Neither of my parents would describe themselves as intellectuals, but they have always read books, and as a child I worked my way steadily through their shelves of detective stories. Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Raymond Chandler (hallelujah) and even Robert Robinson (Landscape With Dead Dons, since you ask). For some reason I never got round to The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, though I well remember it being there. Perhaps Mum and Dad thought it might be a bit strong for a nine year old - certainly other titles, The Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas and Mailer's An American Dream for example, disappeared mysteriously after I was found standing on a chair looking at their somewhat racy covers.
But Ms Highsmith and I met at last a couple of weeks ago when the Males from Hale, the book group of which I am a kind of expat member (I can't afford to live in Hale) decided to take on the first of her Ripley series of books. And what a book it is. Any crime novel that's fit to stand alongside The Big Sleep is a towering book. I'd go further. I thought The Talented Mr Ripley as good as Crime and Punishment (and I love Dostoevsky).
Briefly - and no spoiler here - TTMR concerns a young American, Tom Ripley, asked to go to Europe to persuade another young American he knows slightly to return home. It then deals with Tom Ripley's crimes and misdemeanours and his attempts to evade discovery for them. The re-print jacket blurb says the book is unputdownable. But I found it hard to pick up, so gruelling was the story's tension.
Highsmith writes tersely. There is enough description, but not very much. The imagination fills in the details. The book is consummately plotted, complicatedly so, but with a simple story arc that carries you past the complexities. The pacing is true, with Highsmith able to linger painfully on some scenes yet deal with the quick passage of time lightly and unobtrusively.
Though technically dazzling, these aren't the greatest of her achievments. The story is told entirely through the eyes of Tom Ripley, and something about his clubbable there's-a-good-fellow name, and the way she refers to him throughout as Tom - Tom this, Tom that - gives the reader the uncomfortable feeling of being in cahoots with him. Agonisingly, as he comes closer to detection, and then further away, and then closer still, we don't know whether to hope he will get caught or, feeling his fear as vividly as we do, hope he escapes.
Ripley is a weak, damaged and dangerous man, the kind of person on whom it never pays to turn your back. All the other characters are seen through his eyes. The errant young man's father. His would-be girlfriend. Our perception of them is Tom's perception. We scarcely see them as suspicious, grieving or heartbroken. They are merely the tedious inconveniences with which Ripley has to deal.
So when I was reading TTMR I felt unclean; and when I finished it (twenty minutes ago) it was with a sense of admiration and relief.
Highsmith wrote another four Ripley novels. But I don't think I'm man enough to read them.
