(Warning: significant spoilers below! The entire plot spoiled! Really! Read this and you can skip the book. But I recommend doing that anyway.)
I picked up Hannibal Rising
(2006), the fourth written but first chronologically of Thomas Harris' novels about or including the character of the murderous Hannibal Lecter, by chance at a friend's house. I'm glad I didn't buy it myself. Of the first three novels, I thought The Silence of the Lambs
and Red Dragon
were simply superb. I've reread both many times. But the third book, Hannibal
, went in some directions I didn't much like (not including the notorious campy/horrific "eat your brains" scene), and overall I find Lecter more useful as a supporting character than as a protagonist. Hannibal Rising makes him the center of the story and explains, per the cover, "the origin of Dr Lecter's evil." And while the book isn't entirely bad, I think that the entire idea of explaining Lecter was a mistake, with Harris apparently pushed into writing it by the determination in Hollywood to make an "origins" film with or without his participation. In The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter states
Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.
This book reduces Lecter to a set of influences: a bright (albeit creepy) young child turned to murder and cannibalism by traumatic experiences during World War II. And giving his evil a reason takes all the interest out of it.
Making it even worse, the usually masterful Harris, who is so good at suspense, was really just phoning it in on this one. You can pretty much see the not-very-twisty plot twists coming. If the triggering act of cannibalism was supposed to be a big reveal, well, it wasn't. I twigged about a hundred pages early, as would anyone who knows that Lecter is later nicknamed "Hannibal the Cannibal." Even the details were foreshadowed too heavily: you just know that when a cook makes a point of mentioning that the cheeks are the tenderest morsels that some victim is going to end up missing his cheeks by the end of the book.
And then you get clunky hints like this:
Yes, that ellipsis is Harris' own. Can't you just hear the scary music in the background?
The other real flaw is that for the most part, Hannibal's victims in the book are bad guys who pretty much deserve what they get. There's no horrified thrill in rooting for Lecter when his acts are justifiable as vengeance rather than pure, motiveless evil. (My name is Hannibal Lecter. You ate my little sister. Prepare to die.)
The most interesting character in the book was Hannibal's Japanese
aunt-by-marriage/stepmother, but the Japanese story elements were compromised
by overeliance on the extremely well-known, making me wonder if Harris bothered with any real research. We not only get the loving Lady Murasaki
(named after the author of The Tale of Genji) but a passing mention of her attendant Chiyoh's cousin, Sadako, who happens to be the Sadako, the well-known post-atomic-bomb leukemia victim who tried to fold a thousand cranes. I'm hardly a scholar of Japanese culture, but even I've read both Genji and Sadako's story
and wept quietly among the cranes at the Peace Memorial Museum and Park in Hiroshima. Using Sadako in this book, even offstage, was a cheap stunt.
If the main character had been anyone other than Hannibal Lecter, this might have worked as a barely-adequate revenge thriller with an edge of horror. But with the high quality bar of the first two books, this one simply doesn't measure up.
If you must see for yourself:
But really, better to read these two (in this order) and stop there:
Origin stories have the builtin problem that we know how they'll turn out. Still, they can be made to work if the writer takes a different approach: instead of filling in the blanks between the clues provided by the original stories, he/she tells us that we misinterpreted those clues. I remember reading something that David Brin had once cooked up regarding what his prequel to Star Wars would have been. That would have knocked our socks off instead of making our toes curl up in embarassment. Of course, Brin is a better writer than George Lucas.
Posted by: Serge | April 21, 2009 at 05:05 PM
Harris is a good enough writer that I can reread his books even knowing every detail of the outcome and revel in how the story unfolds. In this book, he wasn't trying. It kind of ticked me off.
I've got a couple of fanzine-published Star Wars novels that are either full prequels or include prequel material in flashback. I like them much better than anything since The Empire Strikes Back. Both were written in the period between that movie and Jedi, when there was some real suspense about how the original trilogy would end.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 21, 2009 at 06:04 PM
There's a film of Hannibal Rising too. It's not great, but as creating ominous foreshadowing (the equivalent of ellipses) in filmmaking does a better job of bypassing my critical facilities it worked okay.
There was some interesting stuff about the complexity of things on the Eastern Front in WWII, and about tracking down family members afterwards, but I may be filling in some gaps in my mind here.
I can't help thinking that it would have been a better story if we saw Lecter begin as a fairly standard vengeance driven hero (bringing Cannibal Nazis to Justice!), then escalating the revenges as they seem inadequate to him, until finally he finds that he's more in love with the horror than with the justice.
Posted by: Neil Willcox | April 21, 2009 at 06:13 PM
True, Susan, a story well told will make it less important to know the ending, although it's a nice bonus to get some surprises along the way during the first reading. Also, we know that Our Side will win WW2, but not necessarily what will happen to specific characters within a story.
Posted by: Serge | April 21, 2009 at 06:20 PM
Yeah, that would have been better. But there wasn't much escalation in the book.
Incidentally, if anyone wants to read/own Red Dragon, I have a spare paperback copy that I found when I went to my bookshelf to find the Silence quote. I bought it used and rather battered, so it's not in great shape, but quite readable.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 21, 2009 at 06:22 PM
I did see the film of The Silence of the Lambs, by the way, before I even read the book, but not of any of the others.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 21, 2009 at 06:22 PM
I saw The Silence of the Lambs (and had dinner) as a birthday present with a friend one year. I didn't think it was scary so never read the books or saw other movies.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | April 21, 2009 at 06:28 PM
Completely unrelated... might you be making it to KWDS? I tried emailing from my new email account a few weeks ago, wondered if maybe spam filters swallowed it.
Posted by: Adele | April 21, 2009 at 09:32 PM
Reading this post just allowed me to look cool, as my husband found a copy of The Tale of Genji in PDF, and I was able to say "Oh yeah, by Lady Murasaki, right?"
He'll never be the wiser that I didn't actually have that factoid memorized... he he.
(But I did know that it was the first novel ever)
Posted by: AJ | April 22, 2009 at 02:51 AM
went in some directions I didn't much like (not including the notorious campy/horrific "eat your brains" scene)
Does that mean that you did like the "eat your brains" scene, or just that it wasn't the only/most significant aspect of the book you disliked?
Posted by: Paul A. | April 24, 2009 at 09:33 AM
I never read Silence of the Lamb and, for some reason, I saw the movie only last year. It was an interesting experience because, since it came out in 1991, one of its novel items has ceased to be a novelty. Since Clarisse, we've had a few more FBI 'girl' agents. There's Dana Scully. There is also Fringe's Olivia Dunham. That it's not a novelty seems to indicate that there is progress.
Posted by: Serge | April 24, 2009 at 09:51 AM
Speaking of Agent Dunham... She's in an interesting situation. Until recently, she was stuck with her dead boyfriend's memories. In this week's episode, she found herself dreaming she was kissing a pole dancer. Turns out she was tapping into the mind of a male serial killer and, when the mad scientist keeping her sleeping body under observation asked why she was making those sounds, he went "Oh."
Posted by: Serge | April 24, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Adele,
I haven't made any plans to go, but it's not out of the question. I'm about two years behind on answering email.
AJ,
Always glad to be of service!
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 24, 2009 at 06:27 PM
Paul,
I didn't dislike it intensely. It was fairly ludicrous, and it made me wonder if it were even biologically possible as written. Can you eat parts of someone's brain and still keep carrying on a (less and less coherent) conversation with them? Inquiring minds want to know. But it was so ridiculous that it ceased to be horrific.
I had similar problems with Hannibal - by turning Lector's enemies into bad guys, it's harder to get worked up about him killing them, even messily.
I think Harris should have stopped after two books.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 24, 2009 at 06:31 PM
Can you eat parts of someone's brain and still keep carrying on a (less and less coherent) conversation with them?
Probably redundant, but I go into the realm of opening-up-people's-heads squick in this post.
One of my biology teachers at school told the story of an operation he assisted with when he was working in a hospital. A blood vessel was pressing on the optic nerve of a patient, causing blindness. So they operated, but had to keep her conscious to see if it actually effected her vision. So they took the top off her skull and probed and identified, cut and tied off the blood vessel, while this woman was capable of speaking (apparently saying "I can see! Thanks you can stop now" and the surgeon having to dissuade her from moving until they had put her skull back together). So if we believe my high school biology teacher from 17 years ago, it's possible to perform brain surgery on someone who is concious enough to hold a conversation.
Perhaps that's why I found that scene, while bizarre, horrifying enough to put the book down and go for a coffee before picking it up again.
Posted by: Neil Willcox | April 24, 2009 at 08:25 PM
Maybe it was the way they kept putting him behind a potted plant that made me find it more campy than horrifying.
And yeah, I guess I knew there were ways to do brain surgery with a conscious patient, though I think I assumed there would be a local anesthetic involved so one wouldn't actually feel anything.
I think I will stop thinking about this now,
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 25, 2009 at 08:03 AM
I wish I had never started thinking about it *turns ever so slightly green, and not in a jealous way*
(brain/skull stuff doesn't squick me out the way eyes do, but the idea of being awake for any sort of surgery more major than removing a mole does)
Posted by: AJ | April 25, 2009 at 07:18 PM
I had a colonoscopy a short while back, and they told me I'd probably fall asleep. They should know, they were putting the chemicals in me -- but some don't, apparently. I was looking forward to the journey through the pink world, but within a minute, I blinked and when I unblinked I was back in the cubicle again.
For real surgery, I'd probably rather be asleep. For anything up to and including root canal, I'd as soon watch.
Posted by: Kip W | April 25, 2009 at 07:53 PM
As far as I know, I never slept thru my colonoscopy, but I had no short-term memory. I was fully awake when I had a vasectomy and that wasn't particularly comfortable. I had no problem walking afterward, but I took plenty of rest, and watched the movie Frankenstein: The True Story.
Posted by: Serge | April 25, 2009 at 08:12 PM
AJ,
I'm such a wuss about surgery that I had my wisdom teeth out under general anesthesia. I have no desire to be awake through major surgery.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 26, 2009 at 12:00 PM
I did have several rounds of gum surgery under local anesthesia only. That left me free to scream for more novocaine whenever I started to feel anything. (The last round was the sort of gum surgery that involves slang like "resodding.")
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | April 26, 2009 at 12:01 PM
I never had any problem or pain when I had some gum surgery done. I was fully awake, but the laughing gas made me very relaxed. I remember thinking about the way my thoughts were going while under the influence, then found myself thinking about thinking about my thoughts.
Posted by: Serge | April 26, 2009 at 04:01 PM