
For those of us blessed enough to have grown up in Australia, who could not reverentially recall lazy and sometimes idle summer days, where time seemed to alternately stand still and then speed up on a whim? Summers that felt like they would never end and in which the sun felt like it was translucently permeating to our very core. Where the ethereally sublime (yet so very harsh) Australian landscape and vistas became a part of our psyche. Where the beautiful and innocent future beckoned and seemed to be the destiny of all. Such truths are eloquently and stirringly written of (with a dark cloud then covering the teenage and subsequent years) in stellar Australian author’s, Christian White, latest spectacular and spine-tingling psychological thriller/crime novel, The Ledge.
Alternating between the timelines of 1999 and now, most of the action takes place in the picture-perfect (or is it?) country town outside of Melbourne, West Haven. On page one, we are told that there have been “Human remains found in West Haven” and that there have been “uniformed police and forensics people in white jumpsuits picking through damp green bushland. A landscape of blue gums, winter sunlight spilling in through the canopy of branches overhead, casting long shadows over the investigators”. Further, we are told that the first person narrator in the present day “felt sick”. The reason being “Because when I was sixteen, my best friend went missing”. Our male narrator, in the present day, works for a living writing successful crime novels and stoically resides in an apartment in the “slightly posh” Melbourne suburb of Elwood. This narrator (he appears to be a former West Haven resident) is separated from his wife, Hannah, and is a doting Dad to six year old, Steffi. Hannah is now in a relationship with the wary (of our narrator) Tim. The narrator and Hannah share custody of Steffi, and the dutiful parents seem to be still in love with each other, but Hannah feels that her former husband has never ‘let her in’ entirely.
Jumping to February in 1999, we are privy to the “diary of Justin Smith”. Thoughtful Justin, sixteen years old, resides in West Haven and he and his gang of best friends (the ever-thinking Aaron, the practical Leeson and the loyal Chen) and his wistful Mum and caring elder brother, Scott, are suffering through a summer that is “hotter than the devil’s butthole. The kind of heat where the bitumen road is too hot to walk on barefoot, and the air is so thick you could take a bite out of it. The insulation in this house isn’t worth shit, so you feel every bit of it. Mum called the real estate to see if we could install an air conditioner, but our landlord would rather we burn to death than shell out on a split system”.
When we meet our narrator (we assume it’s Justin) in the present day, we find that he has stayed away from his former hometown of West Haven on purpose (we are later to learn the chilling and cautionary reasons). Our narrator remembers that “The more time I spent away from West Haven, the foggier it became in my mind…….I was nineteen years old when I left. I drove away with my foot planted on the accelerator of a second-hand Datsun and didn’t look in the rear-view mirror once”.
Now our narrator has come back to West Haven, the discovery of a body hooking him back in to town. A body that may belong to his “best friend” from boyhood. Aaron, Justin, Chen and Leeson had their innocence deftly shattered as sixteen year olds. And as adults some of the former friends (they have accidentally/purposely lost contact) are in the unenviable possession of secrets that could irrevocably alter and ruin their carefully curated lives (and the lives of their loved ones) forever. What did the once-loyal friends do to change in an instant the blissful and dream-like futures they had once envisioned for themselves?
What unforeseeable (are were they?) events occurred that drew Aaron, Justin, Chen and Lee into their menacing orbit?
Were the boys (and as grown men are they still) innocent pawns or masters of deception and ill-intent?
Our present day narrator reflects when he goes back to West Haven “I’d often be visited by the events of 1999. The memories would creep in, only they didn’t feel like memories. They felt like a movie I couldn’t turn off, an immersive theatre experience I was trapped in”. Whose is the heavily decayed body that was found on the forest floor in West Haven? Is it one of the boyhood friends or another person? Why are the former friends forever trapped in West Haven (either mentally or physically)? Why are ‘the gang’ so spooked and panicked? What has got them continually watching their respective backs? Why has our present day narrator been ‘lured’ back to West Haven? When our present-day narrator is staying at the forever 1970s Golden Fern Motor Inn in West Haven, he receives an unwanted ‘visitor’ who bashes him up and eerily tells him “I told you never to come back here”. “Then he slammed his fist into my face”. Why is Detective Bobbi Eckman of the Victoria Police so keen to speak to our narrator? (She ‘pops in’ to see him at his motel and her casual manner betrays a viper-like cunning and curiosity).
Christian has written a crime novel that overflows with intelligence, wisdom and superb insight into the human psyche and condition (both the nobility and the caustic flaws and failings of the human psyche and condition). Themes of the notion of brotherhood (between male friends), loyalty, family and the nuanced vagaries of life in Australian country towns (with their sometimes sinister undercurrents) are expertly examined. The tone of Australian country towns is so well described, as Christian writes of our narrator reflecting when he returns to West Haven as a middle-aged man, “I was reminded of how little things had changed. Sure, the West Haven Video Hire was a trendy cafe now, and the music shop that used to be on the corner of Main and Mills was another trendy cafe. But the general store looked completely untouched, as did the big brick CFA building, the ugly brown Scout hall, and the West Haven public swimming pool”.
Bravo Christian! You have written a novel that had me turning the pages faster and faster as I progressed in my reading of The Ledge. This book has Netflix deal written all over it. Think small-town Australia secrets and boyhood adventures and mayhem.
I loved every second of reading this novel and shall be lining up to read whatever Christian writes next.

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