Disturbing novella lifts lid on rape culture

The second novella in John Boyne’s Elements quartet is a further exploration of sex abuse and its consequences. In Water, published last year, the wife of a swimming coach embroiled in a child abuse scandal left her unhappy Dublin marriage and settled on a small island off the west coast of Ireland, where she eventually found some semblance of fragile peace.

The young, gay protagonist of Earth made a cameo appearance in Water, but his great escape is to leave that same island. And, cleverly, there are characters – in particular the Nigerian parish priest of the island – who appear again in this volume. That said, Earth is a standalone story and can be comfortably read without having read its predecessor.

The story opens with Evan Keogh in his luxury flat in England, getting ready for his court appearance as an alleged accessory to a rape charge, while in the background the thrum of the paparazzi and social media blares relentlessly. The alleged rapist, Robbie, is a teammate of Evan’s in a successful English football club. Did Robbie actually rape a young woman at a party and did Evan film the whole thing?

Boyne sustains the suspense right through to the end with some powerful and disturbing courtroom scenes and a surprising final plot twist. And in between, the reader gets a gut-punch of toxic masculinity involving not just the abuse of women, but the abuse of young, gay men in a society where it can still be unsafe to be “out”.

Evan is a talented footballer but has no interest in the sport, having been forced to play by his father, a man anxious to live vicariously through his only son. He leaves the island for England not to train with an English club, but to paint. His only ambition is to make it as an artist. He is, however, unsuccessful and turns to prostitution to survive. There follows some really harrowing scenes as Evan is pimped out by a Peer to other privileged “paragons of virtue” within the upper realms of British blue bloods. Evan knows better than to whistle-blow.

That which doesn’t kill us might make us stronger, but it can embitter us, too. And Evan becomes a vexed and disillusioned young man with many scores to settle.

Beaten, in all senses, from his life on the game, he turns instead to the “beautiful game” and is almost instantly hired after a tryout. He’s quickly making a very good living and moves into a plush apartment complex where his teammate and co-accused, Robbie, also resides. What the upper-class but utterly uncouth Robbie doesn’t know is that Evan knows his father. From his days on the other game.

Boyne has much to say about men’s attitudes to women, everyone’s attitude to gay men, and about the horrific, pervasive plague in our society of rape culture. The wealthy piranhas in this story are both titled and entitled and can use their infinite caches of money to protect themselves.

But Evan is no bleeding martyr either and Boyne is careful to depict him as three-dimensional and deeply flawed, still stung by the disappointment of his bullying father and by abuse at the hands of his so-called clients. This novella is more viscerally disturbing than Water but utterly compelling.