The Getaway

In Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith created the perfect amoral hero, the model for all amoral heroes to come. But, though Ripley almost never suffers from remorse, his crimes are often committed, as it were, inadvertently. He apparently has no choice. This is part of what gives the novels their tension. The reader finds himself hoping desperately for a different resolution to the messy situation in which Ripley finds himself yet knows all the while that Ripley is moving inexorably toward a final solution.

“Mimi’s Ghost” is oddly reminiscent of Highsmith’s Ripley stories. Morris Duckworth, the novel’s likable, hapless British hero/anti-hero (and the star of its prequel, “Juggling the Stars”), is a murderer by chance rather than by design. His crimes, like Ripley’s, are largely a matter of expediency and, even when planned, they rarely seem premeditated. But Morris has none of Ripley’s sinister charm though he is, by his own account, very good-looking; the atmosphere of menace, which characterizes all of Highsmith’s novels, is absent, replaced by a mood of black comedy. Farce, not fear, sets the tone, making the novel seem even more heartless.

“Mimi’s Ghost” finds Morris still living in Verona (where Tim Parks also lives) and newly married to Paola, the sister of his former girlfriend, Mimi, whom he kidnapped (in an attempt to get his hands on her money) and subsequently killed in “Juggling the Stars.” Paola is idle, rich, sexually voracious and pretty kinky with it, which both excites and repels her husband, who also has his kinky moments. Morris’ yearning for his dead sweetheart, triggered by his conviction that he can see her face in Fra Filippo Lippi’s “La Vergine incoronata” in the Uffizi and that somehow, because of this, she can’t really be dead, has already prompted him to have at least one imaginary conversation with her on his car phone. When the family visits Mimi’s grave on the Day of the Dead, the dead girl winks at Morris from the lovely photograph on her tomb, just as in life she used to wink at him when she was a student in his English class. And she winks at him not once but twice. At the same moment, his mother-in-law has a stroke.

From then on, Morris is absolutely convinced that he can communicate with Mimi, the only woman he has ever really loved. He talks to her all the time on his car phone, has romantic and sexual fantasies about her and, through her, ultimately finds God. She directs and guides him and masterminds (according to Morris’ delusion) his plans, giving him permission to do whatever is necessary to achieve his ends.

Meanwhile, he devises a scheme to exploit poor African immigrants as cheap labor in the family’s wine business with which, having given up teaching English, he is nominally associated. In reality, he has very little say in its running, and his brother-in-law, Bobo, the husband of Mimi’s eldest sister, Antonella, controls the business. Morris co-opts Forbes, an elderly English homosexual, to help him in his great plan under the guise of setting up a charitable home for the immigrants which will double, in the summer months, as the “gentlemanly live-in school of culture” of which Forbes has been dreaming for years. Ridiculous and grandiose as many of Morris’ plans are, it is impossible not to be somewhat charmed by him. There is a kind of endearing naivete about the way he sets to realizing his dreams and putting the world to rights. His chances of success, however, seem negligible, and this has the effect of diffusing any disapproval or revulsion one might feel.

Although Morris is infinitely prepared both to exploit and to be magnanimous toward the immigrants, he is violently homophobic (he doesn’t appear to be aware of Forbes’ predilections). When two of the workers are discovered by Bobo in a compromising position and subsequently fired, Morris decides to turn the situation to his advantage, with predictably chaotic results. One by one, those who seek to put obstacles in his way come to grief. Day by day, Morris becomes more erratic and eccentric until, in one particularly baroque scene, he masturbates in his mother-in-law’s bed (which Mimi had shared with her mother until she ran away with Morris) into some old underwear of Mimi’s beneath a reproduction of a painting of a Madonna. His grip on reality, if indeed he ever had one, has gone.

But somehow he manages to fool not only the Italian police but also everyone else: Forbes, Antonella, even the priest at the prison where he is temporarily sent. Morris, like Ripley, seems destined to get away with whatever crime he commits, perhaps to make up for having been terminally messed up by his parents.

By this time, however, the reader may feel rather exhausted. The plot has so many twists and turns, so many clever cross-references, that reading “Mimi’s Ghost” requires the same sort of mental effort as doing a complicated puzzle. It is hard to believe that anyone who had not first read “Juggling the Stars” would be able to make much sense of the sequel. And even those who have read the first book may still find much of “Mimi’s Ghost” mystifying. But that may not matter. It’s impossible not to admire Parks’ virtuosity, which Italy, with its Machiavellian connotations and its famous chaotic modus operandi, feeds. He is like a juggler with a pile of colored balls. How does he manage to keep so many in the air? In his case, the means justify the end. Without the means, everything else would seem a little pointless.