THE END OF MEN
Christina Sweeney-Baird
HarperCollins
THE STRANDING
Kate Sawyer
Hachette
REVIEWED BY CUSHLA McKINNEY
With the first draft completed in 2019, British lawyer Christina Sweeney-Baird’s debut novel, which describes the effects of a global viral pandemic has found itself overtaken by events.
The End of Men chronicles an outbreak far more devastating than Covid-19, however. The Plague, as it is known, is highly contagious and has an exquisite specificity; females act as asymptomatic vectors whilst 90% of males die within days of exposure.
The story is told from multiple points of view in a series of first-person narratives that span the years between the outbreak’s mergence in the winter of 2025 to its defeat, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, in 2032. Their stories provide snapshots of a world in flux as governments scramble to maintain essential services - surgeons and garbage truck drivers are in especially short supply - and resort to desperate measures to protect the vulnerable (New Zealand does this particularly effectively by performing C-sections without informed consent and whisking newborns into quarantine until an effective vaccine is available).
Our main player are: Amanda, the Scottish doctor who tries in vain to alert authorities to the virus’s first appearance; Elizabeth, a junior staffer who finds herself Deputy Director of the UK’s Plague Vaccine Development Task Force; and Catherine, the anthropologist who overcomes her paralysing grief by collecting the testimonies that form the basis of the novel.
The book’s portraits of women struggling to come to terms with the loss of fathers, husbands, brothers and sons are compelling and tragic, and the question of how society might reconfigure itself is an intriguing one. Aside from finally having seat-belts and body armour designed for the female form, how would political structures, work, relationships, intimacy, reproduction and motherhood change in a female-dominated society, and what does it say about our world today?
Unfortunately all this good work is negated by some egregiously bad science.
I could almost forgive the fact that it takes researchers four months to realise susceptibility is determined by the sex chromosomes were it not for the fact that Sweeney-Baird chooses the wrong one.
Given the author’s expertise is in law rather than medicine, I can overlook this violation of ‘‘basic genetic logic’’ (to quote the researcher who identifies the genetic determinants of susceptibility), but I am amazed it was not picked up during editing.
Indeed, from the breathless cover declaration that “only men carry the virus” to the assertion that the only way to defeat the virus is to find a vaccine that is 100% effective, The End of Men is riddled with scientific errors and they significantly undermined my ability to engage with the novelistic world.
It opens with two strangers watching helplessly as a stranded whale draws her final breath, the sky above them burning pink with their own approaching death, a fate they will cheat by sheltering within the cetacean’s all-enveloping maw. This single, timeless moment forms a fulcrum around which the novel pivots, one storyline tracing the woman, Ruth’s, path from the bustling heart of London to this isolated Northland beach, the other following her and her new companion Nik as they emerge from their refuge and carve a place for themselves for themselves in the ash-filled landscape, maybe the only people left on Earth.
Told in the intimate first person and primarily from Ruth’s perspective, the focus is not so much on the pair’s survival as on the relationships between them, and on Ruth’s discovery of her own inner strength and purpose. The London sections of the novel reveal a life lacking in direction or commitment; a job as a primary school teacher that is more an occupation than a vocation and an affair with a married man that quickly progresses from romantically illicit to controlled and stifling. The New Zealand passages trace Nik and Ruth’s relationship as it moves from mutual dependence into partnership and love.
What exactly has destroyed humanity is never made explicit; Ruth is aware of increasing geopolitical tensions but deliberately avoids following the news, and the end for Britain comes while she is in transit New Zealand, leaving her in ignorance. Nik, too, has has been living in deliberate isolation from the world, and his own past remains by and large a mystery. There are glimpses of the loss and grief that bought him to a lonely shore at the end of the world, but what they build between them has its foundations in the shared present rather than the individual pasts.
Although this is Sawyer’s first novel, her background in stage and screen is evident throughout. Her language is rich and evocative, with the sense that every word serves a purpose and, while the landscape as seen through Ruth’s eyes is not iconically New Zealand, it is vividly and tangibly described.
The plot may not have the circumstantial immediacy of The End of Men, but it tells a compelling tale whose strength lies as much in what is unsaid as in what is on the page. The Stranding is a novel whose depth and authenticity allowed me to lose myself in its reality, a blend of love, loss and hope from which I was reluctant to emerge.
Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist
