Books |
Hannibal Rising
Thomas Harris
By
Published: May 20, 2009
Category:
Fiction
In “The Silence of the Lambs,” Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice Starling, “Nothing happened to me. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.”
We have every reason to take Dr. Lecter at his word. Such is his brilliance that he can afford to tell the truth. Indeed, why should he lie, when the truth is such a devastating weapon? He can plant a thought so upsetting that he neutralizes an opponent. He can kill without conscience. He can even make a joke of eating his victims: “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”
But Lecter lied. No, wait, Thomas Harris changed his mind. And that is the first problem with this book — Hannibal Lecter is more real than Thomas Harris. What a problem for an author! The world so loved the movie of Silence of the Lambs that reading about Lecter is to “see” Anthony Hopkins. He’s “our” cannibal; he belongs to us. And so we presume everything that showcases him after ‘Silence of the Lambs’ will deliver the villain who alternately thrills and disgusts us.
Harris tried to fight his way out of this box by dealing with Hannibal’s childhood in his last novel, Hannibal. Now, in Hannibal Rising, he has written what amounts to a Freudian field guide to Lecter — a 323-page (okay, the type is huge and the margins are generous) account of Lecter’s childhood, from age 8 to 20.
If you loved Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, you are going to be severely frosted by “Hannibal Rising.” I understate: You are likely to hate it. First, it’s not a thriller, not, anyway, as Harris has written thrillers before — there’s no ticking clock. (Okay, there are a few, one of them literal. But the big climax involves Lecter’s ethereal Japanese stepmother, who’s no crowd-pleaser, and if there’s a heroic rescuer, it’s….Lecter.) Second, there’s evil that’s cold and vile here, but its practitioners aren’t (at first) Lecter. Third, the young Lecter is so controlled, so interior, that even the author can’t seem to penetrate him — you read the first half of the book at one remove, as if through a window.
So what’s the reason to read this book? Well, there is the small matter that Harris is one of the better writers on the planet. This novel is set largely in Paris, fictional turf most recently of Dan Brown and Alan Furst. Compared to Harris, Brown writes with his feet. And Furst, a master of smart thrillers, can only score a close second.
Here’s the opening sentence: “The door to Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone.” And the last sentence of the prologue, a neat preview of coming attractions: “…..the beast within turns from the teat, and, working upwind, enters the world.”
And then there’s the story. Lecter is Lithuanian, and noble. There’s a castle and a hunting lodge. His father, though sickly, is a great painter. His mother is earth and love. There is a beloved sister, Mischa. And there is Hannibal, brilliant and curious. Happiness reigns. Then World War II begins. Servants are killed. The family takes to the woods. The young Hannibal sees — well, he’s not sure, but it’s definitely too much.
At last the war ends. His is sister is missing, possibly dead. His mother is ashes. The boy is mute. He haunts the old scenes, like the fighter plane that crashed in the woods: “The pilot was still inside with his gunner behind him and the vine had grown around him and through him, curling between his ribs and through his skull.”
Oh, Hannibal commits some murders, but they are for revenge, and they are as easy to understand and as hard to accept as a vine growing through the skull. Which is another reason many readers will be turned off by this book — it’s about the power of the environment. We loved Lecter when he was pure evil; he wasn’t like us, we could never be like him. But what if he became a monster because he went to school on the monsters he encountered during the War? He became what he beheld. Yikes! Don’t we do the same? Could we too become cold and murderous? (And what about the wars we fight and the ones we choose not to? Are we not, in our national policy, creating monsters by the tens of thousands?)
Heavy stuff. Expect a backlash. Too bad. There’s more than enough here to delight a reader who loves good writing, good plotting and a happy ending — yes, at the end, we see Lecter on his way to an internship in Baltimore. Soon he’ll become the doctor we know and love. Just not in these pages.
