Then by Julie Myerson

Then Reviews

• 
  Kat

  Then is not a post-apocalyptic survival story. The apocalyptic event, which is never fully explained, that led to London becoming a frozen wasteland sets the scene for the story, but this is far more a literary mystery than a story of survival.
  
  The writing style itself is quite difficult to get used to - it's quite bleak and time shimmers between the past and the present from paragraph to paragraph - this is a book that I had to pay real attention to, otherwise I would have been constantly lost.
  
  Isobel has survived the event, simply described only as an unseasonably hot day that after a flash of light turns the world cold, and is sheltering in an office building with a man, and three teenagers. Having lost her memory, and continuing to have some kind of amnesia, she initially has no recollection of the event, or even of what has occurred just hours before. She is not particularly likable as a character, mainly because she has no memories to form a personality, likes or dislikes, and as she cannot remember nor really even distinguish between dreams and reality, she has an almost ghost-like quality.
  
  Other characters fade in and out as the story progresses, and the whole book has a very ethereal but disjointed feeling. The ending is particularly poignant, but this book has no real resolution, which almost makes it a little bit too clever for its own good. This is not a fun read, nor action-packed, but I did like the ghostly, discombobulated feel. Yep, I've been waiting years to use that word!
  
  Read more of my reviews at
  The Aussie Zombie
  
• 
  Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk

  I'm about two-thirds of the way through and I've had these thoughts in my head for some time and I feel I need to record them now.
  Everyone keeps saying how gripping this book is, how disturbing, how powerful but I don't quite feel this the same way. It's not so gripping that I can't put it down but it IS fascinating. It's not so disturbing that I feel upset by it - for apocalypses it's good but also a bit tame; they're cold but not freezing, they're hungry but not driven to cannibalism, their world is falling apart yet there is a lot less chaos and brutality than I would expect. Pardon the pun but for an apocalypse it's a bit cold and distracted.
  No, what IS fascinating about this story is the way it makes me feel like I'm in someone's mind; her mind. Her world has fallen apart. This cold, colourless landscape reflects her inability to feel emotions - she comes across as cold, confused... lost. Her "ghosts" or "hallucinations" or "flashbacks" are the product of a broken mind. And that's what makes the book disturbing - to be inside a broken mind. How much IS illusion, how much real? You feel something terrible has happened (and I'm not just talKing about the end of the world!). She's done something terrible - or has she? Is she blaming herself? Does she feel that somehow she's caused all this? All is confused yet has a structure... We ARE in a true wilderness here, the detritus and chaos of a broken mind...
  And that is what makes this a truly brilliant bit of writing - the fact that it can draw these feelings, these questions, out of me - the fact that it can make me think about what all this is REALLY about...
  
  And now I've finished I have nothing more to say.
• 
  Michele Harrod

  I'm going to give this 4 stars for now. For the first part of this book, I was a bit confused - as was the protagonist. who is largely without memory, and living in an office high rise, after what would appear to be the end of the world as we know it. Outside everything is frozen or on fire. There is no electricity, no communications, and it would seem, very few people left alive. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.
  
  I'm going to say little else about the actual story here, other than the fact that I am in AWE of the bravery of this author to have written this story. To have explored this scenario as she did. Sadly, I was away holidaying with other people when I read this - and this is a novel where the horror of what's coming creeps up behind you, slowly, like a murderous lover. You know it's coming, but you just can't turn around and make it stop. The sort of book that really, really needs to be read where you know you will not be interrupted.
  
  As the final scenes in this book were tearing my heart out - and smashing it, forcibly against the wall, and the rock in my throat was beginning to choke me - someone entered the room and noticed I was a tad 'traumatised'. And they commented "God, you get way too involved in the books you read - they are meant to be escapism", and the moment was lost for me. Damn it. It's a bloody good book if I'm 'involved'. It's what I lust after - books that offer engagement, inspiration, insight, heart-breaking, gut wrenching bloody INVOLVEMENT. God-damn it, don't waste a tree otherwise!!!!!
  
  So, whilst I read it then, I need to read this again. Soon. Because it deserves to be felt again, deeply. I don't have children, and this book has haunted me for over a week now. I can't say what this would be like for a mother to read.
  
  And I can't imagine ever liking a moment of winter, ever again.
• 
  Lisa

  With a sense of place so immense; I was pulled in from the very start. The story tangles and then unfurls on almost every page in a rapid mesh of half-events, conversations and time but I was never lost. Julie's writing is superb, adept and unflinching in this novel. Read it. Quickly, go!
• 
  Guy Haley

  
  A maternal counterpoint to Cormac McCarthy’s depiction of indefatigable fatherhood in The Road, Then is, if possible, even less fun.
  Like The Road, Then is also hard to put down, despite the relentless parade of sleep-shattering horror. We’re talking real horror here, not of the supernatural or cartoon slasher type, but of the realisation of the terrors all parents have, the kind of cold, black, oily weight on the heart fear that makes you want to check on your own offspring as they sleep. We’ll leave it at that.
  Izzy struggles to survive in a frozen London. Her perception of time is unreliable. She cannot, at first, remember her own name. Through a Memento-like trickle of flashback and recollection, Myerson unleashes an uncompromising picture of marital betrayal, the end of the world running in parallel to the end of a marriage; a lesser catastrophe, maybe, but nevertheless as devastating.
  Myerson weaves past and future, cause and effect together, hinting at multiple versions of the same events playing out over and again. Izzy could be dead – the ice and fire motifs of the apocalypse have a certain hellish precedence. A more concrete indication of what’s really going on may have helped us here, but maybe not; as a portrait of the struggles between home, heart and head, Then is astonishingly powerful, haunting and disturbing, its occasionally frustrating sense of confusion fortifying Izzy’s sense of dislocation in the reader’s mind. Horrifyingly compelling.
  
  Did you know?
  
  Myerson’s books all concern her experiences of motherhood, so much so she fell out with her son Jake over one of them.
  
  
• 
  Jenny

  This is brutal and powerful and heartbreaking, but it's one I'll keep because it's brilliant. Definitely not a book for everyone. More for those who like contemplating the meaning of life, death and everything in between.
• 
  Stephen

  This is an interesting book that considers the lived experience in a post-apocalyptic London. With all of the current talk of nuclear exchanges between Russia and NATO, it somehow seemed appropriate to give some thought to what that might mean to those on the receiving end. We know that something bad has happened, but we aren't told exactly what.
  
  Some parts of the story suggest a form of dirty bomb near Liverpool Street in London. Other parts suggest some form of asteroid strike or possibly the consequence of some form of solar activity. What we do know is that, in February, things get extremely hot, and then they freeze. The reader isn't helped by an absence of timescale to all of this. The narrative could cover a period of months or days. It equally could be a much shorter period of, say, an afternoon. All we do know is that there is a period in which and already traumatised woman is traumatised further.
  
  It felt to me that the book was about what it feels like to suffer a trauma. The main character was already suffering from an affair that hadn't gone quite right and a marriage that starting to bounce awkwardly. There was the question of childbirth, paternity, and separation all rolled into a short space of time. We are led to believe that the apocalyptic event occurred just at the point where the woman was in labour. I'm afraid that this stretched my belief a bit too much.
  
  Layered on top of that was what we are led to believe was a sexual assault, an on-going relationship with imaginary friends, and a community living in a tower block. The narrator of the story isn't fairly lucid and that conspires to make the story just too far unbelievable. The author stretched the goodwill of the reader a bit too far. It really didn't work for me.
  
  This is a shame. The book contains a good idea, but the execution of the idea doesn't really work. It may have worked better if told in the third person rather than the first. It might have worked better with a more coherent timeline. It could have made more sense if the main character had a degree of lucidity. However, none of these were present in the book which meant that the opportunity, in my view, was missed.
  
• 
  Biogeek

  A very, very difficult book to read. There are all sorts of factors that make books hard to stick with. Narratives that bounce from past to present, where characters' memories are undependable, where characters deliberately withhold information from each other and the readers, where incomprehensible events have occurred, where these events may or may not have occurred in the real world ...and all of these make up Julie Myerson's Then. The novel succeeds in throwing is into the middle of a post-climate catastrophe London, but fails to allow us to make any sense of what has happened, or what is happening to Isobel, the protagonist. I had no problem with not understanding what the great cataclysmic event was. I did have a problem with not understanding most of what had happened in Isobel's life. Many better post-apocalyptic novels out there.
• 
  E.H. Walter

  I was excited by the idea of this book, a post apocolyptic London and one woman's struggle to survive in this strange new world. I was utterly disappointed. I am not sure what this book was trying to do. Was it an observation of the frailty of the human memory or just trying to be a 'clever' book? Whatever it was trying, for me it did not work. I am sad I wasted three hours reading it, at least it was not more.
• 
  Gerie

  BIT OF SPOILER - BUT NOT BAD.
  The author of this book is pure genius when it comes to writing style and topic.
  At first I was a bit irritated that the punctuation was sooooo poor. Then as I read, I realized it was a necessary part of the book.
  The ONLY reason I am not giving it a 5 star is because it is very, VERY depressing. The content of the story is very morbid and heartbreaking.
  If you don't mind that in a book PLEASE, PLEASE read this book.
  (some swear words)
• 
  Faye

  Tried to read and enjoy but failed, a hard book to get into. Very disappointed with what it was promising. Not much information on how the apocalypse occurred, a bit too cerebral for me. Others may like this book but I have already got rid of it to a charity shop, a rare fail for me
• 
  Tracey Agnew

  I loved this book. It is bleak, its main character is broken, her memory shattered by the most heart breaking events. Her life is slowly pieced together through a narrative that goes back and forth in time in a thoroughly absorbing story. Read it!
• 
  Anne Matthew

  Sophie's choice in a memento-esque loop. Oh and there's an apocalypse. Brutal
• 
  Emma

  Myerson does a slow, powerful build of emotion like no one else, and this is one of her best: beautiful, hauntingly lovely, and heart-breakingly sad. As you slowly begin to grasp what has happened to Izzy, it's almost too much to bear, until you realise who and what she really is at the beginning of the story.
• 
  Laura

  I've abandoned reading this book at around 100 pages. Although the writing style and descriptions are great, I've just found myself bored, not gripped at all and I don't really care about the characters. Such a shame as I really like this author.
• 
  Daniel C.

  Yes, it's bleak and strange. Cold and heartbreaking. If you're seeking a straight A-to-B narrative, look elsewhere. It's like a barely remembered dark dream.
  This is the 2nd novel I've read by Myerson, and I'm already looking for other books by her. Yes, I loved this novel.
• 
  Trudie

  it took me a long time to get into the style of writing and the timeline confused me slightly. I preferred the last quarter of the story although it was emotional to read.
• 
  Lily

  Can I give a book a 1 star and a 4 star review at the same time? That seems appropriate.
• 
  Hugo

  Honestly? Can't remember reading it. I'll have to add it to my lockdown re-read pile.
• 
  Jenna Adkins

  Gripping and heart wrenching. Stayed with me long after I finished reading.
• 
  Jodie "Bookish" Cook

  Book Review
  
  Title: Then
  
  Author: Julie Myerson
  
  Genre: Apocalyptic /Survival/Thriller
  
  Rating: ***
  
  Review: Julie Myerson’s latest novel, Then, describes a near-future dystopia in which an unexplained apocalyptic event has plunged London, and, presumably, the world, into an icy, desolate no-man’s-land. We follow the narrator, a nameless, bewildered woman, and her small gang of fellow-survivors, as she struggles to stay alive, to remember what happened to her, and to distinguish reality from a series of frighteningly realistic hallucinations.
  
  Or something like that, anyway.
  
  It’s hard to summarize Then without dropping major spoilers, because the strength of the book lies in its nightmarish uncertainty – the narrator’s and the readers’ confusion about the characters’ identities, histories and relationships, the order of events and the reality of those events. The narrator is camping out in an abandoned office block with a strange man and a trio of teenagers, and she doesn’t know how she got there, how she knows them, or where she, or they, came from.
  
  
  Two different realities seem to be colliding and as she tries to figure out how to manage them, her memory starts to return and the full horror of her situation returns with it. The jacket blurb describes the book as an ‘echo chamber of the heartbreaking and the terrifying’, and I think this captures the reading experience pretty well – images and scenes and dialogue bounce back and forth as the narrator tries to regain control of her life, each one contradicting the next in a cacophony of horrific and heart-breaking half-forgotten instances.
  
  I haven’t read Julie Myerson before, so I couldn’t say how Then stands up to her previous work. I can toss out a handful of comparisons, though: this is The Road crossed with The Shining; Don’t Look Now meets The Others. Memories and ghosts and confused identities and creepy, empty buildings; snow falling over a scorched landscape; recurring, disturbing images of dead children – it’s a pretty chilling vision of a disaster zone seen through the eyes of a traumatised survivor. And the very slow revelation of that trauma escalates the horror of the book to an almost unbearable pitch. Stylistically, though, it’s nothing like either Cormac McCarthy or Stephen King, whom I think would probably be two of the more obvious checkpoints; the language is pared down and almost staccato, and Myerson uses the page well, spacing out her dialogue and descriptions to mimic the hesitant reactions and damaged mind of her broken narrator.
  
  The plot develops slowly – I’d say almost too slowly – and the short, almost timeless scenes in the office building work very well, mimicking the dislocation that the narrator feels in this new, awful world she’s found herself inhabiting. If I were to offer a criticism, it would be that Myerson pushes the deliberate confusion a little too far – at the end I was still left a little unsure where one or two narrative threads tied into the whole, though the flipside of that is that I was tempted to start reading over again, to see how it stood up once I’d grasped the overall view. So that’s good.
  
  What else? Myerson’s portrayal of love – both sexual and parental – is astute, and there’s an interesting parallel to be drawn between the traumas of childbirth and infidelity and that of global meltdown. The actions that rip the narrator’s personal world apart coincide with the destruction of the external world – themes that Joanna Kavenna discussed in an interview here not so long ago.
  
  It’s a difficult read – the plot is very confusing most of the way through. If you’re left scratching your head angrily after David Lynch films, you might well have the same reaction here. I found myself scribbling notes as I read, to try and help figure things out. And it really is horrific – the more tender-hearted readers might find the last few chapters very hard to digest. But other than that, thumbs up! Bleak, unrelenting and utterly hopeless – one of the most memorable disaster stories I’ve come across in ages.
• 
  Claire

  I could not put this book down. I read it when I should have been sleeping and I read it when I should have been writing.
  
  Other readers have complained it is bleak: it is wonderfully bleak. The prose is cold because the place is cold. Other readers have complained that it is confusing: it is wonderfully confusing. Myerson makes us work hard to understand who is who, what has really happened, what is real and what is in Izzy's head. Even at the very end, I'm not completely certain, but I don't mind that, in fact I love it.
  
  I would have preferred the confusion to continue longer. In the middle of the book, there is a sudden and clear catch up about an affair that Izzy had. To me it seemed too different from the first half; she tried to cover too many years in a few pages. It felt like exposition. My rating lost a star because of that. But it shouldn't stop anyone reading it.
• 
  Michael Davies

  Set in a snow bound dystopia that is never fully explained the book tells the story of Isobel, one of the survivors of apocalyptic event, living with a handful of others in an abandoned office block in London. She apparently has no memory of events of her previous life, but as the story progresses she drifts between past and present, conscious and unconscious thought and the tragic result of a love affair and the truly terrible effect of the sudden catastrophe on her family. It's not an easy book and I do sometimes wonder why I read novels of such unremitting bleakness - the ending in particular is harrowing - but maybe it's because from the comfort of my armchair I can revel in the comforting thought that it's not happening to me. Well, at least not yet!