The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

A RACE AGAINST TIME
The year is 2025. Mankind is under threat.

A FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES
Men are dying, but women remain safe. As the sickness spreads to every corner of the globe, people fight to protect the men they love against all odds.

A DISASTER LIKE NO OTHER
Can they find a cure before it’s too late?  Will this be the story of the end of the world – or its salvation?

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What an absolutely brilliant novel this is! It somehow passed me by when it was first published in 2021, but I’m glad that it finally found its way to me because it’s a novel that I loved from beginning to end.

It starts in November 2025 when an A&E consultant starts to see a trend in the deaths of several patients, all of them male and in good health until very recently. She raises her concerns that this might be something big, and is summarily dismissed. Amanda is very quickly proved to be something of a Cassandra when her fears are validated, but by then it’s too late as this new virus has already run rampant throughout the UK and beyond.  The quirk is that while women may carry and spread the virus, they are unaffected by it and men – no matter what their age or health – have a very low level of natural immunity resulting in a high mortality rate.  The virus is brutal and devastating in its impact, and leaves the reader with a terrifying scenario to consider. 

The author has chosen to tell this story from multiple points of view – something which I personally loved.  Some characters are recurring, others we hear from only once, but using multiple points of view allows the reader to consider how lives are impacted across a broad spectrum of scenarios.  This includes the doctors, scientists, and virologists who seek to understand the virus, why it only affects men, and the push to develop a vaccine.  These sections are fascinating, even as the attempts to understand the virus fail for so long.  Amanda’s point of view is one that we return to multiple times throughout the novel and I loved her determination to identify the source of the virus, despite – or perhaps because of – the way in which her initial concerns were dismissed at a time when it could have made a difference.   

What really makes this novel stand out for me is that we see not just the “big moments” around vaccines and the government policies issued to mitigate risk as far as possible, but also the way in which it explores the minutiae of everyday lives and how the average person might be affected, rendering the novel more relatable for the average reader.  These range from the children, spouses, and parents of sons as they come to expect the worse given extremely low survival rate associated with the virus, and those chapters are devastating as many experience multiples losses in a short space of time. These experiences are contrasted with those who have daughters and who are now considered more fortunate in that they have less to fear.  It’s a stark contrast to the preference for male progeny in the past (and today, in some places) where daughters may have been considered a burden by some and I couldn’t help but see this as a balancing of some of the gender inequality that we’re all familiar with.

The virus also results in a degree of role reversal which was explored brilliantly.  The careers that continue to be male-dominated have to picked up by women with many learning new skills in order to fill the gaps and to ensure that essential roles continue. And women now have a degree of power.  Where previously a woman encountering a man alone might in some circumstances feel afraid, as a potential carrier of a deadly virus, she is now unlikely to be approached, never mind anything more serious. On a lighter note, I also enjoyed the observation that those few men who do survive are now in such high demand that they can’t even go for a coffee without some women pestering them or offering them their number.  Imagine how it might feel to be constantly bothered like that… (yes, I chortled!) 

The End of Men is a novel that I thoroughly enjoyed.  It explores a scenario that’s very different to our own experiences from the last few years, and yet there’s enough in there that will feel familiar to the reader in the notions of quarantines and social distancing that moves the novel away from being purely theoretical.  I loved it, and in particular seeing how different people cope with the situation, whatever their personal circumstances.  Recommended.