Toby's Reviews > The Boy Who Followed Ripley

I think I was about 14 pages in before I said to myself, "wow, Patricia Highsmith was a talented writer." It was clear almost instantly that this was a different type of Ripley book but the way she writes meant that it didn't matter. Her understanding of Tom Ripley and her ability to set the tone and atmosphere of a novel means that it doesn't matter whether his behaviour is that of a sociopath or murderer or curious old man or kindly uncle or bag lady as it's almost impossible not to enjoy it.

I can appreciate why some people are of the opinion that this is the weakest Ripley novel to date and perhaps as a standalone title it might well be considered such BUT as a further chronicle in the life of one of great anti-heroes of contemporary literature this is pretty damned enjoyable.

Tom is growing old, mellow; his attempts to become a mentor allow us to explore this growth/change in his personality and led to perhaps one of my favourite sequences in the series in the sexual underbelly of West Berlin. It also allows us to share loss with him, something that he had never felt before, which from a sociopath is rare and signifies that perhaps he has finally started to find a peace and happiness in his life. If you'd told me that Highsmith would write this book and this development after the devastating arrival of Tom in The Talented Mr. Ripley I probably wouldn't have believed you but now having read it nothing feels more natural.

I had a few issues with the chronology of the series here. The book is clearly set in 1979, 24 years after the first Ripley novel but he hasn't aged much at all, especially considering that he points out Heloise as being 28 or 29. Before this novel I would've been unable to really place the stories but Highsmith seems to ahve gone out of her way to place this novel at a certain time; the mention of Christopher And His Kind, references to the visit of Jimmy Carter to Berlin in 1978 amongst others deliberately placed in the text only served to drag me out of the story and question the reality of the world she was writing in.

Small things but something I would've expected someone as talented as Ms Highsmith to have noticed and fixed. Only one Tom Ripley book left and then I shall allow myself to read other of her works.