The Talented Mr Ripley

"I came across Patricia Highsmith when I was first working as a journalist in London in the mid-1990s and ended up at a media event that was a bit more glamorous than my normal beat. I think Andrew Neil or another British media figure was hosting it; I don’t recall. What I’ll never forget is being handed a goody bag containing a book called The Talented Mr Ripley . It’s the first book I read where I was absolutely rooting for the villain, my entire emotional energy focused on willing him not to get caught. Even if you’ve seen the 1999 movie, the book is still worth reading. I love the rags-to-riches element, the settings: 1950s New York, the fictional Mongibello on the coast south of Naples, Venice. Highsmith wrote four more books featuring Tom Ripley, as well as other psychological thrillers. Books by Patricia Highsmith recommended on Five Books"

"For me, what’s so brilliant about this novel is how Highsmith gets us to root for Tom Ripley, even though he’s horrific. The idea that you want him to succeed even though he’s a psychopath is a real feat of literary genius. Because if anyone put that in a synopsis, you’d think, ‘That’s not going to work.’ Even though every part of your moral consciousness is telling you that it’s wrong, there you are thinking, ‘I want you to get away with this, I want it to go your way.’ To get us, as the reader, to empathize with somebody who is such a horrific, damaged person is just such brilliant writing. The sense of place is pronounced in all of these books, and it’s not necessarily glamorous. There’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in Italy; we’ve also got an uninhabited private island in Greece. We’ve got a 12-foot room and an elite college campus. That sense of location, whether it be horrific in Room or very aspirational as it is in all the other books, is really important in all of these novels."

"I’m not the only person who has spotted the similarity. Macbeth gets some good news: he is going to be Thane of Cawdor. Banquo, his mate, is like: ‘Well, that pretty good. Why are you looking so upset?’ But almost in the same breath, the Witches have told him that, also, he could be king. In The Talented Mr Ripley, Tom Ripley gets some very good news. He’s given a lot of money by a very wealthy man to go off and find his son, Dickie Greenleaf, in Italy. Tom has been down on his lucky, with all these scammy little schemes going on. He’s a very dodgy character and everything is catching up with him. He could just have taken that money and had a rather nice time, slithered up the social scale a little bit—just as Macbeth could have been Thane of Cawdor. But as soon as he sees Dickie Greenleaf and his life, his charisma, the way he rides through life, he wants that for himself. He doesn’t immediately think: I’m going to murder this person. He wants to be his best friend. But when his influence is slipping, when they are on the boat, he kills him. That, to me, is the exact equivalent of bumping off Duncan. “There is so much breadth to Shakespeare, so much you can take from his work” Once Ripley’s done that, although he’s disguised the murder as an accident, things are going to catch up with him. There’s a period where he pretends to be Greenleaf. Then there’s a period where he goes to Venice and goes back to being himself. But there are always people on his tail who he thinks will reveal him. So he has to kill Freddie, and he thinks he will have to kill Dickie’s girlfriend Marge. Just as Macbeth, after that first murder of Duncan, has to start murdering people to stay where he is. The only way is down. Another theme in both Macbeth and The Talented Mr Ripley is how disguise and subterfuge is mixed up with social status. A usurper is wearing the crown. What Patricia Highsmith has done is take on pre-existing myths, just as Macbeth itself took on older ideas about the Furies and the Fates and wise women from pagan Celtic mythology. A key difference is that Ripley is famously amoral. He doesn’t have crises of conscience. He has crises of: ‘Oh my god, they might get me.’ But he doesn’t wonder: ’Am I a bad man?’ But, as with Macbeth, we are never really against him. We might not approve of him, but—as in Patrick Susskind’s Perfume , where the main character is a serial killer—you are always kind of rooting for him. In each, we find someone who creates their new life through murder, and I think both Macbeth and Tom Ripley are compelling for that reason. Yes, I’ve always been fascinated by Macbeth. I read it at school, and we also went to see Polanski’s Macbeth at the cinema. I was absolutely blown away by it, in particular, the Witches, who are amazingly evoked in that film. Polanski used three archetypes; not every production does. In Joel Coen’s more recent The Tragedy of Macbeth , they are identical, but Polanski went for the crone, the middle-aged witch, and the young maiden. The witches have agency that far exceeds that of the kings. They are not punished, but influence the action. The kings are their puppets, is one way of looking at it. The play itself is notoriously historically inaccurate. The real Macbeth, ruled for ten years, and was actually a good and peaceful leader. But Shakespeare wasn’t much bothered about that. He created a warlord who seized a throne not there for the taking, and the trouble follows on from this in Hagtale . I wanted to take a story of male ambition and turn it around—make the witches the custodians of nature, which of course relates back to their mythical pagan function. I created two storylines to explore that—one, the story of a feral wolf child adopted by the witches, who eventually becomes Lady Macbeth, and another which takes place 300 years later, just after the Black Death in the 14th century, when a monk called Brother Rowan is given the job of saving records of these obscure Scottish kings from three centuries before. That’s the version of Macbeth that becomes Shakespeare’s play. I’m yet another person to have come along and found my way into this story, and done it differently again. I wanted to write something feminist—inspired by Angela Carter’s short story ‘Wolf Alice’ in The Bloody Chamber , for instance—but also about climate, in a way that engaged people, and which would not seem preachy or didactic. I felt that Shakespeare’s power of storytelling is such that you can kind of co-opt his story and make it into an eco-fable. In Macbeth , Birnam Wood is seen to move when the soldiers use branches as camouflage. In my story, the forest is moving because it is very angry. It literally moves. I use that image from the play as an opening mission statement. But I chose not to use Shakespearean language, because to me that is sacrosanct."

"Yes, it fascinates me that René Clément, the French film director, adapted this novel into a film called Plein Soleil (known as Purple Noon in the United States). In the story, Tom Ripley is sent from New York to Italy by the father of Dickie Greenleaf to bring Dickie back to the United States. As he ingratiates himself with his son, Tom Ripley adopts increasingly dangerous, amoral and murderous measures to reap the rewards of his lifestyle and finally, steal his inheritance. The novel starts in a gloomy Manhattan, where Ripley meets Dickie Greenleaf’s father. It’s not bright, it’s claustrophobic. And then we come to this Mediterranean world of plein soleil where in the movie everything is brightness—there’s a yacht, these lovely towns, and everybody is wearing lovely styles and costumes. “I think that cinema is, in many ways, a predatory thief” What I particularly love about Patricia Highsmith is the way she uses third person intimate or ‘limited’ narrative point of view. I don’t like the term limited, because that suggests it isn’t perhaps very good. I love the term intimate because that, to me, conjures the nature of this approach. A character is a ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘it,’ or ‘they’ but not an ‘I’—and yet it’s almost written as if it were in the first person. So we have a certain sense of distance, but also a sense of complicity, which may even conflict with a lack of empathy for a character at times. The way that Highsmith does this is really effective. It’s not a surprise that somebody like Hitchcock latched on to Highsmith’s work, because Hitchcock is an exemplar of cinematic third person intimate. We don’t usually think of applying the literary terms of narrative point of view to movies, but they can be."

"It’s described as the godfather of the modern psychological thriller. Everyone who writes psychological thrillers must acknowledge Patricia Highsmith at some point. She gave the genre legitimacy in that she was quite a highbrow writer writing popular fiction, so we all quote this book and mention it, hoping some of it rubs off on our own books. What appealed to me most about this book is that Tom Ripley is the ultimate sociopath, and yet we’re rooting for him. In my first book, back in 1997, I had an antihero, an anarchist called Dutchie, who had lost his girlfriend in an IRA bomb. It was very difficult to do as a first book, but I was trying to get people to root for him: not necessarily like him but be on his side. It was a challenge. With Tom Ripley, he’s very charming, but we know what he’s doing is not right. He has to go and find Dickie Greenleaf and convince him to come back to America. He’s on a mission from Dickie’s dad, Herbert. The other big takeaway I had from this book—and I still feel like I haven’t done this yet, but I want to—is that I love books where someone impersonates someone else. I just love the idea of someone taking on someone else’s identity. Identity, I should say, is a crucial part of the psychological thriller, and certainly the psychological thrillers I write. Identity is a big part of memory, and what makes someone who they are and how you would impersonate them. The Talented Mr Ripley is also interesting because it doesn’t have a happy ending, really. You feel Highsmith has endorsed this sociopath, doing this bad thing, impersonating someone else and taking on their life but there isn’t that classic happy ending. It’s a reminder that her moral compass is still intact. You’ve been on a bit of a journey, you are siding with the bad boy. It’s an interesting play on the morality, which is a really big issue in my books, if I may very briefly mention No Place to Hide . That’s very kind though, again, mixed feelings: do you know how long it took me to write it?! In it, the issues of good and evil are much more overt. It’s a very loose retelling of Christopher Marlowe’s play, Dr. Faustus . Marlowe’s play is brutal, Faustus is dragged kicking and screaming down to hell, there is no redemption. There is no forgiveness, he just messes up big time. There are two versions of the play and in one of them he appeals slightly more for forgiveness. The answer is, ‘Absolutely not, you made a deal, signed it in blood with the devil, the 24 years are up, you’re out of here’. I toyed with that. If No Place to Hide is a loose retelling of Faustus should my main character suffer the same brutal fate? Which side I fell on that in the end was perhaps more a reflection of the fact that, ultimately, I like books in which, in a slightly corny way, good ultimately prevails. Because if you do enter this dark world of psychological thrillers—and my books are quite dark—you take readers with you. It was particularly the case with Find Me , which was probably my darkest book, my first JS Monroe. Somehow, at the end, you do have to come up for air so you’re not drowning. You don’t have to have a saccharine-sweet, happy ending, but there’s got to be a sense of hope. I would just feel too uncomfortable taking people to a dark place and just saying, ‘That’s it, I’m going to leave you here.’ It is. I’ve done it twice now in the five books I’ve written. The Other You had quite a lot about facial recognition and facial recognition software. In the UK, we are one of the most surveilled societies in the world. There are action groups, people who monitor how much things are being recorded, but when there’s an awful news story, we’re all waiting for the CCTV footage. We think, ‘They won’t have been able to do that without being caught somewhere on CCTV. There’ll be a traffic camera somewhere. There’ll be a security camera on the front of an office, there’ll be dashcam footage, there’ll be something.’ When that comes out, we don’t all say, ‘That’s outrageous. I didn’t realize that we were being filmed!’ We go, ‘Thank goodness that they’ll catch the bad person.’ So we have this ambivalent attitude to surveillance culture in the UK. We are very watched. But I don’t hear people jumping up and down in their millions saying, ‘Turn off all the cameras!’ It makes us feel safer. It’s a weird dichotomy. I find the mobile phone particularly intriguing. We do carry around these things which have the capacity to listen in on our daily lives. There’s just been the news that TikTok is not going to be allowed on government-issued mobile phones because they’re convinced the Chinese are listening in through it. You can do a test. If the microphone on your computer or your phone hasn’t been disabled, you can say, ‘I like red dog biscuits.’ And you will see adverts coming up for red dog biscuits. The algorithms are kicking in and you’ll get Google ads tailored to what you’ve been saying. Turn off the microphones is all you have to do. It is quite easy to disable everything. My kids are all in their 20s now, but they always have a plaster across the camera on their laptops because you never know what software you might accidentally have downloaded. If you want to go on FaceTime to talk to someone, peel the thing off, talk, and then put it back on again. Hannah Fry wrote a very good book called Hello World which I read when it came out in 2018. It had some good stuff in it, particularly about facial recognition which I was particularly interested in at the time. The automatic number plate recognition stuff is also interesting. Do you ever watch a program on TV called Hunted ? People try and escape and they use the network of cameras across the country to work out where they are. When you go to the ATM, you’re being filmed. On our roads we have an extraordinary network: you see the signs saying ‘ANPR in action in this area.’ It’s everywhere."

"I read it for the first time only about a year ago, when I properly discovered Highsmith. I had the film in my head, so I found it very difficult to imagine the characters in anything other than their film incarnations—because it was such a brilliant film. But, apart from the characters, I did find I was able to put the film aside and enjoy the writing. What I adore about the book is how brilliantly she explores the idea of moral grey areas and how the main character does things in a sort of neutral space—a psychopathic neutral space—and Highsmith writes this in a quite nonchalant way, while building this ongoing tension and horror. You sort of love Ripley, as the novel moves on, but you are also horrified by him. I just think that’s genius: when you can get me deeply caring about a character who I also find appalling and frightening. You feel very sorry for him. That’s how she’s done it so cleverly, you feel he’s the underdog. Everyone can relate to that feeling of thinking that someone else’s life is much more attractive and glamorous and wanting to grab hold of that and have a part of it. We’ve all been there, at some point. “I just think that’s genius: when you can get me deeply caring about a character who I also find appalling and frightening.” You know that he’s had a really horrific life, somehow. Even though she doesn’t spell it out, you just know he’s had an awful childhood. You come out of it, in your heart, knowing his back story. And there’s a great deal of sympathy that sort of bubbles under the surface for this awful, dangerous person. That’s why I chose this book, I just feel that no one does grey areas better than Patricia Highsmith. Definitely. A lot of writers I know read her voraciously and admire her. I think she has, deservedly, got the acclaim now for her incredible skill. She’s a brilliant writer."

"Again, I think Patricia Highsmith, at one stage, was much more appreciated in Europe than she was in America, even though she was American by birth. I think Ripley just set so many characters in motion because he was one of the first entirely amoral central figures, someone who commits appalling crimes and murders but you actually feel a kind of sympathy for. Well, if not a sympathy, you’re intrigued by the character. It’s also fascinating because he’s a kind of blank canvas. So in The Talented Mr Ripley – which was made into a movie not that long ago – he’s got this friend who he rather sucks up to called Dickie Greenleaf. When he murders Dickie and takes on his persona, it’s almost as if he becomes more real to himself as a person, because he’s being someone else. Which I think is fascinating – and goes back to actors and Charles Paris. This idea of the criminal who does it almost from lack of his own personality rather than the power of his personality. It’s a very interesting area, which has been explored a lot more since, but I think Patricia Highsmith was the first to do it. I’m not sure we could have had Hannibal Lecter without Patricia Highsmith. It’s very much the same thing. Obviously he is more extreme, but here is a character doing appalling things who gets all the best lines. It’s a very different kind of writing, a very different kind of book, but yes, Hannibal Lecter is, I think, in a direct line from Tom Ripley, the amoral killer. Very intriguing, and these days not unusual. But when Patricia Highsmith was writing, I don’t think the concept of the serial killer existed. She was ahead of her time I think. No, it’s a very clever trick, because she doesn’t sentimentalise him or anything. The telling of the story is very even-handed, really. But we kind of get inside his head, and what he does has a kind of logic to it."