may or may not have done before the sky tore apart. Myerson, it seems, is still very much concerned with the relationships between a mother and her children and how far a mother will go to do what she believes is right.