Friday, December 28, 2007
The Cry of the Owl
To my mind, the three great strengths of Patricia Highsmith’s writing are her prose style, her characterisation and her unconventional but powerfully compelling narratives. She was a genre writer but her novels are every bit as good as many of those books which are recommended as literary fiction. Her prose is plain and to the point. When she does use figurative language it seems organic, consistent with her fictional universe; there are no encrustations of fine style intended to impress the reader. Her characters always seem entirely plausible and her skill is to show how easily the ordinary and the banal can slide into derangement and obsession. Sometimes the slide is into violence and murder; sometimes her plots fizzle out and in the end nothing happens.
In one telling moment in The Cry of the Owl, one of the leading characters reflects on an incident which now seems
less real than a scene in a story of violence on television. Had he been one of the real characters? Robert wanted to smile.
Orthodox representations of crime are, Highsmith implies, misleading. Crime is a much messier matter, which fails to conform to culturally-induced expectation. Highsmith gives us amoral characters but they are never evil in the simplistic sense of tabloid journalism. She shows how human weakness and the right set of circumstances can have unexpected consequences. And the world she creates is a bleak and cheerless one. There isn’t a lot of happiness at the end of a Highsmith novel. In The Cry of the Owl one of the characters, it turns out, is Death - but in a very subtle, understated way.
The Cry of the Owl is a stalker novel, first published in 1962. It is Highsmith at her very best (which sets me at odds with Barry Forshaw, whose list of ‘The top five Highsmith books’ in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction doesn’t include it). As such, it is interesting to compare it with Enduring Love. Highsmith’s prose and compulsive-readability seems to me every bit as good as McEwan’s. Her world is a drab American working class world rather than that of affluent English professionals. However, the key difference is what happens. In McEwan’s novel the book’s sympathies are with the hero who is stalked. The crisis is finally resolved with the incarceration of the stalker and acknowledgement that the protagonist was correct all along in perceiving himself under threat. It is a deeply conservative text. At the end, civilised values and knowledge are restored; the threat to those values is placed under restraint.
Highsmith is on the other side. The Cry of the Owl begins with the stalker and encourages the reader to sympathise with him. We are invited to understand stalking. From this unconventional opening the story moves in a series of quite unexpected directions, which are hard to discuss without spoiling the surprises. In the end, though, ‘plot’ doesn’t really matter for Highsmith. What interests her is human psychology in all its perversity. The stalker emerges as by far the most humane person in the story. This makes The Cry of the Owl a disturbing and surprising work of fiction.
In one telling moment in The Cry of the Owl, one of the leading characters reflects on an incident which now seems
less real than a scene in a story of violence on television. Had he been one of the real characters? Robert wanted to smile.
Orthodox representations of crime are, Highsmith implies, misleading. Crime is a much messier matter, which fails to conform to culturally-induced expectation. Highsmith gives us amoral characters but they are never evil in the simplistic sense of tabloid journalism. She shows how human weakness and the right set of circumstances can have unexpected consequences. And the world she creates is a bleak and cheerless one. There isn’t a lot of happiness at the end of a Highsmith novel. In The Cry of the Owl one of the characters, it turns out, is Death - but in a very subtle, understated way.
The Cry of the Owl is a stalker novel, first published in 1962. It is Highsmith at her very best (which sets me at odds with Barry Forshaw, whose list of ‘The top five Highsmith books’ in The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction doesn’t include it). As such, it is interesting to compare it with Enduring Love. Highsmith’s prose and compulsive-readability seems to me every bit as good as McEwan’s. Her world is a drab American working class world rather than that of affluent English professionals. However, the key difference is what happens. In McEwan’s novel the book’s sympathies are with the hero who is stalked. The crisis is finally resolved with the incarceration of the stalker and acknowledgement that the protagonist was correct all along in perceiving himself under threat. It is a deeply conservative text. At the end, civilised values and knowledge are restored; the threat to those values is placed under restraint.
Highsmith is on the other side. The Cry of the Owl begins with the stalker and encourages the reader to sympathise with him. We are invited to understand stalking. From this unconventional opening the story moves in a series of quite unexpected directions, which are hard to discuss without spoiling the surprises. In the end, though, ‘plot’ doesn’t really matter for Highsmith. What interests her is human psychology in all its perversity. The stalker emerges as by far the most humane person in the story. This makes The Cry of the Owl a disturbing and surprising work of fiction.
# posted by Ellis : 5:30 PM
