Scaling the Ladder

Scaling the Ladder provides a contemporary “re-boot” of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Like its predecessor, Scaling the Ladder addresses social class, people's enduring desire for a better life and what is required to get on in our society. The book's central character is Adam, a twenty-something, working-class, mixed-race man as he seeks to become the best version of himself that he can be. Against the backdrop of the aftermath of Brexit, the (first) election of Donald Trump, and the Grenfell Tower disaster, the story takes place over a two-year period from just before Christmas 2016 until late-October 2018, and mostly in and around gentrified and ungentrified London.
The novel opens with Adam at the lowest point of his life, facing sentencing for commercial burglary, three days before Christmas. It concludes with a very different confrontation between Adam and the forces of law and order. In-between, the novel charts Adam’s attempts to transform his life and overcome the deprivation he has endured. Afforded a second chance to make something of himself, Adam answers his deceased grandfather’s hopes for him and secures a place on a university degree course. Like so many others of his generation, Adam is initially assured that the route to a successful life necessarily entails acquiring a university education and, for people such as him, a progressive rejection and overcoming of his working-class life and culture.
Adam’s encounters with a diverse collection of others at university increasingly expose deep cultural fissures and are marked by increasingly fractious encounters with the rather different and diverse mores, norms and concerns of professional middle-class life and culture. Foremost amongst these middle-class “others” is Amelia, a college professor who attempts to shape and mould Adam’s ascent. Despite his efforts towards being accepted by this alternative world, Adam is increasingly caught up in and exposed to the culture war battles that have become so prominent and so harmful within our complex societies.
Will Adam succeed at scaling the ladder? Will he rise to become a true working class hero, or will he become yet one more victim of our divided world?