home. b It had been a curious murder
Rereading this, it feels at times that Highsmith is referencing French farce as Ripley is faced with a range of visitors to Belle Ombre, some less welcome than others, as he tries to usher away one guest before the next is to arrive.
But frivolity is swapped here for murder, and a complicated layering of false identities, doublings and reflections,
Interestingly, Ripley is sickened and reluctant at times to commit the 'necessary' violence though does what he has to with creativity and quickwittedness, not without cost.
With insights into his marriage, and the police hovering on the side lines, this is tense and fastpaced, edgy and transgressive and the more mature Ripley continues to learn by experience, becoming all the more dangerous as his story progresses.
A second outing for suave psychopath, Tom Ripley, Such a shame Highsmith jumps straight to him being married to a French wife and living in a French villa I'd have loved to have been party to that wooing!
This time, Ripley is involved in an art fraud operation and already Highsmith has realised that if nearly all fiction about art riffs on fraud and identity, then she can go one step further.
Another deliciously dark offering full of edgy tension and sudden explosions of violence, For all those who thought that crime thrillers are serious stuff, heres a book to make you change your mind, Tom Ripley returns as the audacious crook now living the good life in France, married to a rich amp beautiful girl, There is reference to his past life as Dickie Greenleafs friend but the story starts with the dust having more or less settled on that affair, Instead, we learn of Ripleys discrete involvement in a longrunning forgery scam which shows signs of unravelling when a rich American connoisseur becomes suspicious of a painting by the famous Derwatt which he feels is a forgery.
It is indeed a forgery, for Derwatt has long been dead and all his paintings are the works of a minor painter which is the basis of the scam architected by Ripley amp his friends, which includes the guiltridden painter Bernard Tufts.
Tom Ripley, however, doesnt want the beans to be spilled on a financially enriching scheme thats been working well, The book takes us on a hilarious yet thrilling journey from France to London and around Europe as Riple resorts to all means to justify his ends.
Ripley is a rogue, streetsmart made rich, amoral and free from the trials of guilt or conscience, yet very likeable, to the extent that one keeps wishing secretly perhaps for him to succeed.
Ideally this book can be better enjoyed were one to read the series in order, but even otherwise its fun, This was my first Ripley book and not having read the first one made no difference, I cant wait to start on the next though,
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I knew going into this that the later Ripley novels don't live up to the first one, but I was still curious anyway, And it was certainly true that a lot of those elements that made the first novel so enjoyable Tom's very believable rationalizations of his actions, the atmosphere and the tightropelike intensity of the action were largely missing from this book.
The events in this book take place someoryears after the first book, Tom has settled down in France with a French wife and leads a life largely of leisure with a few illegal enterprises on the side, When one of those enterprises is threatened Tom steps in to save it which inevitably leads to more suspicious deaths and more coverups required on his part.
It just felt like such a watered down version of the previously vibrant and exciting Tom and the sense of tension was largely missing for me, From any other author this would have been a fine thriller, but as a sequel to Ripley it just didn't live up, A few years years after the events of The Talented Mr, Ripley and Tom Ripley is now living a comfortable life with his rich heiress wife, Heloise, Tom is at the center of a scheme selling forged paintings, All goes well until a buyer, Thomas Murchison, notices a change in color that doesnt make sense in a couple of the recent paintings, Tom begins by impersonating the painter and trying to convince the buyer of the paintings authenticity, When that doesnt work, he turns to other ways to resolve the problem, Not the best Ripley, but still quite an enjoyable read, Tom Ripley has grown up,
He is still a conman and a murderer, of course, But now, in place of the socially awkward, seething, repressed homosexual, there is a man of a certain suaveness, a man with an apparently healthy, loving, and sexual relationship with his wife, a man of leisure and taste with friends all over Europe.
And instead of murdering in a rage, lashing out at men who confront him with that desire he wont face, this time Tom can tell himself a plausible story that his crimes are for the greater good, protecting not just his own interests but the interests and reputations of a host of others.
The result of this maturation is a book that seems initially to have less psychological depthat least with regard to its protagonistthan the first installment in his chronicles, sitelinkThe Talented Mr.
Ripley. In contrast to its predecessor, Ripley Under Ground is almost a romp, as Tom
gets himself into trouble and out of it, impersonating a dead artist, murdering a nosy amateur critic who threatens to blow the lid off Toms artforgery operation, burying the body, exhuming it and dumping it to a river, and on and on.
Where Talented was an origin story, the making of a sociopath, Ripley Under Ground is the continuing adventures of a sociopath, Its a great deal of fun,
But the psychological complexity is still there its just beneath the surface, hidden in a glamour of symbolism, a cloak of indirectness, The splintering of identity, that most Highsmithian of themes, crackles through the pages of Ripley Under Ground, Throughout the book, characters impersonate one another, question their perceptions of reality, and even move liminally between the planes of the living and the dead,
The painter Derwatt, dead by suicide years before the book began, is resurrected first by the forgeries and then by Toms impersonation of him, The painter who makes the forgeries, the guiltracked Bernard Tufts, loses his own identity in the artistic impersonation of Derwatt Tom even thinks that Bernards Derwatts are, in some ways, better Derwatts than the originals not just better paintings better Derwatt paintings.
In despair, Bernard announces himself dead and hangs himself in effigy, before eventually killing himself for realor is it murder, Tom wonders, if you drive someone to suicide The bizarre and gruesome transformation of Bernards remains into those of Derwatt is yet another blurring of identity, one which leaves no doubt as to Toms tenuous connection to sanity, in case you are as I was temporarily fooled by the apparent normalcy of his life and marriage.
Even Tom Ripley himself takes a round trip into death, in the chilling sequence that gives the book its title,
The book concludes very much as the first one did, with Toms sense of the clock ticking on his freedom, The ghosts of the murders he committed in Talented haunt him people still ask him about Dickie Greenleaf, his first victim and his first impersonation.
And the police inspector investigating the amateur critics disappearance has noticed that acquaintances of Tom Ripley have an unusual tendency to vanish or die, As Tom girds himself to carry out yet another deception, he wills away a chilling sense of imminent defeat, of failure lurking at the other end of the telephone line.
And because of the closeness of perspective, the great intimacy with which Highsmith lays bare Toms inner life, as a reader you cant help but want him to succeed, and to find out who he will have to murder next.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is probably Patricia Highsmith's best book Tom Ripley is certainly her favorite creation, coming back to him in four more books, This is the second in the series about the deliciously amoral bisexual sociopath who went from rags to riches, attaining all the things we want to havefine wine, paintings on our walls, gardening.
Tom traveled to Italy at the request of Dickie Greenleaf's father, who mistook him for a friend of Dickie's from school, The working class Tom wants everything wealthy Dickie has in fact he wants Dickie, and he wants to be Dickie, And so he impersonates the wealthy high culture he so desires, he's a conman, a fraud, and is very, very talented at it, We sort of like him! We sort of understand him,
We pick up the leisurelycan I get you a glass of wine Please, sit! Don't worry about the polished oak floors can the maid get you an espressoaction six years after Dickie disappearedsuicide! How sad!and his friend Freddy also goes missinga nice guy, Freddie, but Tom hardly knew him.
Tom is now married to the wealthy and lovely Eloise, living in luxury in Paris, having received Dickie's inheritancehow nice of him to write Tom into the will before he killed himself! So thoughtful! and is part of an international art forgery scheme, until an art collector, Thomas Murchison, suspects the Phillip Derwatt paintings he owns are fakes and intends to get to the bottom of this! But Tom can't tolerate a disruption of his subterfuge.
and he likes the challenge and risk of solving a problem, It's not about moneyhe has plenty of that, He just wants what he wants, He does what he wants to do,
Bernard, the forger, wants out of the game, to restart his own career as a painter, Maybe that's enough of the plot, but there is a point in which Ripley actually is as the title suggests actually under ground,
We know there are three more books, so we know the jig is not yet up, so that is a kind of spoiler in itself.
I preferred the solo fraud Ripley, going from a kind of innocencein disguise, performing wealth and privilegesuddenly acting rashly, and surprisingly, to the guy who now works in tandem with others in the forgery scheme, with an ever widening circle.
And we already know what he will do when he is pushed into a corner, so the surprise element is gone how can his character develop much But he's such a deliciously evil character!
Ripley reminds me a bit of the amoral pedophile Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, though not so urbane and well read.
But both have no real selves, no there in their souls, At some points Ripley speaks of the lack of a self, he has little remorse or reflection at all, He hates reading people's journals, Bernard writes about the artist and self:
"More good artists don't show their personalities or waste their fire in their personal life, I think, They seem perfectly ordinary on the surface, "
Ripley's all veneer and surface, He's performing a role, empty inside, just as Highsmith in the midtwentieth century may have seen her lesbian life, performing heterosexuality when she felt he had to, hiding her one "lesbian" novel, Carol under a pseudonym, having relationships with men as well as women Highsmith even willingly paid for "conversion" therapy at one point to see if she could stop her lesbian "deviancy".
Doesnt she seem “perfectly ordinary” i, e. , straight to many on the surface Ripley Underground explores the relationship between art and authenticity or fakery,
This book isn't quite as engaging as the first novel in the series, but it is still very good, written by a very fine writer, even a misanthropic one with a dark view of human nature.
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