We are the past

Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather).

Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). The Monument is rubble, Tower Bridge has ‘long gone’ and scavengers are chopping fingers off frozen bodies to snatch rings. Our narrator can’t remember much — two thirds of the book pass before we find out her name is Izzy — but a couple of randy fellow vagrants claim to know her, and some children say she’s their mum. By the time one of them ‘lifts off the ground and comes flying through the air’ — and vanishes — we’re not sure what to believe.

The mood is grave, the prose a mix of word-painting (aircraft leave ‘chalk lines’ in the sky; a mouldy corpse has hands like ‘bunches of black bananas’) and clipped, quoteless speech straight out of Then’s urtext, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

So is it OK? she says.
Is what OK?
Has he gone?
Has who gone?





Izzy’s amnesia licences a lot of talk like this. She finds urban debris — such as a ‘hoarding with the words T Mobile visible on it’ — particularly mysterious. ‘That means nothing,’ says one of her ghostly brood. ‘It’s just an ad. Don’t you remember, there were loads of those? They were absolutely everywhere’. The protagonist’s alienated gaze comes to seem a Trojan horse for the view that modern life is rubbish: a rare sunny afternoon allows her to imagine that Londoners are ‘still going about their business … taking money out of holes in the wall and carrying bags of things from place to place’.