Customer Reviews

Ripley Under Ground

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Tom Ripley has aquired a beautiful wife and a lovely home in the French countryside. As Tom's life can never be without conflict, Tom finds himself caught in the middle of a forgery scandal that could destroy the world he has made for himself. We find Mr Ripley a little older, a little wiser and a little more sure of his ruthless capabilities. The Author, Patrica Highsmith, stretched the lines of plausibility on this one just a little, but then again we are talking about the ever scheming Thomas Ripley.

"Ripley Under Ground" is the first book in the Ripley series to follow the talented Mr. Ripley. It establishes Tom Ripley as a married man living on a French estate and explains much of his transition from parasitic murderer to suave psychopath. This novel is possibly the most psychological one in the Ripley series since it endows Ripley with a tremendous artistic sensibility that often validates his homicidal choices.

In this novel, Ripley has evolved from a sponger and a drifter to a country gentleman. In true aristocratic fashion, he shuns professional life and devotes his energy to painting, gardening, language study, and--well--forgery. Ripley plays a pivotal role in setting up a forgery ring in England that produces the work of a dead painter whom the world believes is still alive. Unfortunately, an art aficionado discovers some of the forgeries and begins an investigation that threatens to expose the ring. In an effort to validate the forgeries, Ripley disguises himself as the dead painter and holds a press conference. The investigator attends the conference but remains unconvinced. As a result, Ripley (in his own guise) invites him to his estate and subsequently murders him. This puts Ripley in an ironic predicament since the police approach him not only in search of the missing investigator, but also in search of the dead painter who, thanks to Ripley's impersonation, they believe is still alive. To complicate matters more, the forger himself appears at Ripley's estate in a state of agitation ready to confess his crime to the world. Somehow Ripley must avoid incrimination, subdue the distraught forger, and prevent the police from searching for the dead painter whom he inadvertently brought back to life.

The most fascinating aspect of this novel is the artistic sensibility that seems to govern Ripley's homicidal choices. For example, the investigator whom Ripley murders is more concerned with commercial authenticity than artistic value. He ignores Ripley's argument that the successful forger is as great as the artist he imitates and retorts that building a reputation on forgery is like stealing another person's bank account. When Ripley murders him, one wonders if he does so out of artistic revolt rather than self-preservation. This idea is reinforced by Ripley's refusal to kill the forger even after the forger attempts to murder him. Despite the enormous danger posed by the forger, Ripley is affectionate and nurturing toward him.

Is this thriller really an assault on middle class values? I think so. Ripley the art connoisseur loves his forged paintings and his genuine ones equally. Unlike the investigator, he feels no need to distinguish between them as long as they are of the same aesthetic caliber. While Ripley despises the business concerns of his forgery partners, he admires the forger who paints for passion rather than profit.

Equally as interesting is the attitude of Ripley's wife. Ripley confesses his murder to her and indicates that she knew of his homicidal past even before marrying him. He frequently alludes to her amoral tendencies which, no doubt, are quite compatible with his own.

I recommend "Ripley Under Ground" as a thriller, a psychological study, and a novel of ideas.

The criticisms here are mostly spot-on. I was excited to read the second Ripley novel after masterful The Talented Mr. Ripley, and have to say it left me with mixed opinions. On the one hand, Highsmith continues her dazzlement of having us identify with a cold blooded killer and cheer him on his way to get scot free. On the other hand, there are significant parts of the novel that feel like the first or second draft of a finer novel. Problems include the preposterous impersonation scenes, where Ripley throws over investigators and highly interested parties by donning a beard and accent, before meeting the same people again as Ripley, and an overall sogginess to the second half of the book, which could stand a great deal of tightening. The first book had better pacing and urgency due in part to Ripley having to outwit opponents in tight quarters, where this one winds up limp. Not to say there aren't thrilling moments and great turns, but it seems Highsmith tosses a number of objects and devices in the air with their never really coming to much: the goodhearted housekeeper, the grave in the woods, a cellar never returned to, a distant friend hooked in with espionage for some reason, the unexplored fate of a stolen painting, the possibilities of problems with customs, or a rivered body being found... and on... the plot felt perfunctory after a while, not tight and energetic, and after a truly gristly solution found in Austria (not wholly believable as a soluation), Highsmith simply ends the novel with more questions to be asked, as if she were tired of it and just wanted to pass the manuscript on to the publishers. It's too bad; it could have been better. As it is, it's certainly not bad, certainly not great. It's convinced me to wait some time before moving on to the third in the series.

"Ripley Under Ground" is the second novel in the Ripley series by the talented Patricia Highsmith. In the first novel, readers were introduced to Tom Ripley - a poor player who wishes for a better life and achieves it through ill-gotten gains. The charm of Tom Ripley is that even though he is an amoral murderer, the reader roots for him to get away with all the evil deeds he has committed.

This second book finds him married and living a rather quiet, peaceful life in France. He is the conspirator of Derwatt Ltd., a company that manufactures paintings by an artist who has supposedly been dead for the past six years. When questions of forgery arrive through an American visitor, Tom impersonates the artist but to little avail. He later introduces himself to the American visitor as Tom Ripley, and invites him to his home in France to view the two Derwatt paintings he owns, in a desperate attempt to persuade the man to change his mind. Despite all his charm and storytelling, the man refuses to budge on his theory and plans to seek out an expert when he returns to London. Tom knows that he must take matters into his own hands to prevent this and the damage it would cause to everyone involved.

Tom Ripley is a thoroughly interesting character. He is intelligent and philosophical despite his amoral adventures into corruption and murder. He truly believes that he is doing what is best for himself and those involved. As the story progresses, and the situation becomes even more desperate, there seems to be far too many loose ends to tie up - and Highsmith doesn't end them tidily. She leaves room open for the series to continue, with questions abounding in the readers' minds. And through everything we witness Tom do, we still want to see him succeed, even in the most grisly of tasks.

Patricia Highsmith's crime thriller "Ripley Under Ground," was initially published in 1970. It's second in her Ripley series, known to the faithful as the Ripliad, recounting the deeds of her widely-known antihero, the American Tom Ripley, a smooth, charming, murderous, potentially bi-sexual, young psychopath, semi-retired to a lovely French villa -- with an equally lovely young French wife -- off the proceeds of his many bad deeds.

As the book opens, Ripley has been profiting quite nicely thank you, for donkey's years, from a sweet little scam: a cottage industry grown up around selling the paintings -- and the sizzle -- of Derwatt, a brilliant British surrealist painter. But unfortunately, Derwatt has been dead these six years. However, Ripley and friends had resurrected him, and continued to sell his increasingly valuable paintings, actually executed by a close friend of the late artist; and to license, at handsome fees, the use of the well-known painter's name to an art supply house and school. All the while explaining that Derwatt had not committed suicide in Greece, as once was thought, but merely retreated to a remote Mexican village, there to live in complete anonymity. Then, wouldn't you know it; the whole shebang is menaced by Murchison, a suspicious American art collector.

Ripley will take action, of course, and it will inevitably be murderous. His response will be orchestrated with a lot of pan-European travel, to gallery openings, and glamorous places, and is a lot of fun to watch. The book is so skillfully written, we almost find ourselves rooting for Ripley. It moves fast, dialog crackles, narrative writing is fine.

Highsmith, of course, was American herself, a Texan, who chose to live in Europe. She's best known as the author of the superlative thriller, Strangers on a Train, and, as filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train (Two-Disc Special Edition); also for the first Ripley book, The Talented Mr. Ripley, recently filmed by Anthony Minghella, as The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Ripley series doesn't necessarily need to be read in order, but it's perhaps best to do so, as the Ripliad is certainly subject to the law of diminishing returns; the later books get weaker. At any rate, Highsmith's work has previously been best-known and most popular in Europe, but the recent film has reminded a lot of Americans of her large body of work, mainly unsettling chillers, set in a topsy-turvy world of her own devising that resembles ours, only in an earthworm's view.

In the second of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels, "Ripley Under Ground," it is six years since the Dickie Greenleaf and Freddie Miles homicides. Tom Ripley has settled in France, married moneyed Heloise, and is living comfortably well-off at his county home Belle Hombre with his loyal, supremely capable housekeeper Mme Annette.
Tom can never play the straight and narrow; after all he does have a homicidal streak. He is involved in an art forgery scheme originating in London whereby a painter named Bernard is forging new works by the dead painter Derwatt. Tom is also involved in a fencing scheme with a shady character named Reeves Minot who is central in the third novel in the series. Being a dodgy character suits Ripley who enjoys elaborate crooked schemes and the danger of discovery.
Ripley's wife doesn't really trust him because she knows about his shady past. An American named Murchison seems to be catching on to the forgeries so Tom has to head him off at the pass. In his home Tom has a real and a forged Derwatt which he shows to Murchison while trying to convince him no forgery is going on.
Bernard, the forger, mentally unstable, has pangs of guilt about recreating Derwatts because the renowned painter was Bernard's idol. Bernard's going to spill the beans and wreck the whole scheme. Bernard, whose sanity is in question, sometimes seems saner than Tom.
There is always a lot of travel around Europe in a Ripley novel; it adds to the intrigue and the atmosphere of suspense. The detectives in this book are very suspicious of Ripley, but he outwits them by schemes that seem way too complicated.
Ripley, always flirting with discovery and detection, unnecessarily invites people to stay in his home who could potentially destroy him. He invites Dickie Greenleaf's cousin to stay, and the guy turns out to be incredibly nosy and intrusive. Highsmith creates unbearable suspense in this way because you never know who is going to unmask him, endanger him. Everybody seems to suspect him because of his shaky background. Ripley is like a moth flying too close to the flame.
Tom plays elaborate cat and mouse games which seem to become more complicated, intricate, and audaciously dangerous for him. The problems Ripley has getting rid of a corpse verge on absurdity but add to the suspense.
Tom kills people to save himself. He was born to lie, feels comfortable lying, and in playing a role, impersonating people such as Derwatt, and being someone other than himself.
In this book Tom adds one more murder to his tally and possibly a second if you count driving a person to suicide a homicide. The story that Tom tells the British police detective at the end of the book is a little too bizarre to be believed.
You begin to root for Ripley not to be caught, but his victims don't really deserve death; only his selfish needs compel him to act. There are brilliant touches, sly comments, and details in a Highsmith. This one is a great read.

This was a really slow read. Although I love the Tom Ripley character it was hard to enjoy this book as I already knew he was an evil, deceitful character. It wasn't as suspenseful as "The Talented Mr. Ripley" when the reader wasn't quite sure about Ripley's character yet. Still, it is a good mystery novel and worth the time.

Hello? Where is the nervous, insecure, most probably insane pathological liar we met in the excellent "Talented..." This book is a weak sequel, with an improbable plot, and a house full of guests that has Ripley running back and forth like a character in a 1930's comedy. How stupid are the police? A seasoned detective can't tell the guy's wearing makeup and a fake beard from a few feet away? The ending is just ridiculous: the cop takes Ripleys word about some very strange goings on in the middle of the Salzburg woods, and that's the end of it. If it were this easy to get away with murder, I would have tried it myself.

I read Ripley Under Ground following the first novel in the series. Patricia Highsmith's writing a succinct and beautifully descriptive, and she builds the story chapter by chapter until it becomes hard to put down. The story has been explained well by other reviewers and revolves around a British artist - Derwatt - who presumably drowned himself on the island of Icaria in his disappointment over his career. His friends, ironically, manage to make the dead artist famous by selling his paintings and drawings but they run out of art works to sell. Enter Tom Ripley with the solution: have someone paint pictures in the Derwatt style. Derwatt become a cottage industry with his own line of art supplies with an artist - Bernard Tufts - turning out Derwatt paintings. As a cover, Derwatt is painting away in an obscure village in Mexico and will not reveal the name. Everything is good until someone looks too closely and thinks Derwatt is being forged.

Without giving away much more of the story, the inquisitive art collector meets a sticky end and Bernard, the art forger, begins to fall apart. Tom Ripley is called on to deftly manage the growing police investigation as his many houseguests - including a Greenleaf cousin and Bernard - come to stay at his house. And his wife Heloise, conveniently in Greece during the early part of the book, returns home. The story builds nicely as the police want to question the illusive Derwatt about this missing art collector. Ultimately, however, Ms. Highsmith ends the book without resolving the whereabouts of the art collector but Bernard becomes a useful stand-in for Derwatt.

The loose end is a bit troublesome and I thought of some ways in which the story could have been resolved. Ripley could have implicated Bernard as the art collector's murderer because Bernard felt that Derwatt had been insulted by the charges of forgery. It also might have been interesting if Ripley had found the real Derwatt when he was searching for Bernard, as a disinterested observed of his own fame.

Despite the loose end Ripley Under Ground is a very engaging book that should delight lovers of the Ripley series.

Several years after he murdered Dickie Greenleaf and went through the events described in "The Talented Mr. Ripley," we now find a more domesticated Tom Ripley living as a man of leisure in a beautiful old country house with a lovely garden in France, with his young, blond French wife Heloise. Tom, living on the money that Dickie "left" to him (in a fake will drawn up by Tom himself after he murdered Dickie), plus his wife's family's generous allowance, supplements his income (and adds some excitment to a rather staid life) by having a stake in a bogus art dealership that sells paintings from the mysterious Derwatt. Unbeknownst to the general public, Derwatt actually committed suicide years before, and the new Derwatt paintings are being painted by Bernard Tufts, a secret business partner of Tom, who's an expert counterfeiter of Derwatt's art. But what's one to do when this fraudalent scheme is discovered by an avid Derwatt fan?

Though Ripley is now older, wiser and more circumspect than he was in the prior novel, he hasn't changed at all in one respect: he will not let anything or anyone stand in the way of his blissful existence, even if he has to lie, cheat and murder. Still a master of imitation, Ripley also has to assume the role of different persona, including that of Derwatt himself, in order to get away with his various crimes.

The problem I had with "Ripley Under Ground," was the same thing I had with "The Talented Mr. Ripley," but even more so. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at how many times Ripley was able to convince the police (here both French and British, as opposed to Italian in the prior Ripley novel) of his complete innocence and non-involvement with the shakiest of alibis and under the deepest suspicion. Ripley explains that he's just unlucky in that people who were last seem with him happen to disappear, and presumably well trained detectives astonishingly accept this after the most cursory of investigation.

What was most frustrating to me is that all the police had to do to figure out the Derwatt ruse, and Ripley's involvement in it, was to follow the money trail. His colleagues at the Derwatt gallery explained that they had no idea where Derwatt lived or how they could locate him. Wouldn't following the money trail be the first thing one would do if someone who's alleging counterfeit paintings was murdered? This avenue of investigation would have led to the discovery of Ripley's involvement in the enterprise, and his entire story would have collapsed like a house of cards.

In short, if you liked "The Talented Mr. Ripley," it's probably worth your while to read "Ripley Under Ground." But the problems of the first Ripley novel are magnified here.