Two More Ripleys Done

Now all that is left is The Boy Who Followed Ripley which I started last night. Read Ripley's Game out of sequence, after I read Ripley Under Water. Will review them however in chronological order. Ripley's Game is most unsettling. In Ripley Under Ground, Highsmith played with layer upon layer of false identities; here she introduces a pyramid of men each and all looking to find an agent to perform a criminal act so as to avoid being personally guilty of murder. Who is more guilty: Ripley for suggesting Trevanny to Reeves or Reeves for asking Ripley to find him some unsuspecting innocent to kill a couple of Mafioso looking to take over illegal gambling in Hamburg?

Is Trevanny less guilty in accepting the "job" because he is terminally ill with leukemia or because he is motivated to provide an inheritance for his wife and son? There is a review quote on the front of TBWFR from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that expresses my thoughts most clearly: "Highsmith skews your sense of literary justice, tilting your internal scales of right and wrong." Coincidentally, when a co-worker mentioned he saw John Malkovich as Ripley in RG and asked me whether I thought Ripley was a good guy or bad guy. I immediately said "bad," especially as in this novel, he entertains himself by using Trevanny as the hit man.

Later that night, I was mentally comparing Ripley to James Bond. Both pile up bodies, live high, and suffer no lasting consequences of their violent acts. But Bond has a license to kill ... Ripley acts exclusively out of self interest, to maintain a high society life style. His veneer of financially endowed well breeding is his cover for being a sociopath. His neighbors and fellow townsmen all seem to ignore the coincidences and rumors that surround his life. To quote: "Tom ... was aware of his reputation, that many people mistrusted him, avoided him. Tom had often thought that his ego would have been shattered long ago -- the ego of an average person would have been shattered -- except for the fact that people, once they got to know him ... and spent an evening, liked him ..." Only Madame Trevanny at the conclusion of the book expresses the readers' appraisal: she spits on him ... but then she doesn't go to the police, preserving her own husband's reputation and the ill-gotten gains that permit her to move out of the small village and move up in social standing.

On the other hand, Ripley Under Water seems to me to be the most contrived of Highsmith's plots so far. While it ties back to Ripley's dumping Murchison's corpse in a nearby canal, his victim from Ripley Under Ground, the character of David Pritchard who comes to France to dredge the waterways for his body seems to have dropped in with no clear motive or cause of justice. Pritchard and his wife are perceived by Ripley as low class almost hippie Americans, completely unworthy opponents. They are so beneath him intellectually, that his doesn't even have to dirty his hands killing them; there greed makes them self-destruct. It was not suspenseful, merely a bridge between others in the series, marking time.

In the meantime, I've squeezed in some movie nights and afternoons, finally finding The King's Speech perchance on the library shelves, despite being 182 in line on the reserve list. I liked it but not as much as the Hollywood hype lead me to expect as well as elevator talk at work. A bigger surprise and enjoyment was Nowhere Boy, the late teen years of Lennon as he grows into music. Excellent performances and engaging story.