as the introduction to a five-week-long serialized adaptation of all of Patricia Highsmith’s renowned Tom Ripley novels. “Looking for Ripley” will begin on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. GMT, but will also be available to listeners for a week thereafter on BBC iPlayer. Billingham’s presentation will be followed tomorrow by a one-hour dramatization of the first novel in Highsmith’s series, The Talented Mr. Ripley [1955], beginning at 2:30 p.m. GMT. Before “Looking for Ripley” debuts, The Rap Sheet asked Billingham for a preview of his thoughts about Highsmith and her creation. His response is featured below.)It is virtually unprecedented for the BBC to be broadcasting adaptations of novels by the same author in five consecutive Saturday afternoon slots. Yet that is what it has chosen to do in the case of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, and the documentary I am presenting serves as an introduction to these adaptations, examining in particular the enduring fascination for the character of Ripley. Fifty-five years after his creation, Ripley still exerts a powerful hold over a great many readers, is a model for writers hoping to create compelling antiheroes, and--as I found out during the program--is still used as a case study by the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists!
These five radio plays, in which the character of Tom Ripley will be portrayed by the brilliant Ian Hart, are, I think, a measure of the esteem in which Highsmith’s work has been held for many years. It is something of a shame that she was somewhat less appreciated when she was alive. This may have been because she was almost impossible to pigeonhole as a writer, but it was probably more to do with the fact that her books presented a version of suburban America that many readers found unpalatable. There was rarely a character to “root for” and if there was, it was usually a killer. Her fictional landscapes contained few, if any good people and the motives for the crimes in her tales were of far less importance than their consequences. She was interested in guilt and the switching of identity and rarely gave two hoots about anything approaching conventional justice. Her humor was savage and she used it to devastating effect, laying bare the sordid nature of the lives that lay behind the façade of American suburbia.
Highsmith longed to be loved, yet preferred animals to people. She was an American who yearned to be European. She was a woman who often bemoaned the fact that she had not been born a man and somewhere, from this tangle of contradictions and fury, she produced Ripley, one of fiction’s most enduring and ambiguous characters.
Tom Ripley--a man who is only truly alive when he is somebody else--is portrayed in the five novels very simply and absolutely without judgment. He kills because there is really nothing else he can do, and, as a reader, there is a real frisson in seeing him get away with it time and time again. You are drawn into Ripley’s world, compelled to empathize with him, and when you get close to this character--a psychopath who kills if there is a problem to be solved, who does not feel guilt in the same way as other people, who is not troubled by conscience or any other trappings of a conventional morality--it is hard not to feel a little (dare I say it?) jealous.
I went “looking for Ripley” by talking to many who had been close to him and his creator, including Highsmith’s biographer, Andrew Wilson, and the actor Jonathan Kent, who Highsmith herself said was the “perfect Ripley.” Did I find him? Well, I caught glimpses of him, and I certainly found out a lot more about Highsmith herself, who often signed herself “Tom” or “Ripley” and to whom her best-known character was unusually real. I discovered that dinner parties round at Pat’s could be unusual, to say the least, and that she often carried her beloved pet snails around in her bra.
As for Ripley himself ... well, I discovered that what he is truly talented at, is hiding.
READ MORE: “Happy Birthday, Mr. Ripley,” by James Campbell (The New York Times); “The Darkly Talented Patricia Highsmith,” by James Sallis (Los Angeles Times).
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