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70 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 71
Poison in the water
The toxic sexes in Rooney,
Boyne and Keegan:
responsible and caring is
best for man and woman
By Shane Breslin
Y
ou might have heard that old joke
about the fish in the fish-bowl: two
young fish are swimming laps,
having fun as only young fish can,
when an older fish goes by and
says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?”.
The younger fish look at one another
quizzically, then say, “What’s water?”.
Over the past few decades, the water
around all of us has changed.
Our water has been changed by the
Internet’s penetration into every small thing,
by the way a series of innovations built on top
of it, each breaking enough new ground to
have defined any other century —
smartphones to social media, blockchains to
artificial intelligence — turned every sod of
solid soil beneath our feet. Our water has
been changed too by the ocial response to
all this transformation: desperate
policymaking and regulations that try, and
fail, and fail miserably, to protect us (and,
maybe most of all, to protect the policymakers
and the regulators) from technology’s terrible
worst excesses.
But these revolutions are not our water,
because all of us are all too consciously, often
I think the phenomenon
is much bigger than John
Boyne, and much bigger
than Sally Rooney. I think
this, pervasive levels of
self-hatred, is our water
painfully, aware, of all that technology and of
the impossibly rapid changes it demands us
to keep up with.
No, our water — the thing that is everywhere
around us and yet unseen — is something
else. I suggest this thing, everywhere,
unseen, but terribly felt, is our perception of
ourselves and of what’s real, and true, and
valuable.
A while back I read in these pages a
thought-provoking essay by Nadia Whiston,
an angry riposte to how the writer Sally
Rooney treats women. For better or for worse,
Rooney has become the voice of a generation,
and Whiston, from her perspective as a young
woman, wrote persuasively about the
complexity of the issues that arise through
Rooney’s portrayal of the lives of women,
YOUNG women, young IRISH women. In that
essay, titled ‘Sally Rooney lets women down’,
she castigates the ending of Rooney’s first
novel, ‘Conversations with Friends’:
“What it says to me is that Rooney
understands women to be disposable, so
what I am talking about here for Rooney the
writer is, in fact, responsibility. For it seems
odd does it not, for a writer so young, so
modern, writing books wedded utterly to the
current, divorced utterly from the romantic,
for one seen to be so influential, to merely
reinscribe old tales of anxiety and rejection
once again into society and then to be
celebrated for them?”.
The accusation is that inverted misogyny,
a woman’s hatred of women, is recurring
throughout Rooney’s books. At its most
extreme, it goes much further: there is serious
domestic violence; there is indelible self-
loathing impelling Rooney’s women, most
notably Marianne in ‘Normal People’, to seek
out victimhood, to embrace nihilism and
corrosive sadomasochism, to become
playthings for married men, to place violent,
Furlong:
cring
Mrinne:
seeks out
victimhood
nd plces
busive
mles on
pedestl
CULTURE
70 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 71
books masquerade as truth, with the things
they present as truth making ‘Earth’, in
particular, among the most deceptive and
dangerous of books.
The second part of his Elements series
follows Evan Keogh, a young man who
escapes his godforsaken home on an island
o the west of Ireland — one of the Aran
Islands, perhaps, or maybe Inishbofin — for
life in London. Evan, who is gay, has been
dealing with the fallout of a failed attempt at
a love aair with a longtime friend and
neighbour. A talented soccer player, he
loathes the game and everything about it, and
has also been dealing with the relentlessly
oppressive judgement of his father Charlie, a
crude and bigoted football fan who had trials
at English clubs in his youth but never made
it as a pro. And despite a love for the abstract
art of Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian, and a
lifelong dream of becoming an artist — “like
a fuckin’…like a fuckin queer”, says Charlie in
one standard outburst — Evan has also been
dealing with the verdict handed to him by one
London gallerist that while he can paint, he
has none of the talent required to make it as
an artist.
More than anything, though, as we join
him, he’s been dealing with being at the
centre of the media circus surrounding a high-
profile rape trial that might look similar, in
some ways, to Nikita Hand’s case against
Conor McGregor, and a number of other trials
in recent years, most of them seeming to
involve Irish rugby players and lurid messages
shared on WhatsApp.
‘Earth’ has received plenty of admiring
reviews. On the website of Hodges Figgis, it
gets one long and gushing five-star critique
after another. It is “a gripping tale about
escaping circumstances and societal and
parental pressures” (review by Jane), “There
is not a superfluous word...The characters are
utterly convincing” (Irene), “totally
absorbing” (Nicola), “a compelling tale that’s
extraordinary in its depth” (Jill).
I don’t question the reaction of these critics
to the text. What I’m oering is the perspective
of a male reader of a text that hates men.
Because what is required of Boyne here, in a
book that takes as its subject matter issues
as explosive and divisive as these, is some
attempt at representing the truth, in all its
nuance and complexity and paradox.
Instead of the truth, though, we are given
the cliché of the Bad Man, in all his countless
abusive, domineering male characters on a
pedestal and then stay in their orbit, ready
and waiting for the next time the reward of
their attention searchlight spins again and
fixes momentarily on them. And this is touted,
ironically or otherwise, as Normal.
What Whiston noticed in Rooney, I felt was
represented, but also counterposed, in a
recent well-received book by John Boyne.
‘Earth’. It is spiteful in its treatment of men,
one of the ugliest examples of misandry I’ve
ever read.
You might read an alternative title of this
essay to be “John Boyne lets men down”, but
I don’t think that goes nearly far enough.
Because I think the phenomenon is much
bigger than John Boyne, and much bigger
than Sally Rooney.
I think this, pervasive levels of hatred, is
our water.
And at the very epicentre of it all is
self-hatred.
I remember the advice of a writing mentor
years ago, all flashing eyes and bristling
intensity: “If you’re happy, go away and be
happy. If you’re not happy, write”.
If happiness is the enemy of literature, it’s
also the enemy of marketing. Marketers never
want someone who’s happy. They want
someone unhappy. Better still if they’re
desperately unhappy. Best of all is that they’re
so unhappy it manifests as a pain that they’ll
pay handsomely to alleviate. People in terrible
pain and with money in their pockets, they’re
the golden goose.
It started about a century ago with the
ascent of advertising. The most successful of
all marketers, salesmen and spin-doctors
realised that while it was one thing to solve a
genuine pain, it was another to solve post-
pain painlessness. So they got to work.
Creating pain where none existed. Creating
desire for change where none was necessary.
Sewing the seeds of the distortion that things
can be better, no, things WILL be better, with
this cream, that ointment, this tincture, that
treatment, with this life-changing product or
regimen or course; and just sign here please,
and enter your 16 digits there, thank you very
much.
Advertising originally had imposing
barriers to entry — the cost of equipment,
expertise and production and the artistic
constraints of 30-second slots — but with the
arrival of the smartphone and social media
the Pandora’s Box exploded.
Just look around. Almost everyone’s lonely.
Almost everyone is waiting for some new
validation, a fleeting piece of evidence that
they’re here now, and visible, that they’re not
a complete waste of time and space and flesh.
Few people are immune to the desperate
sad need for the dopamine hit of the like, the
share, the comment. And the tech platforms’
cash cow is the slickness of their self-serve ad
functionality that allows individuals and
corporate entities everywhere to precision-
target messages that land on you like the
Facehugger from ‘Alien’, implanting its seed
in your soul.
You’re not good enough.
This self-hatred is everywhere. Every fifth
adult, or thereabouts, is taking
antidepressants. We are painfully aware of
everything that’s unsatisfactory about
ourselves, because the world seems to tell us
on repeat. And we know everything that’s
terrible about the world, because it comes to
us every moment. Ping. There’s another piece
of bad news, just waiting for you to swipe and
see what it is.
John Boyne is a very fine writer, and, what
is much rarer, a very successful one. By some
measures, he’s Ireland’s most successful
writer ever. (The blurb of his current Elements
quartet, gorgeously produced by Penguin,
tells us his works have been translated into
60 languages, making him the most
translated Irish writer of all time.)
Boyne weaves page after page of lovely
prose, and I do not argue with the merits of his
talent. I question his thinking. And instead of
seeking and finding some universal truth, like
the best novelists always do, Boyne’s recent
What I’m offering is the perspective of a
male reader of the text of John Boyne’s
book ‘Earth’ — that hates men
72 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 PB
colours and variations. Exploitative. Bigoted.
Misogynist. Violent. Pathologically
self-interested.
I counted 12 male characters in ‘Earth’,
including Evan, the protagonist, aspiring
painter turned professional football star
turned accomplice to rape defendant; Charlie,
his hate-filled bullying father who publicly
shamed his then six-year-old son for wetting
his trousers at a Premier League soccer
match; Robbie, Evan’s teammate and
co-accused, a star footballer who loved
nothing more than to be watched, whether
that was from the stands on a Saturday or in
the bedroom on a Saturday night. Rafe, who
becomes Evan’s first pimp in London, sending
him for sordid acts at the behest of wealthy
clients. A man known only as “Sir”, who may
be a former prime minister or television
personality or someone equally well known in
the public eye, who hires Evan and degrades
him with the most depraved sex acts
imaginable. There’s Max, a woman-hating
taxi driver; Buddha, a vulgar farmhand; Harry,
a farmer’s son who fucks — or rapes? — Evan,
roughly, against a tree; and Cormac, Evan’s
childhood friend who cruelly dismisses his
advances and sends him spinning away to
England in the first place.
‘Earth’ is a broadstroke assault on men
everywhere. With the possible exception of
Father Ifechi, the Nigerian parish priest on the
island who travels to London to attend the
trial, there’s not a single male character who
is better than loathsome. Notwithstanding all
the ways in which he has been a victim — of
bullying, exploitation, rape — Evan too is a
hideous character, with no redeeming
features. The subtext in all those five-star
reviews of ‘Earth’, all by reviewers with
women’s names, is this: all men are
loathsome. “Men are bastards” has long been
a predictable refrain, and the sad thing is that
many men have done a fine job of living up to
the brief.
This has led, in the world around us, in our
culture, in our water, to a sort of bifurcation
when it comes to masculinity.
If you’re a man, you’re either toxic, like
Andrew Tate, like Conor McGregor, like all
those rugby players in their WhatsApp
groups, like all the men in ‘Earth’. Or, because
labels of toxicity is what you fear most, you
move to the extreme opposite of toxic, but the
trouble with this is that over there you adopt
the persona of the weak-willed and the
limp-wristed.
For many years the word has been that
manhood, manliness, maleness, was
inherently bad. How often now does the word
“masculinity” come with the automatic prefix
“toxic”? And yet could there be anything more
poisonous to the male soul — and perhaps
also to the female soul, and thereafter to
society in general — than men who beat down
any traits of maleness for fear of its being
deemed inappropriate or poisonous? Men
hating men means men hating themselves,
and men who hate themselves are
everywhere.
There is a third path between these two
dreadful extremes. The noble middle ground
is available, and it is vast. Luckily, there’s
another recent example from Irish literature
that shows us exactly what that might be.
It is, I think, not unexpected that the most
compelling vision of this golden mean — the
type all men might aspire to: strong-willed,
action-oriented, ready to shoulder the
weightiest responsibility in the face of
whatever opposition or opprobrium or shame
might come as a consequence — comes not
from a male writer, but a female one.
Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These‘
tells the story of Bill Furlong, a coal merchant
in Wexford in the 1980s. Orphaned at the age
of 12, never having known his father, raised
in the Protestant big house where his mother
had been taken in as a sta member before
her premature death — and shamed for this
otherness by the fear-filled Catholic boys at
his school — Bill has overcome every
interposed challenge to rise to local
respectability. He is hard-working, Mass-
going, married to a solid wife and raising five
solid girls. He gives employment to decent
men, striving to make ends meet and have a
bit to spare. It’s no coincidence that Bill’s a
coalman, for is there any more nobler
representation of a man than someone who
does the heavy work of bringing warmth to
the home? One day, delivering fuel, he
stumbles upon a scandal and, after failing to
do what he felt was necessary not once but
twice, finally acts.
Towards the end of this short novel:
“…he found himself asking was there any
point in being alive without helping one
another? Was it possible to carry on along
through all the years, the decades, through
an entire life, without once being brave
enough to go against what was there and yet
call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in
the mirror?”.
Earlier, dropping o some logs to people
who “had given him the business, when they
could aord it”, he was welcomed by children
desperate for a little warmth in the hearth.
One young girl says, “We knew you’d come…
Mammy always said you were a gentleman”.
This, the status of everyday gentleman, the
ordinary nobility that comes with care-taking,
is the vast central path available to all men.
After Bill has happened upon the realisation
that something major is wrong, and must be
addressed, and that he must be the one to
address it, Keegan writes, “the ordinary part
of him wished he’d never come near the place”
and, two pages later, “once more the ordinary
part of him simply wanted to be rid of this and
get on home”.
This “ordinary part” is readily available to
all men. It’s the part that seeks the easy out
when things get tough. It’s the part that
reaches for the bottle or the betting-slip when
a wordless torment rages inside. It’s the part
that brings toxic behaviour, because it’s not
masculinity itself that’s toxic, but men who
don’t know the true power of their own
masculinity.
This ordinary part, I think, is what John
Boyne, for all his talent as a writer, was unable
to overcome when he wrote a book that hated
men and was loved by women.
And it’s the part that must be resisted if
men everywhere are to shoulder their own
burden of responsibility, and make their world
better, whatever the fashionable disapproval,
whatever the consequences.
Claire Keegan gives Furlong the status of
everyday gentleman, the ordinary nobility
that comes with care-taking, the vast
central path available to all men
Boyne
