Review: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

 Patricia Highsmith is the doyenne of a certain type of ‘noir fiction’ where her protagonists (it is not really possible to call them heroes) although not gangsters, nevertheless operate outside the normal social and moral standards of their society. The epitome of this type of misanthropist is Ripley, memorably brought to the big screen by Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich and Matt Damon amongst others. But before Ripley, Highsmith tried her hand at a prototype in her very first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), itself made into a film by Hitchcock.

The proto-Ripley in this tale of unravelling murder, is a feckless young alcoholic called Charles Bruno. The spoiled offspring of  rich but unloving  parents, he resents his father who does not splash out the family cash to him quickly enough. On the other hand he is overly close to his mother who indulges his self-destructive behaviour whilst making half-hearted attempts to get him to clean up his act. Charles is also obsessed with murder stories, another unhealthy trait that his parents do little to eliminate. He is especially drawn to those murders where the perpetrator has managed to evade capture, or even suspicion. He sees that a critical element of these ‘successful’ murders is often the apparent lack of motive. His interest is driven, at least in part, by his wish that his father were dead, so that he could get on and help his mother spend the family fortune. Obviously Highsmith was an eager student of Freud.

Charles’s Oedipal hatred takes concrete form when he meets another young man, Guy Haines, on a long train journey to Texas. Guy is initially reluctant to get drawn into conversation with Charles, who he suspects (rightly) is quite drunk. But he lacks the will power to resist Charles’ insistent overtures of friendship. Reluctant at first to engage, he eventually reveals rather too much about his precarious marital situation.

His tongue loosened by drink Guy tells Charles that he is on his way to see Miriam, from whom he is currently trying to get divorced. Miriam, it appears, is a rather shallow young woman who likes to play around and whom Guy has come to hate. However, Guy is worried that some unforeseen complication may postpone the divorce and hinder his pursuit of happiness with his new love Anne. This fateful conversation sets in motion a plot that will consume them both.

For whilst to Guy his criticism of Miriam may have been no more than drink-fuelled bar-room talk, to Charles it was the answer to his prayer: how to get rid of his father. Charles suggests that they each murder the person who is in the way of the other’s happiness. Since Charles has no connection to Miriam and Guy none to Charles’s family neither will ever be suspected of involvement in the crimes. Guy of course thinks this is nothing but drunken bravado on Charles’s part and when they part at the end of the journey he never expects to see or hear from Charles again….

From here the story proceeds with grizzly inevitability. Whilst Hitchcock insisted on presenting Guy Haines as a good man pushed to the brink by the psychotic Bruno, Highsmith’s original is much darker and more complex. Partly through guilt and partly through weakness Guy is pulled further and further into Bruno’s  scheme. He has multiple opportunities to bring the saga to an end but he fails to take any of them. The interesting question for me is – why?

Guy is portrayed as a text-book example of a successful American in the post-war years. He is a celebrated architect and, even if his first marriage has been a failure, he has a wonderful future to look forward to with the rich and cultivated Anne. So why does he allow all this to slip away? The answer, it seems to me, is that despite having easy access to conventional wealth and success there is an emptiness at the heart of Guy: he doesn’t seem to believe in anything. You see this in the casual way he initially turns down a job that many architects would kill to obtain – or the way in which repeatedly considers ending his apparently happy relationship with Anne.

On the surface Guy is simply a conventional, if talented, man brought down by contact with evil. But if he was susceptible to being corrupted by a pathetic drunk like Bruno it was because of that emptiness at his core. Where did that come from? Was it perhaps that the American Dream itself was rotten? That there was simply no moral centre to a society where success was measured exclusively in dollars? So that when someone comes along with a compelling if repulsive proposition Guy simply has no convincing reasons for saying no?

Whether you buy this interpretation or not, the book is a compulsive read about a man who is powerless to prevent his moral disintegration. In her later books Highsmith choose to concentrate on the Bruno’s of this world, mainly in the form of Tom Ripley. But whilst these sociopathic monsters undoubtedly have a macabre appeal, it is the rest of us, the people like Guy, who hold society together. He shows us just how tenuous modern society really is.