Sun Damage - Sabine Durrant
You suspect not, but really is there anyone who can compete or compare with Highsmith on those terms? Despite the similarities, the opening of Sun Damage is nonetheless promising and engages you quickly in the schemes and operations of two con artists working the French Riviera at Saint-Cécile-sur-mer. Ali and Sean work as a team, scouting for potential marks and working a quick and sophisticated number on them. In the age of social media, it's probably a little easier to convince an unwary, wealthy, lone tourist who has just arrived to have a good time to willingly part with a considerable sum of money.
It seems to Ali that Lulu Fletcher Davies is just such an easy touch, but it's Sean who works the charm on the new arrival, convincing her that they have mutual acquaintances and may even have already bumped into each other on another occasion, if only they weren't so drunk they might remember. While Lulu proves easy to fool for a quick buck, every good con artist needs to know their limits and know when it's time to just take the money and run. For some reason however, Sean thinks he can spin Lulu out for a little longer, promising a trip on the yacht that they have temporarily "borrowed", if she is willing to invest in an upgrade. Ali has her doubts and has already been considering the long-term viability of their partnership, but before she can work something out with Sean, Lulu starts to get suspicious and has an unfortunate accident.
It's already been noted that with the right make up, Ali has been mistaken for Lulu at the hotel, so it's no surprise then when Ali decides that now is definitely the time to cut and run - since Sean can't be trusted to not land her in even deeper trouble with the authorities - she adopts the persona of Lulu Fletcher Davies to make her escape. This is not just Patricia Highsmith-like, it's pure The Talented Mr Ripley, with the boating "accident" on the French Riviera inspiring a killer to adopt the look, personality and persona of their victim. Not to mention, since Ali's background of deprivation has also been already indicated, giving her motivation to enjoy the money and social status that has been denied her.
The similarities are evident, but the differences between Durrant and Highsmith are also fairly obvious. Highsmith asks us to identify with an amoral killer and fraudster - albeit one who also constantly lives in fear of being caught - while Durrant, obviously, softens the challenge for the more casual reader, presenting Ali in a rather more sympathetic light. She has already felt some qualms about ripping off a young woman undeserving of the scale of betrayal of the scam, and although she might be implicated in what has happened to Lulu, she doesn't strike a killing blow. So, no, Durrant isn't as daring as Highsmith - few modern writers are - but it doesn't mean that this still can't be a good thriller working this situation to her own standards.
And indeed, the writing is fine, drawing you into a tense Highsmith-like situation, only to ultimately let you down as Ali - in the guise of Lulu - unfathomably takes up a position that Lulu had arranged for herself as a cook for a family. As if that choice isn't bad enough, the wealthy family she chooses to be a skivvy making food for are pretty much unbearable. You wouldn't stick around them for a second if you didn't have to (and Ali doesn't), least of all when they ask probing questions and you have to be always on your guard in the assumed identity of a woman whose body you suspect is eventually going to be discovered, identified and reported. Why would you, when you have a modest fortune and the means to disappear? Social media might be useful for staging an identity theft, but it makes it easier to get recognised and caught out.
It's very contrived and not at all convincing. Of all the means of escaping, Ali takes the toughest route imaginable, for no good reason apparently other than it makes for a tense series of encounters where any false move could reveal her as a fraud. And if she managed to avoid being found out, how long will it be until Sean turns up, which you know eventually he will, since she hasn't gone far and we must assume he must know the assumed identity she is going under.
We know what drives Tom Ripley to take greater and greater risks, to work on becoming another person, but Ali, not so much. Maybe it's not such a good idea to be so nice or to start getting feelings for one of the invited guests who has suspicions that she is not who she says she is. Not such a good idea "and yet I seemed powerless to resist" says Ali. You'd never get Ripley or Highsmith coming out with something as banal and lacking in calculation as that.
Worse, the larger part of the book then involves cooking recipes, shopping, a little bit of swimming and a little bit of figuring out the family and their individual problems and potential weaknesses that might be exploited, but it's timid stuff with weak unlikely characterisation. If it fails to live up the the promise that was laid out in the opening chapters and fails to live up to Patricia Highsmith - an unreasonable expectation I admit - Sun Damage nonetheless delivers a rather more reader-friendly summer thriller experience to be picked up at the airport and read while sunning on a beach on the south of France in the comfortable assurance that you would never be taken in by a scam as obvious as this.
Reading notes: Sun Damage by Sabine Durrant is published by Hodder & Stoughton on the 2nd June 2022. Reviewed from an advance uncorrected proof copy provided by the publisher.
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