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After the Rain
John Bowen
New Hart, (1967).
rain
94
1967
English
0573605122 9780573605123
Paperback
List Unknown
New Hart, (1967).
rain
94
1967
English
0573605122 9780573605123
Paperback
List Unknown
94 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
About the author
John Bowen
31 books11 followersJohn Griffith Bowen was a British playwright and novelist. He was born in Calcutta, India, and worked in publishing, drama and television.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gr...
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gr...
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
October 31, 2023
Well, this time I picked out an old paperback from my box of 60s +70s science fiction pbs, and, even though I stayed up late to finish it ( fell asleep, then awakened, then struggled on to the end),I think this one would have been better left in the box.
SPOILER ALERT--the picture on the cover had nothing to do with the story,except showing flooding, but it is the best part of the book. Mainly, it's about a bunch of people-all Brits-sitting around on a raft following a worldwide deluge--and nothing much happens through most of the book. When they finally spot land and prepare to start their Brave New World, the book ends ( it does say they were successful in creating their new society).
It certainly did not help that I could not connect at all with any of the characters.
I think J.G. Ballard did a story about a Great Flood and that's the one I should have found to read.
SPOILER ALERT--the picture on the cover had nothing to do with the story,except showing flooding, but it is the best part of the book. Mainly, it's about a bunch of people-all Brits-sitting around on a raft following a worldwide deluge--and nothing much happens through most of the book. When they finally spot land and prepare to start their Brave New World, the book ends ( it does say they were successful in creating their new society).
It certainly did not help that I could not connect at all with any of the characters.
I think J.G. Ballard did a story about a Great Flood and that's the one I should have found to read.
October 27, 2014
Gorgeous beginning, gorgeous ending. But the middle was a little bit wet.
September 12, 2016
This took me way too long to read, because it wasn't very good. It's not one of those books that makes you keep reading it. The beginning was the most interesting part.
In a drought-ravaged world, a wacky rainmaker may or may not be responsible for turning things around too well - nonstop rainstorms that flood the earth. Some guy, our narrator, makes it to some kind of survivor's camp, but then leaves on an inflatable raft with a woman he meets, Sonya. She's a dancer, and although they were brought together by coincidence, of course they become lovers.
They're picked up by this weird boat that at one point was sponsored by a food company trying to prove that a person can survive only on their processed food product. The ship's captain was trying to circumnavigate the earth (or something like that) with a ship full of that food and other survival supplies. Then the rain started, and that sucks, but he was set. He picked up a bunch more people: a married couple, a man of the cloth, a smart accountant, a dumb bodybuilder, and maybe a few more, it was too boring to remember. Plus now our hero whose name escapes me, that's how dull he is, and Sonya.
Arthur, the accountant, has taken charge of their situation and imposes rules on these people. It's OK, and they get by, but he becomes more and more unhinged and demands to be worshiped like a God. What will happen? Who cares. I had to force myself to finish it.
This wasn't very well-written, and sometimes the author just went off onto a tangent about his thoughts on theater, law enforcement, whatever. I kept forgetting the who the characters were because they weren't well-crafted.
I was given this book because I love books where 99% of humanity dies, but this didn't hit the spot.
In a drought-ravaged world, a wacky rainmaker may or may not be responsible for turning things around too well - nonstop rainstorms that flood the earth. Some guy, our narrator, makes it to some kind of survivor's camp, but then leaves on an inflatable raft with a woman he meets, Sonya. She's a dancer, and although they were brought together by coincidence, of course they become lovers.
They're picked up by this weird boat that at one point was sponsored by a food company trying to prove that a person can survive only on their processed food product. The ship's captain was trying to circumnavigate the earth (or something like that) with a ship full of that food and other survival supplies. Then the rain started, and that sucks, but he was set. He picked up a bunch more people: a married couple, a man of the cloth, a smart accountant, a dumb bodybuilder, and maybe a few more, it was too boring to remember. Plus now our hero whose name escapes me, that's how dull he is, and Sonya.
Arthur, the accountant, has taken charge of their situation and imposes rules on these people. It's OK, and they get by, but he becomes more and more unhinged and demands to be worshiped like a God. What will happen? Who cares. I had to force myself to finish it.
This wasn't very well-written, and sometimes the author just went off onto a tangent about his thoughts on theater, law enforcement, whatever. I kept forgetting the who the characters were because they weren't well-crafted.
I was given this book because I love books where 99% of humanity dies, but this didn't hit the spot.
July 24, 2013
Wow, did those of you who rated this actually read it? I found the author's style superb and I couldn't stop reading this short book set in I believe England. A book that reveals who people are and what they become.
The rain continues to fall, flooding everything uninhabitable and our way of life changes. What do you do? Do remain and wait out the rain? Do let go of your old life and set off for an adventure? Do you seek out people or isolate yourself in attempts to control everything? Do you let the rain drive you insane?
What happens After the Rain?
This is a MUST read book that I can foretell that I will read a dozen more times!
The rain continues to fall, flooding everything uninhabitable and our way of life changes. What do you do? Do remain and wait out the rain? Do let go of your old life and set off for an adventure? Do you seek out people or isolate yourself in attempts to control everything? Do you let the rain drive you insane?
What happens After the Rain?
This is a MUST read book that I can foretell that I will read a dozen more times!
October 14, 2019
The cover, sadly, has nothing to do with the story, since it's set in England. Too Bad. Basically, it's a 'what if the Flood happened today' (well, a couple years in the future of 1958). It starts out pedestrian enough, though it's clear there's no science to be found at all... the book implies it rained for about 2 years straight. First we see what's going on in London, then the main character eventually ends up on a raft with his new girlfriend and 6 others, and hilarity ensues... sort of. I THINK it's meant to be parody, but of what I'm not sure. There's really not much of a theme, other than perhaps the people getting more and more divorced from their old reality. Eventually, there's an unexpected showdown among the characters, they find land, and we get no hint of what happens next. It's a bit amusing when the leader on the raft decides he's a god, then he isn't, and the women swoon for him, but otherwise, it's pretty blech.
November 21, 2025
A "Lord of the Flies," for adults, that doesn't convince, either as apocalyptic fiction or as a thought experiment of what people are willing to sacrifice to survive.
I love John Bowen -- I loved his novel The Girls (READ IT!! It's wonderful: link to my Goodreads review follows), and I greatly enjoyed his Hitchcock pastiche The McGuffin, so when I discovered that, early in his career, in the late 1950s, he had written a cosy catastrophe post-apocalypse novel about a band of mismatched strangers struggling to survive climatic melt-down, I just had to get my hands on it.
I also love a good "cosy catastrophe" -- "cosy catastrophe" being the slightly dismissive label that author and critic Brian Aldiss came up with to describe novels like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, novels in which SF horrors are visited upon staid, boring British suburban high streets and chocolate-box villages. They are novels whose characters invariably feature stalwarts of respectability such as a vicar, a schoolteacher and a retired military man. Lace curtains twitch as a band of plucky survivors make their way down deserted high streets (name-checking, as they go-- for local colour -- WH Smith newsagents, looted supermarkets and the forgotten department stores your grandma used to patronise ...) Every 30 pages or so, as man-eating pot plants or Martians or spooky alien-seed children are hammering at the door, someone laments the impossibility of getting a decent cup of tea. It's great fun.
So, where does this contribution to the genre go so very badly wrong? (I think the verdict of the Goodreads hive-mind -- 2.89 stars --is accurate, not to say a little generous.) Well, to be brutally honest: it's boring. Very, very boring.
The story gets off to a good start, with a Professor Harold Hill/ Wizard of Oz-type professional rainmaker whose mysterious (not to say "scam") rainmaking device may or may not have triggered a world-wide deluge of never-ending rain that rapidly kills crops and livestock, floods low-lying cities and sends desperate people across the globe fleeing to high ground. Bowen makes it very clear that he is less interested in the "whys" than in what happens next. As his narrator (unnamed, until much later in the story -- a nod, perhaps to H.G. Wells' unnamed Narrator in War of the Worlds?), a journalist who happens to have witnessed the catastrophic launch of the scammers rain-making device, says
Look, it is a bit far-fetched. ... It could be that somebody's lit a fire under the polar ice-caps. It could be that something funny has happened to the pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic. It could be that a whole new Continent has appeared, and we're getting the displaced water. Which do you prefer, Bob?
The narrator flees London and, with a young lady he rescues from the flood (and instantly falls madly in love -- of course he does!) together set off across the ever-rising water in a dinghy, and are rescued in their turn by the odd-ball residents of a well-stocked raft.
And this is where, to mix metaphors, the wheels come off.
The power of a well-done CC is in the painfully ordinary, relatable people, put into impossible, unimaginable danger and struggling to hold on to their humanity, however flawed that may be. The characters of After the Rain never make the leap from caricatures of a certain kind of middle-class Briton of the 1950s to someone we might honestly care about.
Two stars because there are flashes of humour and quirkiness: the well-stocked raft is the result of a publicity campaign for a product called Glub-- "the Ideal Breakfast Food, You Need No Other" -- that sent its representative on a solo round the world voyage, surviving only on its variants
Glub Grits, Glub Cushions, Glub Toasties, Glub Flakes, Poppity Glub for little ones, Glub Mash and of course the new Glub in a Matchbox-- a Week's Nourishment in Your Pants Pocket...
Is it any wonder that, surviving on this, the residents of the raft go a little bit crazy? I also liked the fact that it's pretty obvious from the off that ballet dancer Sonya is less besotted with Narrator John than he is with her (obvious to anyone but John, that is), and she would smile her dreamy smile for anyone who offered her a better chance of survival.
My review of The Girls: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I love John Bowen -- I loved his novel The Girls (READ IT!! It's wonderful: link to my Goodreads review follows), and I greatly enjoyed his Hitchcock pastiche The McGuffin, so when I discovered that, early in his career, in the late 1950s, he had written a cosy catastrophe post-apocalypse novel about a band of mismatched strangers struggling to survive climatic melt-down, I just had to get my hands on it.
I also love a good "cosy catastrophe" -- "cosy catastrophe" being the slightly dismissive label that author and critic Brian Aldiss came up with to describe novels like John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, novels in which SF horrors are visited upon staid, boring British suburban high streets and chocolate-box villages. They are novels whose characters invariably feature stalwarts of respectability such as a vicar, a schoolteacher and a retired military man. Lace curtains twitch as a band of plucky survivors make their way down deserted high streets (name-checking, as they go-- for local colour -- WH Smith newsagents, looted supermarkets and the forgotten department stores your grandma used to patronise ...) Every 30 pages or so, as man-eating pot plants or Martians or spooky alien-seed children are hammering at the door, someone laments the impossibility of getting a decent cup of tea. It's great fun.
So, where does this contribution to the genre go so very badly wrong? (I think the verdict of the Goodreads hive-mind -- 2.89 stars --is accurate, not to say a little generous.) Well, to be brutally honest: it's boring. Very, very boring.
The story gets off to a good start, with a Professor Harold Hill/ Wizard of Oz-type professional rainmaker whose mysterious (not to say "scam") rainmaking device may or may not have triggered a world-wide deluge of never-ending rain that rapidly kills crops and livestock, floods low-lying cities and sends desperate people across the globe fleeing to high ground. Bowen makes it very clear that he is less interested in the "whys" than in what happens next. As his narrator (unnamed, until much later in the story -- a nod, perhaps to H.G. Wells' unnamed Narrator in War of the Worlds?), a journalist who happens to have witnessed the catastrophic launch of the scammers rain-making device, says
Look, it is a bit far-fetched. ... It could be that somebody's lit a fire under the polar ice-caps. It could be that something funny has happened to the pressure at the bottom of the Atlantic. It could be that a whole new Continent has appeared, and we're getting the displaced water. Which do you prefer, Bob?
The narrator flees London and, with a young lady he rescues from the flood (and instantly falls madly in love -- of course he does!) together set off across the ever-rising water in a dinghy, and are rescued in their turn by the odd-ball residents of a well-stocked raft.
And this is where, to mix metaphors, the wheels come off.
The power of a well-done CC is in the painfully ordinary, relatable people, put into impossible, unimaginable danger and struggling to hold on to their humanity, however flawed that may be. The characters of After the Rain never make the leap from caricatures of a certain kind of middle-class Briton of the 1950s to someone we might honestly care about.
Two stars because there are flashes of humour and quirkiness: the well-stocked raft is the result of a publicity campaign for a product called Glub-- "the Ideal Breakfast Food, You Need No Other" -- that sent its representative on a solo round the world voyage, surviving only on its variants
Glub Grits, Glub Cushions, Glub Toasties, Glub Flakes, Poppity Glub for little ones, Glub Mash and of course the new Glub in a Matchbox-- a Week's Nourishment in Your Pants Pocket...
Is it any wonder that, surviving on this, the residents of the raft go a little bit crazy? I also liked the fact that it's pretty obvious from the off that ballet dancer Sonya is less besotted with Narrator John than he is with her (obvious to anyone but John, that is), and she would smile her dreamy smile for anyone who offered her a better chance of survival.
My review of The Girls: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
August 19, 2019
This is not, as the cover would make it, action-based pulp fiction. Instead it is a novel of ideas which explores a second deluge and the ethical dilemmas it creates. Most of the plot and discussion take place with a handful of characters stuck together on a large raft, so it's not unlike one of those Huxley novel about the guests at a party sharing their views or a Shavian or Sartrean colloquy in Hell. An even closer metaphor might be the medieval ship of fools. But this novel is not in the same league as those in either social insight or novelistic technique. For a more successful version of the conversation or dialogue novel, I'd recommend Huxley's Crome Yellow or Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. And the most successful works combining of action and philosophical dialogue remain Robert Stone's first three novels.
April 30, 2021
Voor een boek uit 1958 is dit verassend verfrissend. Geloofwaardige personages en hun interacties na een onvoorstelbare ramp. Het doet denken aan de Blindeman van Hugo Claus. De plot word op de achterflap bijna volledig uit de doeken gedaan, er ontbreekt slechts een regeltje aan. Maar de plot is misschien ook niet zo belangrijk als wat er gebeurt als een handjevol mensen wekenlang op elkaars lip zitten. Hier en daar is het wat prekerig, maar ik heb het met veel genoegen gelezen. Het heeft later ook nog een toneelstuk voortgebracht dat zich 200 jaar later afspeelt, dat ik graag een keer gezien had.
August 14, 2023
De regen viel na een lange periode van droogte. Het stopte niet. Overal ter wereld was de zon verduisterd en bleef het regenen. De Grote Overstroming maakte de wereld onleefbaar voor de aardse bewoners. 'Misschien heeft iemand wel een vuurtje onder de poolkappen gestookt.'
John Bowen schreef After the rain (Na de regens) in 1958. Een sciencefictionroman én klimaatroman avant la lettre. Stylistisch niet sterk genoeg om literatuur genoemd te worden volgens sommigen. Ik heb persoonlijk genoten van de verbeeldingskracht, de over-de-top symboliek, de onverholen maatschappijkritiek en de psychologie van de mens op zijn slechtst.
Bowen waarschuwde indirect voor de vernietigende invloed van de mens. Voor een mogelijke herhaling van de recente geschiedenis (WO I / II). De Watersnoodramp in 1953 zal ongetwijfeld een inspiratiebron geweest zijn.
John Bowen schreef After the rain (Na de regens) in 1958. Een sciencefictionroman én klimaatroman avant la lettre. Stylistisch niet sterk genoeg om literatuur genoemd te worden volgens sommigen. Ik heb persoonlijk genoten van de verbeeldingskracht, de over-de-top symboliek, de onverholen maatschappijkritiek en de psychologie van de mens op zijn slechtst.
Bowen waarschuwde indirect voor de vernietigende invloed van de mens. Voor een mogelijke herhaling van de recente geschiedenis (WO I / II). De Watersnoodramp in 1953 zal ongetwijfeld een inspiratiebron geweest zijn.
December 31, 2024
Sort of a blend of Lord of the Flies (though the grown-ups behave much worse than kids) and a John Wyndham catastrophe story (only with no cosiness whatsoever). The story develops along somewhat contrived lines but it becomes an effective parody of how somebody with enough (unjustified) conviction can get elevated to the status of prophet.
April 16, 2025
Köpte i random bokhandel i Berlin, cool vintage upplaga som jag läste klart hela av på flyget hem och sedan glömde. Underhållande lite post-apocalyptisk bok som inte tar sig själv för seriöst.
January 11, 2016
I thought there were a couple parts thAt were pretty greet, but the majority of this book was quite DRY hahaha get it? It's about the flood happening again, get it? The end wrapped up incredibly quick too, I liked the ending but wish it woulda later longer. (My ex wife says the same thing :/) but I will say I loved the "tigers of jealousy" part and I'll type it out here...also not a spoiler
"Now the tigers of jealousy began to invade my mind, and I was too weak to keep them out.
Company would have helped to keep the tigers away, but I shunned company, lying for long hours on the deck feigning sleep, turning my face away from others and hugging my arms close to my chest as if I loved the tigers and wanted to keep them with me always. And the tigers would walk through my mind endlessly, delicately, waving their tails and conjuring up pictures for me. The tigers themselves did not rend me, but the pictures they made were hurtful.
Jealousy needs no nourishment from outside. The memory of a long past indiscretion, a misheard sentence-the tigers only need a single puff of air to give them life, and after that they make their own. For almost as long as I had lived, these tigers had lurked between the surface of my mind, awaiting only the excuse for life and now they had it, they were my tigers. They were part of me. Bone, flesh,, and pelt were made out of my own insecurities, my own deep knowledge that I was not a person to be loved easily, or sincerely, or for long."
I got this book out of a livres gratuit boite in some small town near the Cevenes. 3,000 marches.
"Now the tigers of jealousy began to invade my mind, and I was too weak to keep them out.
Company would have helped to keep the tigers away, but I shunned company, lying for long hours on the deck feigning sleep, turning my face away from others and hugging my arms close to my chest as if I loved the tigers and wanted to keep them with me always. And the tigers would walk through my mind endlessly, delicately, waving their tails and conjuring up pictures for me. The tigers themselves did not rend me, but the pictures they made were hurtful.
Jealousy needs no nourishment from outside. The memory of a long past indiscretion, a misheard sentence-the tigers only need a single puff of air to give them life, and after that they make their own. For almost as long as I had lived, these tigers had lurked between the surface of my mind, awaiting only the excuse for life and now they had it, they were my tigers. They were part of me. Bone, flesh,, and pelt were made out of my own insecurities, my own deep knowledge that I was not a person to be loved easily, or sincerely, or for long."
I got this book out of a livres gratuit boite in some small town near the Cevenes. 3,000 marches.
September 13, 2013
The premise was interesting enough: Unstoppable rain. For a very, very, very long time. Cities were covered with water, leaving only those who could find a way to survive on some sort of water craft with limited supplies. And then the rain stops. And the door is wide open for a wonderful way to explore human nature at its most desperate.
But, alas, the author did not deliver. The writing itself is technically good, but it lacked much substance. I was dying for some sort of connection to a character so I could actually care about what happened to all of those aboard the raft, but there was nothing. Halfway through the story, I realized I didn't know the name of the lead character. That's not okay in my world of reading.
So much potential for a story that is Lord of the Flies (with adults) crossed with Waterworld (sadly without Dennis Hopper), yet so poorly executed.
But, alas, the author did not deliver. The writing itself is technically good, but it lacked much substance. I was dying for some sort of connection to a character so I could actually care about what happened to all of those aboard the raft, but there was nothing. Halfway through the story, I realized I didn't know the name of the lead character. That's not okay in my world of reading.
So much potential for a story that is Lord of the Flies (with adults) crossed with Waterworld (sadly without Dennis Hopper), yet so poorly executed.
April 11, 2016
When an attempt to cause rain during a drought in Texas goes a bit too well, it doesn't stop raining. Ever. Gradually the waters rise and society grinds to a halt. The bulk of the story involves a group of English people trying to survive the flood. The main character has a bit of a stroke of luck in my opinion, in the way he survives, but I guess someone has to in these situations! The second half of the book is more slow going and the behaviour of the characters becomes increasingly odd as they lose their connections to their previous lives. I'm not really sure what that was all about, but it's written well and it made me keep reading even though not much happens for long periods. Slightly dated and a bit of a lame ending in some respects, but an interesting apocalyptic fiction story.
May 21, 2010
I read this a long time ago but just recently picked up a copy of it. It's a post apocolyptic novel in which enduring rain leads to a world wide deluge. I don't remember a lot about it. It may be better than my 2 star rating, but here's how I arrived at 2. I know I didn't hate it or I would have remembered that, and I know I didn't absolutely love it or I would have remembered that. But since I've kept it on my list for this long I must have liked it OK. So there you have it.
August 4, 2014
This is definitely a case of not being able to judge a book by it's cover. I have had this paperback a long time and finally got around to reading it. It was not what I expected. Spoiler alert, the cover is the best part of this book and it doesn't have anything to do with the story. This is more a social commentary about a group of strangers/survivors. I was very disappointed. It is not your normal disaster/end of the civilization story.
January 22, 2016
As far as post-apocalyptic books are concerned: the plot's not great. But damn is the writing style entertaining. It's much more a book about the human condition, and how our judgements change to our circumstances.
September 5, 2020
I first read this book in London, England in 1968. I brought it with me to Canada when I emigrated and just reread it. I think it is really well written and is appropriate for the Covid time...! Amazing how adults can turn into children and be overwhelmed with fear so quickly by events unknown.
April 6, 2011
Hardbound script
A world wide deluge strikes human civilization.
A world wide deluge strikes human civilization.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews