Warning: contains spoilers
The film version of this book is one of my favourite pieces of cinema, it is dark and it is deeply uncomfortable to watch as the characters are all so flawed and yet so ordinary. The scene in the boat is one of the most vivid moments I have every seen on screen and it is etched into my memory. So I came to the book with a rich memory of the film and the story and for the most part I found the book didn't quite live up to the film.
The pacing felt different, in my recollection the boat in the mid point of the film and the a dramatic pivot, but in the book we get there much more quickly. Dickie in the book doesn't seem to get much of a chance to get under your skin in the way that Jude Law's performance is so brilliantly charismatic and yet vile. Also in the book Tom seems to have turned on Dickie well before they get to the boat where as I remember it as something of a bolt out the blue. (I am being careful to see "I remember" as it is some years since I last saw the film, but it is one that has played over in my mind a few times and so there is plenty of room for my memory to be whole different version than the actual film).
But in the film everything after the boat was for me a bit flat while in the book the intensity just builds and builds from that moment. You get drawn deeper and deeper into Tom's mind, ever more guilty that you are willing him to get away with it. This is one of the great thing about this story, at least for me, what drives Tom is an encounter with the world that is all too familiar - it is exemplified by the feeling of being ineffectual at parties and so as someone who finds small talk painful and retreats to the corner to drown myself in red wine I feel there is very little distance between myself and Tom Ripley. Also the lust for and the hatred of Dickie are familiar - down the years I have known a string of people who could fill his shoes with ease, who are everything us Tom Ripleys can never be. This is perhaps why such a big part of me is willing Tom to get away with it - but is there any real victory in him getting away, the unwritten chapter of Tom's life after the book ends would hold the answer, does the great impersonator manage to be "someone else" while being Tom Ripley or does being Tom Ripley continue to limit him even when he has newly enhanced economic resources.
The film seemed much more homo-erotic than the book, but this might just be the effect of casting Jude Law and Matt Damon. The film seems to leave no doubt the Tom is gay and Dickie isn't - the book felt less conclusive on either side. With regards to Dickie we get to know him much less in the book and so naturally the answer can not be so definitive, while with Tom the attraction to Dickie is much more multifaceted and so if there was a sexual attraction it was only one force among many and not actually the primary one. Also the flip side which is Tom's dislike for Marge is not taken as a universal dislike of women. In the film Marge is person equal in attractive qualities (personality and physicality) as Dickie, but in the book she is more needy and parasitical. It is much more reasonable in the book to understand the attraction to Dickie and repulsion to Marge on a purely personal level rather that the diagnostic to an underlining sexuality.
In the end I still think the film is stronger than the book, but the book is more complex and I think it will leave me puzzling even longer and deeper about Tom Ripley.
