A mother in meltdown

FICTION: Then, By Julie Myerson, Jonathan Cape, 296pp. £12.99

FOR A COUPLE of years, starting in 2006, Julie Myerson, under a pseudonym, wrote a column called Living with Teenagersfor the Guardian newspaper. It was a frank and witty account of parenting the troubled teenage years, and it later appeared as a book. She stopped writing the column when her kids rumbled her and one of them was teased at school.

In 2009 Myerson published The Lost Child, an account of her family's crisis in dealing with the cannabis problem of her eldest son. She and her husband locked 17-year-old Jake out of the house, in order to force him to confront his problems. This book proved highly explosive, in part because of the radical step the Myersons took in barring their own child from the family home. But the other controversial aspect was the book's revelatory nature, the manner in which it exposed Myerson and invaded the privacy of her children, especially Jake.

Myerson has positioned herself among the more confessional of artists, making use of her biography as an essential part of her oeuvre. In assessing her eighth novel it is impossible to put these recent controversies out of mind, as the central theme is motherhood and the central crisis is to do with lost children and the ensuing guilt (“I’ve done bad things”).

Then is set in a postapocalyptic London of the near future. An unspecified climatic event has occurred and London has been reduced to a wasteland, covered in ice and snow, with dangerous scavengers fighting over the last scraps of whatever is going. The main character, a woman whose name we don’t learn until late in the story, is hiding out in a disused office block with a man and three teenagers in a parodic representation of a nuclear family. The woman is sexually intimate with the man, Graham, until he later turns his attentions to the teenage girl, Sophy.

The woman is confused and disorientated, and has forgotten everything, including her name. She has no memory of her children, who appear as ghostly spectres in isolated corners of the office block. Much of the story has the quality of a horror movie, as little children appear and do childish, innocent things in the midst of total devastation. As the novel unfolds the woman slowly remembers snatches of events, which eventually add up to a past. Her name turns out to be Izzy, short for Isobel.

Isobel, in the past, has a happy marriage to Simon, with four children. Then her friendship with Matthew, an old pal from her childhood, develops into a romance and she conceives a child. Matthew kills himself when she ends the relationship. Her husband does his best to cope with the circumstances of his wife’s being pregnant by another man, but eventually they split up. Isobel is alone with the four children, and about to give birth to the baby, on the fateful day, “the moment when everything stopped”.

It is February, and temperatures rise unseasonably. Houses spontaneously combust. The birth of the extramaritally conceived child and the climatic apocalypse are simultaneous. The children keep wondering why their dad hasn’t come to save them, as the goldfish in the pond die and flames encroach from all sides. Without giving too much away, Isobel emerges from the house with only one child, and that child is soon lost to the horror and chaos of the devastated world outside.

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the postapocalyptic world serves as a metaphor for social decay. In Myerson's Then, the landscape feels more psychological than sociological, though fans of the McCarthy novel will find many echoes here. The devastation has a very personal quality, and the apocalypse could easily be occurring in the central character's mind. Isobel's disorientation, her inability to get her brain to function coherently or follow events, her constant forgetting, feels more like a mental breakdown, like a shocked consciousness losing touch with reality.

In this unremittingly dark book the disintegrated psychic state of the central character remains bleakly engrossing and sadly touching throughout.

Katy Hayes is a novelist, columnist and playwright. You can hear her play The Sun Always Rises, recently produced and broadcast by RTÉ, at rte.ie/radio1/drama