The End of Men ARC Review

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

Pub. date: April 27, 2020

Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Mild Spoilers

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me a copy of The End of Men in exchange for an honest review.

The year is 2025, and a mysterious virus has broken out in Scotland--a lethal illness that seems to affect only men. When Dr. Amanda MacLean reports this phenomenon, she is dismissed as hysterical. By the time her warning is heeded, it is too late. The virus becomes a global pandemic--and a political one. The victims are all men. The world becomes alien--a women's world. (Summary from Goodreads)

In eliminating the world’s men, author Christina Sweeney-Baird is free to explore the grief and loss of those who are left to recover in a broken world. The End of Men is divided into sections that linearly follow the virus’s initial outbreak to how women (and a handful of men) are left to rebuild society. From a worldbuilding and pacing perspective, Sweeney-Baird balances the rush of panic in the early days and the long recovery afterwards. 

My only structural complaint is the use of “Day 2”, “Day 105,” etc. to describe how long it took to cure the plague. I found this to be difficult to read after the 60% mark when the dates begin to read long numbers like “Day 1,168.” The days in the thousands gave me little indication of seasons or other yearly indicators, and overall added little to my reading experience. 

Though The End of Men had a strong start, the more characters that were added to the story the more I found the narrative difficult to follow. More than a dozen first person narrators from numerous countries make up the cast, yet the characters had very little to differentiate their perspectives. There wasn’t one character with enough emotional depth to pull me into the story, which is unfortunate considering this is a character-driven story. 

Furthermore, most of the characters are directly connected to the virus as healthcare professionals, professors, journalists, scientists, and somehow all of them are connected to each other. I was itching to hear more about the everyday lives of the common people, which would have given a wider perspective to the world.

One of the other issues I had with The End of Men stems from the line: “You know, we don’t pretend that women are suddenly all gay now. There’s no doubt that female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality is.” (300). For context, a tech engineer built an app to connect women after many lost their partners in the pandemic. While she is the only character to say this line, the implication undermines the fluidity of sexuality regardless of gender. This one case is representative of the lack of nuance in the discussion of gender within the book. From the beginning of the book, I wondered how the subject of trans and non-binary people would be treated because to me, to reduce people to their biological sex ignores a lot of the complexities of the human experience. 

Turns out, trans people got one chapter in the last quarter of the book. In the chapter, a doctor offers a brief, extremely straightforward explanation of how the pandemic affected the LGBT+ community. To read about the mass deaths and suicides of gay and trans people without actually hearing their first-hand experience past the transwoman who recounts the statistics of their deaths really sucked. The narrator of this chapter, another doctor who is collecting stories of the pandemic, speaks with little emotion and brushes off the doctor’s experience of watching her community break apart as just another tragedy of the pandemic. Out of all the issues I had with The End of Men, this is the one I wish had been resolved. 

 

Both fortunately and unfortunately for Sweeney-Baird, she began to write this book in 2019, months before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. This fact is super interesting to me because there are parts of The End of Men that reflect exactly what is going on right now in our world, yet there were other parts that felt unrealistic due to my experience with the pandemic. One of the times I actually felt lucky to live in our current world was reading that The End of Men’s vaccine took over 672 days to develop. One of the choices I thought didn’t age well was Sweeney-Baird’s explanation of the origin of the plague. In The End of Men, the plague emerged from an illegal op where a poor fisherman aided in smuggling exotic monkeys into the UK. My issue was that the leader of the operation was blamed for the pandemic. I found this perspective fails to address the other systems that bring about the need for some to choose smuggling. Plus, the surviving smuggler (who is immune to the disease,) is put in jail for life, but the question of who ordered the monkeys is never asked.  

Sweeney-Baird’s exploration of the issues and prejudices that could affect a world without men are some of the most interesting parts of the book. For example, women without a husband or children receive hate because they supposedly didn’t lose anything in the plague. It shows how the patriarchy is internalized within so many individuals. The ability to analyze the extent of male dominance and authority over most of the world is furthered once they all die. I also enjoyed the child allotment scandal where sperm donations were planned to be distributed to women in relationships with the resources to provide for their children. The scandal was fixed by creating daycare and education systems to support parents. This was just one of dozens of situations faced by the characters, and definitely kept me interested in what happened next.

Rating 3/5: I’d recommend The End of Men to fans of World War Z, as the two books have a similar storytelling structure. Though there were parts of this book that moved slow or had problematic elements, I genuinely enjoyed the novel's exploration of a pandemic-ridden world.