The End of Men

Christina Sweeney-Baird

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, July 1st 2021

With the first draft completed in 2019, British lawyer Christina Sweeny-Baird’s debut novel, which describes the effects of a global viral pandemic, has been 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 emergence 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 new-borns into quarantine until an effective vaccine is available).

Some voices appear once or twice to highlight particular scenarios, such as what you might do if your scum-of-the-earth husband turns out to be immune. Others are recurring and carry the reader through the arc of the outbreak: Amanda, the Scottish doctor who tries in vain to alert authorities to the cluster of deaths that mark the virus’s first appearance; Elizabeth, a junior staffer from the CDC who finds herself Deputy Director of the UK’s Plague Vaccine Development Task Force; 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 seatbelts 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 Sweeny-Baird chose the wrong one. The observation that men succumb to the virus while women are asymptomatic carriers could be explained by the presence of a gene on the Y-chromosome that renders them vulnerable, with a small proportion of men carrying protective variants. In this story, however, resistance is carried on the X chromosome and, although all women must have at least one protective copy or they, too, would fall ill, they only pass it on to 10% of their sons. Given that Sweeny-Baird’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). Still, 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.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/end-men-and-stranding