Author and lawyer Christina Sweeney-Baird’s tale of a world-altering pandemic was eerily prescient but the writer was careful to separate her imagined world and the reality of Covid-19.
London-based Christina (29) had always wanted to write and spent much of her childhood scribbling. She says that she worked on, “the beginnings of novels and essays all through my teens. I’ve also always journaled since I was eight; I have a chronological shelf of over 30 journals covering over 20 years.”
She penned her first novel while she was training to be a lawyer. “I never had an idea that was The One, I just wanted to know if I could write a novel and actually finish a piece of work. Then I had the idea for The End of Men and I knew it could really be something; I was so excited by the idea. What does the world look like without 90% of its men?”
Pandemic with a twist
End of Men takes the idea of a pandemic and adds an extra twist – what if the disease working its way through the population was more dangerous for men than women? As her novel was moving towards publication, the very real Covid situation was unfolding around the world, something that Christina found: “completely surreal at first, especially when there started to be reports that men were more likely to be affected by Covid than women.
“Although I tried to keep the book I had written and the experience of early 2020 compartmentalised for my own sanity. And I do think Covid is very different from The End of Men; the gender elements of the novel’s page change the world’s response so very quickly the book doesn’t resemble anything we’ve actually experienced.”
The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird.Christina’s pandemic begins with a patient zero on the Isle of Bute, with much of the novel’s action centred on the city of Glasgow, a location that is close to her heart. “I wanted to ground the story in a place that’s familiar to me,” she explains. “I know Glasgow very well having grown up there and there’s a particular sensibility to Glaswegians that I wanted to write.
“The Glaswegian character, Dr Amanda Maclean, is funny, wry and no-nonsense. And I had gone on holiday to the Isle of Bute and been struck by how remote and beautiful it was. It seemed like such a juxtaposition: this awful plague starting in this place of natural beauty.”
Multiple voices
Rather than focussing on one viewpoint, Christina has chosen to tell the story through several different voices. “I think because of the breadth of the story. It’s such a huge question – what does the world look like without men? One narrator would inevitably limit the answer to one country and one person’s experience,” she says.
“I wanted to explore the global aspects of the story and also have different women and men’s perspectives: how would it change things if you were a doctor? A politician? A mother of two boys? A man stuck on a boat in Iceland?”
Christina says that she found the concept of building a fictional world based around women and their needs exciting. She was able to address everything from the small things like the, “phone too big for my hands to the huge concerns: Sexism in medicine and medical research which literally puts women’s lives at risk. The broken childcare system. Structural sexism and sexual harassment…”
Finding balance
Still continuing with her law career Christina says that she is enjoying the balance of writing and legal work so far. “I’m working on my next novel, which I hope to complete (very!) soon. I think I’ll keep both going for now – as they say, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!”
The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird, is out in paperback on May 12, published by Borough Press.
