~ A Ladder to the Sky, by John Boyne ~
Maurice Swift is an ambitious novelist with a unfortunate limitation: he is good with words, but has no ideas for plots. He is extraordinarily handsome, though, and both men and women are attracted to him; he makes up for his lack of talent by luring stories, in one way or another, out of his lovers. This might sound like a relatively harmless, almost journalistic process, but Maurice is quite cold-blooded, and the victims of his seductions generally do not fare well.
In A Ladder to the Sky, John Boyne has a clever, funny, dark take on literary ability and pretensions. The novel follows Maurice for a few decades, with each major section written by a character who plays an important role in that part of his life.
Sexual identity is simply a fact of life in this novel. It certainly colours the life experiences of the characters, but often only because of other people’s prejudices. While there are several gay or bi characters, it is really Maurice’s ambition, career, and ruthlessness that are the focus of the book. In Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, the central character was gay, and in that book too the search for his birth mother and the social changes in Ireland over the second half of the 20th century were as important as his own queerness. There is a pleasing normality about sexual identity in Boyne’s books. Much as the colour of one’s skin or one’s ethnic origin can significantly affect one’s existence yet not be the entire focus of one’s own life.
I’ve read two of Boyne’s books, and in each, one chapter has been strikingly memorable. In The Heart’s Invisible Furies, Cyril’s first realization that he is gay and in love with his friend Julian is delicately lovely, though the overall tone of the book is bitingly funny. In Ladder, the stand-out section is when Maurice is taken by a friend to visit Gore Vidal in his house in Italy; an entertaining battle of wits ensues.
Gore couldn’t help but laugh at the suggestion. Many outrageous things had been said about him over the years, after all, thousands of unkind comments from the likes of Truman, Harper, Norman, Buckley, Tricky Dick, Updike and all the rest of them, but no one had ever had the bad manners to accuse him of having a good nature.
After Gore the novel gets darker; I found myself stunned at the end of the next section written in the voice of Edith Camberley, an up-and-coming writer. Boyne pinpoints the sensitivity, insults and egos in the literary world.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you too, Mr Swift. Are you Edith’s boyfriend? [..] You must be very proud of her.”
You stared at her and said nothing for a few moments. I could see the horror of what was about to happen but couldn’t think of any way to prevent it.
“We met at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago”, you said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You’re a writer too, then? I didn’t realize”.
“I’m Maurice Swift”, you repeated, your tone making it clear that you could not have been more astonished if she’d said that she’d never heard of William Shakespeare.
Not all the novellas are equally compelling. In the fourth, we discover that Maurice is now living in New York with a child, running a magazine, but snippets about schools and interns never quite hold one’s attention to the same degree as the first three novellas. And the final section in Maurice’s voice feels a little rushed to closure, with somewhat unlikely confessions and coincidences.
The thoroughly unlikable Mr Swift is a fascinating character to follow, and this book will appeal especially to those who enjoy behind-the-scenes tales of the literati.
A Ladder to the Sky, by John Boyne. Hogarth, 2018
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