Book review: John Boyne's 'Earth' is a psychological study of fame

The author uses a spare style to craft an unsettling atmosphere and injects the narrative with absorbing twists

John Boyne’s 15th novel for adults is the second of a quartet named after the elements. Picture: Chris Close

• Earth 
• John Boyne 
• Doubleday, €15.99 

John Boyne’s  Earth opens on a defining day for its 22-year-old protagonist.

Evan Keogh, blond and good-looking, is an Irish international valued at over €5m by the football team he plays for in the English championship.

But the novel starts on the first day of a sensational court case: A 19-year-old woman has accused Keogh’s team-mate Robbie Wolverton of rape and alleges Keogh recorded the crime on his phone.

Earth is the second instalment in Boyne’s quartet of novels named after the elements. 

In Water, published last year, Vanessa fled to a small island off Ireland’s west coast in the wake of her husband’s conviction for a scandalous crime in which she is assumed complicit.

The movement here is in the opposite direction, but Earth shares some of the preoccupations of its predecessor.

Keogh, a minor character in Water, leaves the island after a traumatising incident in a novel that explores hot-button topics, including sexuality, privilege, and misogyny. 

Boyne is best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Earth is the Dubliner’s 15th novel for adults.

Written in the first person and in a confessional tone, the author presents us with tense, episodic chapters. He uses a spare style to craft an unsettling atmosphere and injects the narrative with absorbing twists.

Earth and soil are vital motifs. The feel, smell, and taste of them oppress Keogh and their effect on him is especially pronounced at turning points in his life.

In Keogh’s father, Charlie, Boyne creates a character redolent of the monstrous fathers who haunt John McGahern’s fiction: Charlie “only allows himself a handful of smiles a year, as if each one costs him something he can’t afford”.

Poignancy accretes in the small details of the violent bully bringing the frightened six-year-old Keogh to his first professional football match.

Charlie reproaches his son for trying to hold his hand and walks so fast the child must run to keep up. 

The scene culminates in humiliation for Keogh when his father refuses to bring him to the toilet during the match (“I bit my lip and felt blood seeping into my mouth.”)

The characters are diametrically opposed. Charlie dreamed of becoming a professional footballer. Although the way it happens in Earth is implausible, his son achieves this. But Keogh hates the sport — he wanted to be an artist.

Unable to sell his paintings in London, the protagonist sells his body: “Being demeaned and physically abused every Thursday night was the price I had to pay for independence.” Keogh emerges as largely sympathetic.

He feels alone, worthless, and rejected by the world, believing there is “something inherent, something indefinable” wrong with him. Yet Boyne complicates this image by also making Keogh obnoxious and devious.

Astutely unspooling a narrative that shifts between past and present, the novel’s taut courtroom scenes are deftly handled and underscore how society applies different standards to men and women.

The central thread of Earth recalls the so-called Belfast rugby rape trial. Like that 2018 case, in the novel public opinion is enflamed by WhatsApp messages exchanged between the footballers about the sexual encounter.

Echoing a Donald Trump defence, one character dismisses these messages as “locker-room talk”.

Perhaps Earth is most accomplished as a psychological study examining the effects of fame on today’s celebrity figures, with Boyne drawing a clear link between how one character tries to replicate in his private life the adulation he receives in public.

“Nothing disappears,” Keogh laments of our social media age. “Nothing is forgotten. Everything we say or do these days clings to us for ever.”

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