The Ledge: Christian White’s latest book offers a plot twist so good, you’ll think it’s a printing error
The Nowhere Child catapulted Christian White to literary stardom in 2018, followed by The Wife and the Widow and Wild Place. All are nailbiters, but his latest offering should come with a mandatory neck brace.
Author and screenwriter Christian White is on the phone from his Melbourne home and listening to him brings to mind an underused word, one of those left to gather dust in the corner of the lexicon like callipygian (nice buttocks) or sprunt (to chase females around a haystack).
That word is harried.
Harried, out of the Middle English herigan (to plunder and pillage), often finds itself attached to the frayed physical and mental state of mothers trying to manage a brood of children.
And on this day White, 43, definitely sounds harried.
As it turns out, his harried-ness has a legitimate source. His seven-year-old daughter, Zaleese, is home sick from school. And his conversation has that slight electric tension familiar to all busy parents – juggling work alongside the delicate crockery of a child’s wellbeing and safety.
White is looking out of a window of his house on the Mornington Peninsula, an hour’s drive southeast of the Melbourne CBD, and into the backyard where his daughter is zipping and darting with pinball energy. “I try to do everything between pick up and drop off,” he says, scouring the yard. “And usually that’s fine. I don’t have any … I just cram it all in.
“But today, my daughter is actually home sick. I’ve told her I’m on the phone. I’ve told her I’ve got an interview. We’ll see. We’ll see how it … she may … she may or may not pop in halfway … actually, right now she’s … she’s out on the trampoline, so I don’t know how sick she is, but yeah.”
There it is. The stream of consciousness that is the harried parent. To be exact, the high Richter-scale anxiety of a father tracking a daughter perpetually shifting in and out of view. (He is proud of being a family man. In the Author’s Note to his new novel, The Ledge, he tells his readers: “… I’m a Dad now!”)
Aside from the convalescing trampolinist, White has a lot on his plate right now.
He is the author of the bestselling thriller The Nowhere Child, which in 2018 catapulted him to literary stardom. It was followed by The Wife and the Widow, Wild Place, and now The Ledge. (His books have sold a combined 500,000 copies and counting.)
All are nailbiters. And The Ledge – a coming-of-age tale about a group of childhood buddies, a body, domestic abuse and the loyalty of friends – has a plot twist so suddenly head-turning and unexpected that the novel should come with a mandatory neck brace.
That he has a career at all, he’s the first to admit, is a miracle.
“I had a ridiculous amount of jobs when I was younger,” White says. “Apple picking. I worked in a bottle shop. I was a video editor for an adult film company. We’d edit European and American porn films. We had spreadsheets with really specific technical terms on them, you know, like ‘forced fellatio’. And we had to cut those things out so the films could be classified in Australia.
“It was the furthest thing from being sexy that you could get.”
Like working at McDonald’s and then not being able to eat fast food? “Exactly,” he says. “You saw how the sausage was being made. But I did meet my future wife there (the writer Summer DeRoche).”
Then there were all the novels he wrote before The Nowhere Child, which won the 2017 Wheeler Centre Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript.
Like Big Jenny. Jenny is a giant alien slug and sends out signals to unwitting parents to bring their children to her. She proceeds to eat the children.
“Ridiculous, right?” he says.
Then came Bad Sex, about a dwarf who falls in love with the tallest woman in the world.
“Insane,” White concludes.
Those early efforts, though, did prove useful.
“You know, you’ve got to write a lot and read a lot, and it is a muscle that you get. It’s like it’s like tennis or anything … the more you do, the better you get,” he says. “And even though the storylines, the ideas, were bonkers, they were well-written and well-structured. It’s something they taught me … I learned about character and dialogue and structure … The Nowhere Child probably took two years to write, but it really took 17 years … I was building towards that first draft – it’s something I had to do. And, you know, I think that was part of it.
“I don’t know if this is true of all writers … as some people seem to say, it’s really painful. But the process and the craft of writing for me has always been so fun and so thrilling and I’ve always done it before I did it for a living.
“I could do it on the weekend and between shifts and stuff like that. So there was this drive to just get up and do something that I really enjoyed. Meanwhile I was working on that muscle and, and eventually it got good enough to put something into the world.”
That something was The Nowhere Child, the story of a kidnapped child in Kentucky in the US and the character’s links to a Melbourne photography student, described by his publishers as “a combustible tale of trauma, cult, conspiracy and memory”.
Acclaimed American crime and mystery writer Jeffery Deaver (50 million copies sold) said White’s debut was “a high-concept thriller … brilliantly executed” and that White “raises the bar on psychological suspense”. The Nowhere Child has since been translated into 17 languages.
White talks a lot about how his entire career was almost accidental. How if this happened, or that didn’t happen, his dream of being a professional writer might never have eventuated, and he’d still be daydreaming about giant slugs called Jenny behind the counter of a local bottle-o.
When asked if fatherhood has changed his approach to his work, subject matter, even his view of the world, the harried-ness briefly returns. Another distraction comes through.
“Yeah. Oh … absolutely. Sorry. I’ve got another call,” says White. “I’m just going to shut this call up … give me two seconds. There we go. It was buzzing in my ear. Umm. Yeah. So. I’m so sorry. Can you hear … is that really annoying you, that sound? Yeah. I’ll just let it ring. Sooo. Absolutely yes. So in a superficial way ...”
There is something refreshing about White. His self-deprecation. His fear that he may be suffering “impostor syndrome”.
He grew up on the Mornington Peninsula – that fabled tongue of waterside real estate with suburbs like Rosebud, Rye and Sorrento – as a “weird” misfit who just wanted to tell stories, and returning to live there with his family, with its childhood touchstones, drops him back into the past on a daily basis.
What was he like at his daughter’s age?
“I was very, very different from my daughter,” he says. “My daughter is a clear extrovert.
“I was a, a very, very quiet little introvert, very creative from a young age. I wanted to, I would write stories, really terrible stories, that would be a rip-off of Jaws or Mighty Mouse or whatever I happened to be watching at the time.
“I do remember being at primary school and we had an old fort, and I would just play by myself and just talk to myself and climb this thing. And it wasn’t until years later when I went back, weirdly, for a primary school reunion … that I realised, oh, everyone thought I was a real little weirdo. In high school, I think people thought I was a weirdo as well, but I knew it and I embraced it and I was fine with it.”
White recalls an incident in his teenage years.
“My friends and I, for some insane reason, decided to join a (ten-pin) bowling league,” he said. “We were terrible bowlers, but we thought, what a cool, weird thing to do. So we did it.
“And then we turned up for our first competition and we watched everyone warming up and everyone was amazing. They were so good. And so we all looked at each other and said, you know what are we doing? We’ve got to get out of here. So we quit immediately.
“But then, on our way out, I saw my dad (Ivan) coming in and he hadn’t told me, but he had heard that I was doing this bowling. And he turned up to watch me and support me.
“I have this amazing, amazing father who was just wonderful and supportive and emotionally open and all of these little things that he did that I never appreciated until I was a father myself.”
White also remains exasperated by the serendipitous moments in his life that led to his current position as a sought-after screenwriter. He was co-creator and writer (with Tony Ayres) of the smash Netflix series Clickbait (2021).
(It was a viewer hit around the world, but not a darling of all critics. The Guardian: “Clickbait is yet another digital-concerned show/film that gestures at big ideas about the internet – catfishing, cancel culture, surveillance, etc – but fails to capture the contours of life on it, both on an emotional level and on an aesthetic one.”)
However, like other turning points in White’s life, Clickbait also nearly didn’t happen.
“At the moment I decided to go and study screenwriting I had a call centre job lined up, but I chose screenwriting,” White says. “That’s another direct sliding doors moment because that led, in a very direct way, to me getting what would become Clickbait for Netflix and all of that sort of stuff.
“So I have these really, really, particular specific points in time that I can look at and go – ‘Oh my gosh, if I had’ve just stepped that way, I wouldn’t have this now.’ And I guess in some sense everyone has that, but it’s a very scary and humbling thought.”
On the cover of the review copy of his latest thriller – The Ledge – it says: NEW FROM THE MASTER OF MISDIRECTION.
Acclaimed thriller writer Michael Robotham states in his endorsement of the book – you won’t see the twist coming. And he’s right.
The book opens with human remains found in a forest. The discovery throws a group of small-town childhood friends – now adults – into a panic. So begins an interlaced yarn that dips from past to present.
Who is the dead person? What is the relationship between the group and the alleged murder? What is the secret they’re all hiding? It’s an old-fashioned thriller that pays homage to many other films and writers, in particular the American horror master Stephen King, who remains a source of inspiration for White.
The twist in The Ledge, when it comes, is so unexpected that you’re left wondering if there has been a printing error in the text.
Which is exactly what White loves about the genre.
“I think part of it (the twist, the misdirection) is it’s expected, it’s part of the trope,” he reflects. “The best crime books … they have some sort of twist … you’re not supposed to pick whodunit until the author wants you to.
“I try to sort of work in this weird percentage which is probably around 60 per cent familiar and 40 per cent original and new. It’s like writing a film. You have to have certain things happen … acts one, two and three, etc. But it’s about bringing something new to that.
“In Australia at the minute, I think me and my peers are standing on the shoulders of giants, but then doing something new with it … giving the reader a new experience. That’s the intellectual reason, but the emotional reason is it’s just so fun and challenging. I love writing within limitations, and I think that that brings out my best.”
Then guess what. Another harried moment.
“Hang on,” he says, holding the phone away from his ear. “What’s that kiddo? Hang on two secs, sorry. What’s out there? Who’s out there? There’s someone at my door. I’m so sorry.”
There’s a flurry of muffled conversation.
“The neighbours have left the cat out and it might be in our yard,” he reports. “I’ve got two very panicked people looking for their pet.”
Then to his daughter: “I think they’ve lost their cat, kiddo, but it’ll turn up. We can help them if you want. Go look out the window and see if you can spot anything.”
Then to the phone: “Yes. Sorry. What was I talking about?”
Then, seemingly, to himself, a parent again, hostage to the harried moment: “I might join the great cat hunt. My daughter’s out there. She’s got no top on. She’s wandering around and I’ve got people looking through my bushes.
“It’s an insane asylum.”
The Ledge by Christian White is published on September 24 by Affirm Press ($34.99). White will start his national tour at Roaring Stories in Sydney on September 26.
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