Christian White pays homage to Stephen King in his latest book The Ledge. He has teenagers on bikes and walking along train tracks, possible monsters (of the real kind) and a main character who is a writer who got early tips from the Stephen King book on writing. White has taken these influences to craft a page turning mystery powered by cliffhangers galore and whiplash-inducing changes of perspective.
The discovery of a set of remains at the bottom of a cliff in the regional town of West Haven reopens old wounds for three old friends, one of whom left the town 24 years before while the other two have stayed behind. Through contemporaneous diary entries from 1999, White plays out the tragic story that the three were involved in. While in the present day, the discovery of the body has the potential to bring to light their long buried secrets.
The story set in 1999 is very much a kids-on-bikes story (inspired by Stephen King’s It but also Stand by Me). But White twists the narrative (he notes that his other inspiration for this book was Lord of the Flies). This is a coming-of-age story and the central group of sixteen-year-olds take their connection seriously and support each other even when things take a dark turn. Their story starts with a possible suicide attempt and gets darker from there. But there are power dynamics and schisms even in that small group that have an impact on their relationships. Meanwhile, in the present-day story White is also keen to explore how those very intense teen friendships dissipate over the years as people grow and change.
As with White’s award winner The Wife and the Widow there are moments in the narrative when readers might do a bit of a double take. But the plot moves fast enough to ignore the feeling that everything may not be quite as the reader assumes. All is explained eventually, in a White-ian flourish that brings all of the narrative threads and remaining mysteries together and that might well drive some readers right back to the first page.
But this approach is both a strength and a weakness of the novel. It definitely provides the ‘ah ha’ moment when readers twig to the actual shape of the narrative. But White wants to do more than this. He set out to interrogate the idea of teen friendship, of the things that shape us as adults and what happens to the ties that we make and the traumas that we suffer as teens as we grow up. And it is in the common experience of growing up that provides the emotional resonance of The Ledge lies. But the trickiness of the structure only allows some of this impact to land, and even then only in retrospect. The emotional core of the novel may have actually been stronger if more detail had been on the table from the beginning.
All that said, while The Ledge takes a little while to get going, like a good roller-coaster, once it takes off there is no stopping. This is a book that almost demands to be read in a single sitting. But The Ledge is trying to work as more than just a fast-paced mystery. And this is a case where the form and intent of a novel tend to work against rather than reinforce each other.
The Ledge by Christian White
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