Building on the few biographical titbits included in Hannibal (1999), Hannibal Rising is clearly intended as an attempt at explaining how a young boy would become the creature that was so beautifully portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Brian Cox in the films Manhunter (1986), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002). However, Hannibal Rising is neither a tight psychological thriller like Harris' early books nor a wonderfully over the top gothic romance like Hannibal (1999). In fact, this book is nothing more than a shapeless series of set pieces and sketches that do little to shed any light on the inner workings of Lecter's mind and even less to hold the attention of any but the most undemanding of thriller fans.
Building on the few scraps of biographical data provided by Hannibal (1999), the book starts in Lithuania 1941 where the arrival of the Nazis forces Hannibal and his aristocratic family into hiding. As the book begins, Hannibal is a fiercely intelligent and sensitive child who dotes on his younger sister Mischa. However, when Hannibal and Mischa's parents die in an explosion, the children are left to fend for themselves and do so successfully until they encounter a group of Lithuanian militiamen who kill Mischa in a way that will come to define Hannibal's life. The book then skips forward two years that Hannibal has spent in an orphanage. Rendered Mute by trauma and now prone to violent rages, Hannibal is suddenly adopted and taken to France by his uncle and his beautiful Japanese wife Lady Murasaki. In Paris, Hannibal becomes hopelessly devoted to his aunt who, thanks to Japanese poetry and a little tenderness coaxes the young man out of his shell. As the years go by, Hannibal struggles with the half-buried memory of what happened to his sister. Plagued by nightmares, Lecter enrols in medical school but a chance encounter with one of his sister's murderers sets Hannibal on a murderous path as he tracks down and executes his sister's tormentors. However, as the book ends, Lecter is leaving Paris in order to start a medical residency in the US but despite exacting vengeance for the killing of his sister, Lecter seems no closer to finding peace... but then again, it does not seem as though he wants to be at peace.
After the success of Hannibal both as a book and as a film, Bantham offered Thomas Harris an eight-figure sum to produce two further Lecter books. Hannibal Rising is the first of these and it seems safe to assume that the second one will also deal with Lecter's youth. What is surprising is that rather than deal with explaining Lecter's personality in one book and then return to the more traditional thriller for the portrayal of Lecter's early crimes and his eventual capture, Harris has chosen to spread the character development out over two books. This means that this book doesn't end with a fully formed "Hannibal the Cannibal", in fact, the book conspicuously does not even touch upon Lecter's career as a psychoanalyst, the very characteristic that prompted Harris to include him as a secondary character in Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988). This makes for a book that feels incomplete and a bit of a cheat but it would be unfair for me to criticise Harris for not including something which is clearly intended to form to basis for the next Lecter book. However, I will criticise him for failing to adequately explain the two other aspects of Lecter's character, namely his expensive tastes and his most expensive taste of all... human flesh.
In the foreword to the collected Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, James Ellroy credits Harris with the creation of the serial killer genre, but his is not to say that Harris was the first person to write a book about serial killers or even a thriller featuring serial killers. What Ellroy means by this is that Harris was the first person to come up with a formula allowing writers to capture in fiction what it is about serial killers that make them so fascinating. What Harris did is that he took the bare bones of the standard detective thriller and adapted it to suit serial killers by making the story not about following clues and working out how a murder was committed (which is what detective stories from Miss Marple to Columbo concentrate on) but what the personality of the killer is. In practical terms this meant that what dragged the plot along was not forensic analysis or clever questioning but rather the gradual process through which the detective gets to know the killer. Eventually, the detective is so closely in touch with the killer's mindset that he is able to predict where the killer will strike next. Harris makes this explicit at the start of Red Dragon when Will Graham explains that he has retired from the FBI because he no longer wanted to get inside the heads of serial killers. What is interesting for the purposes of evaluating Hannibal Rising's account of the youth of Hannibal Lecter is the manner in which Harris constructs the minds of his serial killers.
Freud saw the mind as a hydraulic system. For Freud, the Id and Superego are in constant battle as the urge for sex, pleasure and death press up against the learned desire to be a good boy and behave. Should those two systems drop out of alignment then the pressure from the battle leaks and manifests itself as a psychosis or a neurosis elsewhere in our personality. Any attempt at treating the neurosis rather than the underlying conflict results only in the neurosis reappearing elsewhere in a different form. While Freud's days are long gone and his pupils slowly dropping in numbers, the idea of the mind as a hydraulic system remains a popular one as displayed in series such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under where characters are forever reacting in an irrational manner because of some other problem they don't want to face. What is interesting about Harris' approach to describing the mind of a deranged person is that he does not describe a hydraulic system but rather a series of tastes. For example, we know that Red Dragon's Dollarhyde hates the way he looks, we know that Lecter likes to eat human liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti and we know that Buffalo Bill wants to become a woman. Nowhere is this approach to characterisation more evident than in Hannibal where the entire book reads like a series of love letters from Hannibal to a certain kind of wine, a fig bought from the right shop and a bespoke hand cream made from bits of whale. Hannibal Rising attempts to explain where Lecter's tastes come from (and therefore why he thinks the way he does) by positing a close relationship between Lecter and his adoptive aunt Lady Murasaki.
Lady Murasaki will be instantly familiar to anyone who happens to have read a thriller from the early 1980's. One of the most enduring and toxic cinematic clichés in recent years has been the "Magical Black Man". Present in films such as the Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance, the character is usually deeply spiritual and attached to a usually rich white character that has no soul or spirituality. Well as toxic as the Magic Black Man might be, Lady Murasaki is the perfect embodiment of his female equivalent... the Elegant Asian Woman. Where the Magic Black Man serves to teach the white man about his spirit, the Elegant Asian Woman exists in order to teach him a refined sense of taste. The EAM appears in books such as Trevanian's legendarily silly Shibumi and Eric van Lustbader's Nicholas Linnear ninja novels. In both of those books, the protagonist is of mixed race and, despite a European father, takes after their mother in their love of all things Asian. To put it bluntly, this is quasi-racist nonsense of the highest order. Murasaki's obsession with poetry and cleaning her dead grandfather's conveniently lethal katana make her not just a stock character but also a stereotype and a cliché in her own right. The fact that Hannibal should pick up his desire to eat human liver with the right type of wine from a Japanese stereotype is not just unfortunate because it shows some deeply lazy writing, it is also unfortunate because it shows a misunderstanding of the character of Hannibal Lecter. As should be honest to anyone who has read Hannibal, Lecter is a camp and larger than life character that doesn't just take a pleasure in the finer things for their own sake but also because he self-consciously enjoys the pomposity of it. Why else would he go to Fauchon in Paris to buy figs to eat on the plane? Lecter's tastes define him because they allow him to place himself above the rest of the population, something he enjoys enormously. If everyone ate figs from Fauchon then you can bet that Hannibal would be the first to turn his nose up at them. This contagious sensualism combined with the sheer snobbish contrariness of Lecter's tastes stand in stark contrast with the cool intellectualism of Muasaki's Japanese approach to art. By choosing to explain Lecter's refined tastes through the use of as tired a cliché as The Elegant Asian Woman, Harris is not only displaying incredibly lazy writing, he's also showing a worrying lack of understanding of his own character. Given that Harris' approach to characterisation is one reliant upon tastes, this lapse of judgement is a deeply worrying turn of events, because if Harris cannot convincingly Hannibal acquired his tastes, what hope do we have for the main thrust of the book: How Hannibal became "The Cannibal".
The most obvious problem with Harris wanting to explain how Hannibal became a Cannibal is that Harris is not usually interested in explaining. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Freudian view of the mind is hydraulic is that it is a working analytical model. It dopes not simply seek to characterise a person's problems but to actively explain them. Up until this book, Thomas Harris has shown little or no interest in explaining who any of his characters are the way they are. Indeed, in both Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, Harris mentions in passing that both murderers had histories of abuse but the digging goes no further. We never really grasp why the abuse of Dollarhyde or Buffalo Bill should manifest itself in the ways that it does. However, in setting out to write a book that tries to account for Lecter's personality, Harris has set himself a task that he has yet to accomplish in any of his other books. Indeed, when the time came for Hannibal to move to centre stage, Harris chose not to categorise the creature that he said did not fit any known categories but instead chose to descend into the fetishism of tastes. The closest Harris comes to postulating a psychological motive for Hannibal is at the end of Hannibal where he claims he wants to turn Clarice into a surrogate for his sister Mischa. However, when Jodie Foster made it clear that she would not film the ending portrayed in the book, Harris gladly changed the film's ending to one that did not even mention Mischa.
When asked to explain how Hannibal became a Hannibal, Harris chickens out. The process through which Hannibal turned from a happy young boy to a barely contained monster takes place during the two years between the death of Hannibal's parents and his removal from the orphanage by his uncle. Two years that are explicitly off-camera. When we meet Lecter again he is happy to kill at the mildest provocation, suggesting that he is a sociopath. Furthermore, the Hannibal described in this book is not the cool-headed monster of the later books but rather an impetuous young man who kills out of revenge. So while Harris does attempt to trace Lector's tendency towards cannibalism towards a single traumatising event, that single event is placed within a psychological context that is entirely lacking in depth, complexity or even a passing resemblance to the monster that Hannibal will become in the later books.
In a way, it is easy to understand why Harris should prove to be so reticent in analysing his own character as any horror writer will tell you that the less you know about something, the more frightening it becomes. However, in choosing to focus on one aspect of Lector's disorder and by not providing us with a fully fledged Hannibal the Cannibal at the end of the book, Hannibal Rising appears to give us an incredibly reductive and simplistic analysis of a character who bears only a passing resemblance to the character that people are buying the book to read about. This fact combines with Harris' poor judgement regarding his treatment of the development of Hannibal's expensive tastes to create an unconvincing character study of an uninteresting character. In short, the book does not even come close to doing what it should do... it does not even begin to give us a peek "behind the mask" (which was one of the book's working titles).
Aside from being conceptual flawed, the book is also astonishingly boring. The book reads like an unconvincing action movie, which is unsurprising seeing as the book was finished around the same time as the film, suggesting that Harris amended the book while working on the screen-play. Harris' poor characterisation and uninteresting gore are complemented with dialogue so bad it makes you want to throw the book across the room.
Even by the standards of the mainstream thriller, Hannibal Rising is a weak and flawed book. When you consider that it comes from one of the most successful and influential thriller writers in the last three decades, the book descends from the mediocre to the catastrophic. Lacking the great plot of Silence of the Lambs or the sheer gothic fun of Hannibal, this book is a waste of time and energy. I only hope that the second of Bantham's Lecter books proves to be more satisfying, or else it will be a shoddy ending and beginning for one of mainstream literature's greatest monsters.
Before complaining about another writer's writing, perhaps you should learn to form grammatical sentences yourself first.
Posted by: Valerie Kelley | June 30, 2008 at 04:04 AM