The Two Faces of January

Rydal Keener is twenty-five, American, educated, and adrift. He has come to Greece on money borrowed or taken from a father he resents — a father who, in a way he cannot quite articulate, he has been trying to escape his whole life. He drifts through Athens, picking up tourists, running small scams, and doing very little of what he told himself he came here to do.

Chester MacFarland is older, smoothly charming, and on the run from something in America with his younger wife Colette. When Rydal spots Chester in the lobby of a hotel and Chester accidentally kills a Greek detective, Rydal makes a decision that ties their fates together. He helps. He doesn’t know why — except that Chester is something like a father, and the pull of that relationship overrides the self-interest that would have sent him in the other direction.

The Two Faces of January is Highsmith’s most directly mythological novel — set in the landscape of Greek antiquity, full of father-son dynamics and the violence they generate. It is also one of her most stylistically assured, the Greek light and heat giving her precise prose an unusual warmth. Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac starred in the 2014 film adaptation.

Reading Guides

• Patricia Highsmith Books in Order
• Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith
• Books About Greece

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Two Faces of January apart: The Greek setting is beautifully rendered — Highsmith knew and loved Greece; The dynamic between Rydal and Chester is among her most psychologically complex; and The Oedipal subtext is handled with subtlety. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Two Faces of January give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The Double again — two men who reflect each other across generations. Greece as a landscape that amplifies rather than resolves moral ambiguity. Complicity as a form of intimacy. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Craft and Construction

What lifts The Two Faces of January above the competent is the control Patricia Highsmith exercises over pacing and information. The reader is never ahead of the story, but neither is the mystery artificially maintained by withholding plausible deductions. The solution arrives feeling earned rather than arbitrary — the definitive test of plot construction in crime and thriller fiction.

Limitations

Slower paced than her American novels. Colette is underwritten. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Highsmith fans; readers visiting Greece; psychological thriller enthusiasts

A Novel of Three Countries

The Two Faces of January was published in 1964, set across Greece and Turkey — Athens, Crete, Istanbul — and draws on Highsmith’s own extended residence in southern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. Chester MacFarland, an American con man, and his young wife Colette encounter Rydal Keener, a young American drifting around Athens, at the Heraion. Chester kills a private investigator who has tracked him to Greece, and he and Rydal form an uneasy alliance that is immediately complicated by desire, by guilt, and by the geography of flight across unfamiliar countries.

The 2014 Film

The novel was adapted as a film in 2014, written and directed by Hossein Amini, with Viggo Mortensen as Chester, Oscar Isaac as Rydal, and Kirsten Dunst as Colette. The film was praised for its period atmosphere and its use of the Greek locations — the light, the architecture, the specific heat of the Aegean summer — and for the performances, particularly Mortensen’s controlled menace. Amini’s screenplay stays reasonably close to the novel’s triangular structure: the title refers to Janus, the Roman god of transitions and thresholds, whose two faces look in opposite directions simultaneously — a reference the film, like the novel, earns in its final sequence.

The Oedipal Structure

The title refers to Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions — the two-faced deity who looks simultaneously forward and backward, into future and past. Highsmith uses this image to organise the novel’s central relationship: Rydal and Chester each see in the other a version of what they have come from and what they might become. For Rydal, Chester is the father he has been unable to escape — charming, manipulative, ultimately destructive — and his decision to help Chester rather than report him is driven by a psychological compulsion that overrides his rational self-interest. For Chester, Rydal is the younger self he no longer trusts, a reminder of the person he was before he became what he is. The Oedipal dynamic is never made explicit — Highsmith is too sophisticated a writer to announce her psychological themes — but it operates throughout: the jealousy Chester develops about Rydal and Colette, the specific quality of Chester’s aggression toward Rydal, the way their antagonism deepens in proportion to their mutual need. Greece provides the ideal landscape for this material: a country whose mythology invented the Oedipus story, whose ancient sites carry the weight of exactly these obsessions, and whose particular quality of sunlight makes psychological interiority feel both more pressing and more futile than it does in northern Europe. Highsmith had visited Greece repeatedly and loved it, and the novel carries the authority of genuine affection for a place rather than the picturesque deployment of a foreign setting.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Highsmith’s Greece novel — a psychological thriller that uses the ancient landscape to deepen a modern story of complicity, father-son dynamics, and mutual destruction.