The End Of Men, by Christina Sweeney-Baird

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★ (of 5)

Full Title: The End Of Men
Author: Christina Sweeney-Baird
Year: 2021 (mine was 2021 trade paperback)
Pages: 387*
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin Random House)
ISBN 9780593328132 (trade paperback)

(* 387 pages does not include Author’s Note, Acknowledgements, Discussion Guide, or “A Conversation With Christina Sweeney-Baird”)

Summary

The debut novel from a British corporate litigation attorney, The End Of Men explores the “what if?” idea of a deadly virus that only kills biological human males, those with Y chromosomes. First breaking out in Scotland, the virus spreads and kills rapidly as officials ignore the earliest warnings of a woman doctor (her calls and emails are deemed “hysterical”) and soon spreads around the world as governments take far too long to respond to the pandemic. The story is told via a series of rotating first-person narratives, with a handful of newspaper articles sprinkled in, and one blog entry by a men’s rights activist. Approximately 10% of human males are naturally immune, and handfuls of males here and there survive through isolation until a vaccine is developed, but the global population plummets devastatingly over the next few years and every society changes completely.

Note that the book is not related to The End Of Men, a non-fiction 2010 book by journalist Hanna Rosin arguing that women “won the gender war”.

It did remind me a little of The Children Of Men, P.D. James’ 1992 novel later made into a 2006 movie starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. In that one, something caused total infertility in humans, resulting in massive societal changes and global population collapse. I suppose that in addition to a similar title and similar “what if” proposition, the fact that it was set primarily in England served to remind me of it when I read The End Of Men.

Further note: This isn’t a “Covid novel” — the text was primarily written in 2018-19, finishing in June 2019, many months before Covid-19 was on anyone’s radar. She wrote her Author’s Note in April 2020, expressing the surreal experience of publishing such a novel just as the real-life pandemic was hitting hard.

The Good

As a Big Idea speculative fiction story, I thought the proposition was handled well and accurately. IF this one thing happens (the male-killing virus), then what follows is the logical and expected result. In my experience, many what-if novels fail right there, in the only crucial point of this type of story, by immediately following with things that most likely would not happen in the case of the opening what-if. Here, Sweeney-Baird clearly thought out the consequences of such a pandemic, and also considered how different people would react differently.

The characters represent varying economic and ethnic backgrounds (though most are white women in the UK), and so the story ranges through a variety of experiences. Due to the 90% kill rate of the virus, most characters lose the men in their lives — husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, bosses, coworkers, etc. But due to the 10% immunity rate, most of them know at least one surviving male, which leads to interesting situations. (What if you’re the only woman on the block whose husband or son survived? You will be experience the pandemic differently than other women.)

Though it came somewhat late, the book also looks at how such a pandemic might affect the LGBTQ+ community. Gay men become a far more distinct minority than they once were, for example, while lesbians remain unaffected (and in fact increase in numbers due to wider exploration by women who had never previously considered it). Trans men don’t have a Y chromosome and so are unaffected; trans women do have the Y chromosome and so suffer the same death rate as cis men.

Sweeney-Baird didn’t fail either on the primary thing I was looking for: percentages of men and women in various job types and how such a virus changes things. Militaries around the world, primarily men, were decimated (especially higher-ranking officers who are almost entirely male). Governments in male-dominated nations (most of them) fell apart overnight. (Nations with high proportions of women in leadership were relatively stable.) Some jobs are heavily male-dominated — and some of those, like garbage truck driving, are extremely crucial. Most nations had to institute some form of a civil “draft” to get women quickly trained for the roles that the dead men left behind. Other male-dominated roles, like airline pilot, turned out to not affect society much because the planes would be grounded anyway during the worst of the pandemic. (And would return only slowly later, as enough women could be trained to replace them.) None of this was handled as info-dumps; it was all part of the narrative and dealt with realistically.

There were also some enjoyable epiphany moments, when one of the characters discovers that, Oh! This is what this situation will be like without men! Commuting on a subway, seeing the police arrive, or politicians ironing things out in a back room — all of these situations typically involve a majority of males but now they feel different with only women in the room or including only a handful of immune men. Or how the power differential has changed between the biological sexes — now it is men (those rare ones who are still alive) who get approached regularly in public places by strangers asking them out. One moment in particular that stood out to me was when Catherine took her young son to a remote village to hide away in hopes that little Theodore wouldn’t catch the plague. She stayed in an empty house owned by a friend. Late at night, a man broke into the home, terrifying Catherine (Theodore slept peacefully through all this). Catherine confronts the burglar and suddenly realizes that the man is afraid of her — because he’s hiding out from the plague and she might be a carrier. She assures him that she is a carrier and that she will spit on him or bleed on him or whatever is necessary, and the horrified man runs away.

“This must be what men used to feel like. My mere physical presence is enough to terrify someone into running. No wonder they used to get drunk on it.”
—page 129-130

Points Off For...

The first thing that put me off was my own fault: I wasn’t expecting such a heavily British text and the first few characters who first-person narrated the book used quite a few words and phrases that made the going slow for me. (I know “A&E” only as a TV channel that I’ve never watched, and it required several instances of it in this book before contextual clues taught me that it referred to some sort of English hospital establishment. This is just one of many examples.) Then I was impressed when an American character showed up and the author switched “mum” to “mom” and “grey” to “gray”, along with a host of other changes to seem more American. But that was also a bit distracting, since I kept catching slips — like when she uses “fortnight” in the American’s narration. I have never heard a U.S. English speaker utter “fortnight” in casual conversation, and I would be surprised if you have (unless it was used ironically or humorously somehow, or misspelled as the name of a video game). And these terms kept on coming throughout the book. What the hell is a “hen do”? And apparently “got the floods” means “began crying”. On and on.

Next was the problem inherent in using multiple first-person narrators. Sure, each chapter is named for the woman narrating it, but most of the names screamed “generic white woman” to me — Catherine, Amanda, Lisa, Elizabeth, Dawn, Helen (one of them turned out to be Black, but I can’t remember which one). It was easy for me to forget which one was which. (Weirdly, the men seemed to get slightly less common names which made them easier to remember.) And none of the chapters began by reminding me which woman this one is; I just had to read until a text clue dropped. (Oh! *This* one is the A and E doctor.) To me, many of the characters’ narration voices sounded identical.

The entire book was in the present tense (except for narration of memories), which is always unnerving to me outside children’s books.

There was unnecessary repetition, partly caused by switching back and forth between first-person narrators. Those text clues that reminded me which woman was narrating tended to be the same ones each time, so there were numerous instances of being reminded that Catherine misses her dead husband Anthony (or was it Will? I honestly don’t remember which one Will was married to before he died, which seems like something I should remember). And one of them is really jealous of her friend Phoebe, because Phoebe’s husband was immune and they had only daughters so no one died in that household. I was told that part too many times. (Clearly it worked, because I remember it now, but each time I thought: I have to be told this again?)

A lot of the action happened off-screen, so to speak. This wasn’t consistent; in some parts the narration describes direct action, as in the confrontation between Catherine and the burglar mentioned above, but in many places whatever had happened was done and the narration is just what Catherine (or Amanda or Lisa or whoever) felt about it and what they plan to do about it: entirely thoughts and emotions. I do enjoy some inner dialog with first-person narration, but whole chapters shouldn’t be that.

And, finally, the ending seemed weak. Which reminded me that the opening was weak too. The opening was one of the women shopping for Halloween costumes and wondering how much effort the other mothers put into their own Halloween costumes (this was in 2025, so maybe she should have just searched for it online?) The ending was Catherine’s foreword to a book she wrote — she’s an anthropologist trying to make sense of the whole thing — and the foreword just wasn’t very good. It opens: “I’ve sat at my desk for many days, wondering how to write this introduction. The book is finished, the manuscript complete, yet the beginning escapes me...” That’s something you think or tell a friend, not something you put in your book. It meanders on to where she dedicates the book to her dead husband and son because she thinks about them a lot.

Conclusion

As I read, my opinion was all over the place about what to rate the book. The opening was a one or two, but once the plague started I jumped to a four. Then there were several three-star chapters, and a couple of five-star bits. Back to two, then four! Taking everything into consideration, I had to end up with three stars. The Big Idea was big indeed and thoroughly examined. The emotions in places were raw and pulsing. The characters felt real for the most part, though most of their inner voices sounded alike to me. (Lisa was a huge exception.) But the downsides were ever-present and piled up as the book went on.

I’ve heard that Sweeney-Baird has sold the TV and/or movie rights to the story. I am curious to see how that turns out. Done well, I think the movie could be quite enjoyable (or even as a limited-episode TV series).