'A Ladder to the Sky' by John Boyne
- Reed
- Aug 6
- 3 min read
Author: John Boyne
Rating: A-
Vibe: Literary thriller meets publishing world satire with morally bankrupt characters you can't stop watching
Quick Take: A masterclass in making irredeemable characters compelling—disturbing, brilliant, and uncomfortably real.
I finished A Ladder to the Sky feeling like I needed a shower, and I mean that as the highest compliment. John Boyne has crafted something genuinely unsettling here: a book where most characters are morally compromised, where there aren’t any real heroes, and where you're somehow desperate to see what happens next despite wanting to look away from the carnage.
Maurice Swift is a monster. Let's just get that out there. He's handsome, charming, and completely without conscience—a literary sociopath who steals stories because he has no imagination of his own. What's remarkable is how Boyne makes you want to follow this character to his inevitable downfall, not because you sympathize with him (you won't), but because you need to see if he finally gets his comeuppance. Will someone equally ruthless best him? Will his treachery be exposed? The book becomes this perverse page-turner where you're rooting for karma while being horrified by every step of Maurice's climb.
The structure here is engaging. Boyne shifts perspectives and narrative styles between sections—first person with Erich, third person with Gore Vidal, that devastating second-person section with the wife. These shifts do more than keep the pacing tight—they force you to see Maurice from different angles, each more damning than the last. You watch him seduce, manipulate, and destroy from multiple viewpoints, and somehow this makes him both more human and more monstrous.
But it's the moral complexity around the other characters that really got under my skin, particularly Erich Ackermann in that opening section. Here's a lonely gay German writer who becomes infatuated with Maurice and ends up revealing his darkest wartime secrets. Erich was young, confused about his sexuality, caught in an impossible situation. Does that excuse his behavior? Absolutely not. But does it complicate how we feel about his victimization by Maurice? Absolutely yes.
I found myself wrestling with questions about forgiveness and moral complexity that the book raises but wisely doesn't attempt to answer. What are we prepared to forgive? How do we reconcile someone's capacity for both tremendous harm and tremendous vulnerability? The loneliness and desire that make these older gay men easy targets for Maurice—that felt uncomfortably real, even as their own compromises made it harder to extend simple sympathy.
What Boyne does so well is distinguish between Maurice's calculated theft and legitimate artistic inspiration. Maurice knows exactly what he's doing, and he's doing it for purely selfish reasons.
A Ladder to the Sky is disturbing in the best possible way. It's a psychological thriller disguised as literary fiction, a publishing world satire that doubles as a meditation on art and morality. Boyne has created something genuinely uncomfortable and utterly compelling—a book that forces you to examine your own capacity for forgiveness while never letting anyone off the hook.
Fair warning: you'll finish this wanting to read something life-affirming immediately afterward. But you'll also find yourself thinking about it for weeks, turning over those questions about complicity, creativity, and what we're willing to overlook in the name of loneliness or art. That's the mark of something special, even when it's deeply unpleasant to experience.
