A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne: A Book Review

I have yet to read a John Boyne book I haven’t enjoyed. A Ladder to the Sky came close to five stars, reminding me of Kuang’s Yellowface, except with more Machiavellian malevolence and less anxiety about being caught.

Synopsis

A Ladder to the Sky is John Boyne’s eleventh novel for adults, published in 2018. Maurice Swift is handsome, charming, and possessed of a single ambition: to be a celebrated novelist. The problem is that he has no stories of his own. What he does have is an extraordinary instinct for finding stories in other people and an equally extraordinary willingness to take them.

Beginning in West Berlin in 1988, where Maurice ingratiates himself with a lonely, celebrated (aging and homosexual) German author at a hotel bar, the novel follows his career across decades and continents: from the Amalfi Coast, where he spars with Gore Vidal, to London and New York, where the literary world opens its doors to a man it doesn’t know.

The title comes from an old proverb: ambition is setting a ladder to the sky. The title, at first, admittedly, was a little cheesy when I first picked the book up; it wasn’t until a character references the proverb directly within the story that it clicked into place for me, reframing everything that had come before. Boyne earns his title. It just takes a little while to see how.

My review

The question at the heart of A Ladder to the Sky is: to whom does a story truly belong? Boyne has an interesting article in Vanity Fair about his inspiration for Maurice.

We are presented with the idea that novelists are in the business of taking the raw material of human experience and shaping it into something publishable, and that the only real difference between a writer and a thief is consent. Maurice Swift does not trouble himself with that distinction. He takes what he needs from whoever has it, and he does so with a serenity that is, frankly, chilling.

Multiple critics drew the same comparison I did: The Times called Maurice “a bookish version of Patricia Highsmith’s psychopathic antihero Tom Ripley.” The Washington Post described the book as “an homage to Patricia Highsmith, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.” Penguin’s own product page for the source.

We have a charming, consequence-free sociopath who moves through a world that keeps failing to see him clearly, and he does it very well. Mr Ripley meets Yellowface, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

What makes the book remarkable is the way it handles Maurice’s interiority, or rather his lack of it. He feels no stress about being caught. He is too confident in his own intelligence, too contemptuous of those around him, to believe that exposure is even possible. And for long stretches of the book, that confidence appears entirely justified. You spend most of the novel in a strange double state: wanting Maurice to be caught, wanting justice to arrive, and simultaneously understanding that some of the people he is deceiving are not exactly sympathetic themselves. Why shouldn’t Maurice win, if the alternative is that someone less interesting does? Boyne implicates us, making us complicit, almost against our will.

This reminded me strongly of Yellowface: the same unreliable, morally compromised narrator, the same questions about authorship and theft, the same tension between wanting the protagonist to face consequences and finding yourself oddly invested in their success. But where Yellowface’s narrator is anxious and self-justifying, Maurice is serene. He operates with the calm of someone who has simply decided that the rules apply to other people. It gives A Ladder to the Sky a different quality of dread: quieter, more controlled, and ultimately more disturbing.

The book shifts POVs, between third person, a single chapter in second person, and first person in the second half. It worked for me. Boyne is a writer who deploys technique in the service of the story rather than to demonstrate that he can. His range is remarkable. I have also read The Heart’s Invisible Furies, set in Ireland across decades, and Water, set on an Irish island, and each is an entirely different kind of book. He does not find a register and stay in it. There are no tropes, no formulas. It’s refreshing from many authors who just stay in their lane. 

I read the physical copy, but the audiobook is narrated by Richard E. Grant among others, with each narrator taking a different perspective. I bet that version is exceptional; his voice would suit Maurice.

What I liked / what I didn’t

What I liked

Maurice Swift is a genuinely extraordinary creation: charming, ruthless, and written with a control that matches his own. The book holds its tension beautifully. We are always waiting for the fall the proverb promises, and always uncertain whether it will come.

The POV shifts are purposeful and well-executed. Boyne’s prose is clean, elegant and propulsive. The satire of the literary world is sharp without being self-congratulatory. And the moment the title proverb lands within the story itself is one of those small, satisfying climaxes.

What I didn’t

Four stars rather than five is a close call and reflects nothing more than the fact that the very highest books leave me slightly undone in a way this one, for all its brilliance, did not quite manage. It is a near-miss at five, and a very comfortable four/four and a half.

Final verdict

A Ladder to the Sky is exactly the kind of book I want to press into people’s hands and say: just trust me.

If you have read Yellowface and loved it, read this.

If you have read The Talented Mr Ripley and wanted more of that cold, relentless, sociopathic charm in a literary setting, read this.

The book was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2018 Irish Book Awards and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. 

John Boyne is a writer of remarkable range and consistency, and this is one of his best. Four stars, almost five, and an unreserved recommendation.

Where can I read it?