This year’s Carnegie medals for children’s writing, awarded on Thursday, brought to light an unexpected trend. At a time of widespread public anxiety about the decline in boys’ reading habits and the rise of the toxic influencers of the online “manosphere”, male friendship and masculinity were front and centre on the shortlist.
The winner, Margaret McDonald’s superb debut, Glasgow Boys, tells the story of the relationship between two looked-after children on the threshold of adulthood who process trauma in different ways. Banjo’s aggression and Finlay’s avoidance could be seen as two models of dysfunctional masculinity. Luke Palmer’s Play, also on the shortlist, tells a story of male friendship which touches on rape culture and county lines drug gangs, while teenage gang membership is the focus of Brian Conaghan’s Treacle Town.
Nathanael Lessore won the Shadower’s Choice medal (voted for by young readers). King of Nothing tells the story of Anton, a pre-GCSE hardman for whom reputation is everything. Anton hangs out with a thuggish crowd whose worldview is shaped by gang culture and Tate-like influencers. The arc of the plot – boisterously comic at first, but increasingly moving – shows how Anton’s developing friendship with the uncoolest boy in the school changes his priorities.
Though the books were judged for their individual qualities, the panel’s chair, Ros Harding, observes a pendulum-swing in publishing. “We’ve gone from children’s adventure books, where it was always the boy as the hero, then there was a backlash against that, making sure that girls could be the heroes as well, which then maybe led to some boys feeling that things weren’t being written for them.” Now, she says, “another wave of books” is addressing that.
McDonald says that in Glasgow Boys, she “wanted to explore the spectrum of masculinity that both Banjo and Finlay exist on. Finlay is the more ‘feminine’ man who we perceive to be empathetic and introverted – a very gentle person. Banjo, conversely, is the ‘masculine’ boy: violent and aggressive.”
“People have been very curious as to why I have focused on two men when I’m not myself a man. But I don’t think it would have been much of a question if I was a male author.” McDonald had a considerable struggle to get Glasgow Boys published – 60 agents and 20 publishers, she says, turned it down.
Does she think that one factor was a reluctance to publish books about boys? She believes the book’s use of Scots dialect (it comes with a glossary) was an issue, as was the fact she was submitting it during Covid. But the decline in boys’ reading, she suggests, might have created a vicious circle in publishing. “I think because there’s such a small readership it’s difficult, in a business sense, to cut out the bigger readership – which is girls and women.”
Harding says her experience as a librarian is that most boys read more narrowly than most girls. “A girl who likes reading will read anything. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a male protagonist or a female. Boys were just a little bit more resistant to that. I think they are more likely to want the male protagonist.”
When McDonald hears feedback on the book, male readers “often focus on Banjo and Finlay separately, whereas my female readers focus on the relationships. A lot of boys who read it will be like, ‘I related to Finlay’, or ‘I relate to Banjo’, whereas none of the girls read that way. So it suggests a little bit of a difference in the ways in which boys go into books.”
The hope is that they go into books at all. The explosion in so-called toxic masculinity is taking place at the same time as statistics tell us that reading for pleasure, especially among boys, is on the decline. Novels are empathy machines: they invite you to imagine what it might be like to be somebody else. So they are, at least potentially, an antidote to the misogynistic influence of the manosphere and gaming culture. But it’s precisely with social media and video games that they are competing for the attention of boys and young men.
Lessore says his book was inspired in part by discovering “my little nephew and my cousin – who were, I think, nine and 13 at the time – were both watching Andrew Tate videos”. He sees the long-term effects of that in school visits he does, to expensive private schools and “very, very underfunded state schools” alike. Children self-segregate: boys on one side, girls on the other. “Gay” is being used as an insult once more, and boys have so little respect for female teachers that they have to call over male staff to settle them.
Does Lessore feel confident he’s talking to the young men that books like his need to reach, though, rather than just about them? “I start every school visit with the statistics that teenagers who read more tend to [get] higher paid jobs as adults,” he says. “That usually gets them sitting up a little bit in their seats.”
In Anton’s world, drawn from Lessore’s own working-class south London background, he thinks boys can find something to relate to. “Kids like that don’t think they can be writers, and therefore they don’t read – and therefore they don’t get the empathy that can be learned from books.”
Lessore’s influence seems to work. “Even the more disruptive boys on the school visit tend to, you know, barge their way to the front of the queue to get their book signed. It’s a drop. But, yeah, like: one kid at a time, one school at a time.”
