�鶹��

Available for over a year

Tom Ripley is back. Yesterday, the anti-hero created by the American crime novelist Patricia Highsmith returned to our screens via Netflix, played by Andrew Scott. Viewers as well as readers love the killer Ripley, with him being memorably played by Matt Damon in the Talented Mr Ripley and John Malkovich in Ripley’s Game. Critics have described the charming, cultured and ruthless Ripley as one of the most repellent characters created in modern literature. Highsmith is not unusual in producing crime novels. The shelves of bookshops groan with volumes by Agatha Christie, P D James and Colin Dexter as well as contemporary writers such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. But in their novels, there are heroes, detectives that ensure that killers are put away. The reader can be assured that the world is put to rights. But Highsmith, via Ripley, did something different that was highly disturbing. In her bid to shock her readers, her Ripley books have no redemptive arc. “I am showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it”, she wrote in her diary. “I shall make my readers rejoice in it too”. I am not sure that Highsmith is right. Ripley is fascinating because the reader feels as if they are getting an insight into what makes someone like that tick – why he shakes off the usual taboos of civilisation against murder. But that does not mean that people are rejoicing in it, just as they do not rejoice in, say, the actions of the mass killer Peter Sutcliffe when they read about his crimes against women. Instead they want to understand something that is dreadful but thankfully rare. What is also rare and I think equally fascinating but not studied enough are the people at the opposite end of the spectrum from the likes of Ripley and their self-centredness: those who are so selfless that they give up their lives for others. People like Margaret Hassan, an Irish woman, Iraqi citizen and aid worker abducted and murdered in Iraq in 2004, and Sr Dorothy Stang, an American nun working in the Amazon and outspoken against logging companies destroying the rainforest, shot dead in 2005. And then there are the seven aid workers killed in Gaza this week, who put their lives on the line to bring food to people there. All of them, in their ultimate sacrifice, embodied Christ’s commandment to love one another. No one has greater love than this, he told his disciples, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Ripley might be the perfect case study of a narcissistic psychopath, but Margaret Hassan, Dorothy Stang and the aid workers of Gaza offer a masterclass in love.