If John Boyne blames anyone for toxic masculinity, it’s bad fathers

There are some writers who operate on an ethereal plane, creating work that may be tinged with genius or madness, who worry their prose with obsessive attention and create chiselled sentences with lyrical twirls. John Boyne is not like that. His style is plain and honest. As a novelist, he is a strategist; his career is like a campaign, or series of campaigns. He is engaged with the ebb and flow of current debate and ideas.

His most emotionally impactful book, The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017), is an episodic chart of gay life in modern Ireland over decades; his very funny The Echo Chamber (2021) is a broad satire about social media. He often reinvents himself and his style. This is not a criticism, just a description of the type of literary animal he is: a chameleon, a stalking fox, an opportunist. There is something of the journalist or sociologist about much of his output and this new work is right up that alley.

Earth is the second part of a quartet of interlinked novellas named after the four elements. It follows Water, which was published last year, and Air and Fire are forthcoming. The narrator of Earth has a walk-on part in Water, and he hails from where the first instalment is set: a west-of-Ireland island with 400 inhabitants.

The books are a slender 166 pages each, and can be read in a short sitting. At €13.99, this is expensive. But readers seem happy to pay for Irish writer Claire Keegan’s very short books. Her So Late in the Day was propelled to the top of the bestseller lists while Small Things Like These made the Booker shortlist in 2022, the shortest book ever to do that. The domination of the 350-plus page novel may be dissipating in our era of digital distraction.

The shape of the novel has always been slippery and some of the greatest novels in the English language first appeared serially, for example much of Charles Dickens’ output. Boyne signals in the back pages of Earth which of its minor characters will be the central focus of the next portion, Fire, due out in November. Some readers (me included) would much prefer to read all four parts together as a single experience. Short novels leave me feeling short-changed.

Earth is set in the present. The story is narrated by a young professional footballer, Evan Keogh, a gay man testing his sexuality in a hostile world. Fleeing a bullying father, he left his island home. After working as a farm hand, then as a male prostitute, he found his way to playing in the Championship at an unnamed club in an unnamed English town.

The story focuses on a court case where Evan’s teammate Robbie is accused of rape, and Evan is cited as an accessory because he was in the room and filmed the events. His phone has mysteriously gone missing. There are incriminating WhatsApp messages between the men.

The previous book, Water, deals with a character whose husband was head of the National Swimming Federation and was convicted of sexually abusing girls — this too chimes with real stories that have been reported in newspapers.

Chapters about the footballer’s rape case are interspersed with chapters outlining Evan’s past, including the events since he appeared as a teenager in Water four years earlier. The plot has several engaging twists. It also has a lurid intensity that surprises after the low-key pace of Water, the narrator of which was a thoughtful middle-aged woman.

Boyne has immense technical skill with plot development. The courtroom drama unfolds compellingly, with sessions of evidence and interactions with barristers. There is, however, a major research flaw: the crown prosecutor refers to the alleged victim as “his client”. It’s a controversial and much-talked-about feature of rape cases that the prosecution is taken on behalf of the state and the victim is merely a witness. I’m surprised this irritating mistake was not caught; factual errors in fiction collapse the delicate fabric of believability.

Boyne writes brilliantly about the problems of contemporary young men, and the tragic furnace of machismo that is actively poisoning them; a bewildering world where the lads are so out of touch with themselves that they do not know how to be. Evan and Robbie have hopeless fathers, both of them evil in different ways. If Boyne is seeking a culprit for life’s abusers, he is here pointing the finger firmly at bad fathers.

So this is a compelling read, albeit very short. But the big problem with Boyne’s style is that he does all the work for you. The detail is all laid out: we get the trial verdict, then the actual truth, and every scrap of the characters’ relationships to each other. We get plenty of information about Evan’s thought processes, and his final act is one of knowing certainty. There isn’t much of a gap left for the reader to inhabit, to fill with their own instincts.

Boyne’s writing has a definiteness, a lack of mystery, a bluntness. The instinct for the literal that draws him to the topical subject matter of rape cases and perverted swimming officials also keeps him tethered to a literary style of overt certitude. But if he put a brake on his omniscient tendency, and allowed his talent to roam more freely in the realm of the unknowable, he might create something more transcendent. Perhaps he’s not interested in that, but this critic certainly would be.

Fiction: Earth by John Boyne

Doubleday, 166 pages, hardcover €13.99, e-book £6.99

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