The hunter and the hunted

Libreria Marciana, Venice CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia Commons

Those Who Walk Away
by Patricia Highsmith,
introduction by Joan Schenkar.
Virago Modern Classics, 2014 (1967).

His room was simple and clean and had a view through its tall windows of Giudecca across the water and, directly below, of the small canal that went along one side of the pensione.

Chapter 2

In the late 1990s we stayed a night in Venice at the Pensione Seguso, possibly where Patricia Highsmith may have stayed late in 1966 while researching this novel. So it was with the shock of recognition that the view the fictional Ray Garrett has from his room in the very same pensione is almost precisely that which we had some thirty years later.

And why is Ray staying here? He is trying to meet up with his father-in-law, Ed Coleman, to explain how he feels about the suicide in Mallorca of his wife Peggy, Ed’s daughter, for which the older man blames Ray with an intense resentment that borders on and then tips over into psychopathy.

The problem is that Ed has already made an attempt on Ray’s life when they’d met in Rome: what will Ray’s reception be like in Venice when he turns up alive and physically unharmed?

Palazzo del Cammello, Venice (1882) by Robert Ru

Ray is the protagonist we mostly follow, an indecisive type who tends to watch life go by, but who wants to get on well with others, avoiding conflict. He sees himself as “afflicted with an inferiority complex, passably attractive, fairly rich, though without any great talent.” Unfortunately he’s up against an antagonist who’s an impulsive man with a violent temper, who uses people, who idolised his daughter, who has always hated Ray but now does so with a passion. In Venice and elsewhere in the Lagoon the pair take it in turns to be the hunter or the hunted, one wanting simply to talk, the other to main and murder.

Highsmith wrote this – one of a trio of thrillers (as we’re told by Joan Schenkar in her informative introduction) – while living in Suffolk, England, but her writing is so immediate you feel you’re following Ray and Ed alternately every step of the way, whether in Venice’s labyrinth, in Giudecca, on the Lido or in Chioggia. We meet Ed’s current girlfriend Inez, her friend Antonio and other American visitors staying at the grand hotels; we observe Ray assisted by locals who help get him out of tight spots and with whom he establishes mutual respect; we are present at interviews with the local police and an American detective.

But always there’s that sense of menace, of potential danger round every corner, that Highsmith does so well, even as she states facts with dispassionate clarity and clinically probes the thoughts of her characters. I can sense that some readers may baulk at Ray’s seemingly insipid nature, his passivity, his desire to be liked by not offending anyone, but I have to say I largely empathised with him; he, perhaps like Highsmith herself, wears a mask-like persona because he really isn’t sure who or what the real Ray Garrett is, unlike Ed who is utterly selfish in his ruthlessness and hates to disguise it.

I have no idea if this is (as the Slovenian critic Slavoj Žižek has written) Highsmith’s masterpiece, but I do know this: she expertly manages to add Venice itself to her cast of characters, in such a way that I for one long to go back to La Serenissima, to walk its maze of calli, admire its vistas away from the tourist hubs, and rejoice in its sensual delights. And maybe look out for the ghosts of Ed and Ray.

© C A Lovegrove