Book Review: 'Hannibal Rising'

[I had to do my part to try and keep people from buying another bit of excrement penned by the ever more disappointing Mr. Harris. What happened to this guy? How does one write three really good books and then produce two clunkers like "Hannibal" and "Hannibal Rising"? Read on for a rippingly entertaining review. - jtf]

Books of The Times
From Soup to Guts, the Making of a Foodie

By JANET MASLIN
The New York Times
Published: December 8, 2006

This is what Thomas Harris’s readers would least like to hear from Mr. Harris’s flesh-eating celebrity, Dr. Hannibal Lecter: “I deeply regret any pain I may have caused for the victims and their families. For years I have helplessly battled the problem that caused me to misbehave. I intend to seek treatment for it immediately.”

Now for the second-least-welcome thoughts about Lecter. And these, unlike the above, actually were written by Mr. Harris. They come from “Hannibal Rising,” his final (please!) effort to cash in on a once-fine franchise that fell from grace. Plot points: Hannibal suffered a terrible trauma in childhood. Bad, bad men cooked and ate his baby sister. This gave him no choice but to become a cannibal himself. Monkey see, monkey do.

Does that motivation sound primitive? It shouldn’t. It is no more crude than the revenge plot that drives “Hannibal Rising” or the market forces that impelled Mr. Harris to cough up this hairball of a story. The book is the evil companion piece of a forthcoming film version of “Hannibal Rising,” for which Mr. Harris also wrote the screenplay, and is the supposed story of how the man became a monster.

“Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the latch,” Mr. Harris writes ludicrously. “By our efforts we may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world.”

Poetic pretensions notwithstanding, this particular beast is not slouching toward Bethlehem. Little Hannibal is headed from Lecter Castle in Lithuania (once home to Hannibal the Grim, a 14th- to 15th-century forebear) to Paris, by way of some grisly detours. “Hannibal Rising” begins as the Nazis invade Lithuania and drive the Lecters into hiding. Then it makes a meal of darling little Mischa Lecter, who cried out heart-rendingly for her brother (“Anniba!”), as her captors boiled a big pot of water.

On the theory that one such hellish vision is not enough, “Hannibal Rising” flashes back to it repeatedly. Supporting roles in Hannibal’s memory sequences are played by the corpses of his mother and beloved Jewish tutor. Suffice it to say that he is a scarred and lonely 13-year-old by the time he reaches France and encounters a vision of beauty: Lady Murasaki, the stately, exquisitely alluring Asian wife of Hannibal’s uncle.

Picture the magnificent Gong Li in this role — or just wait, because she’ll show up soon enough in the film version (due early next year). It will require all of her formidable acting skills to deliver dialogue like: “You are drawn toward the darkness, but you are also drawn to me.” Or this: “If you are scorched earth, I will be warm rain.” Hannibal himself, equally purple with Mr. Harris’s prose, prefers to speak in cricket imagery. For instance: “My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.”

Despite lovely Lady Murasaki’s willingness to rain on him, Hannibal shows signs of teenage trouble. When a butcher makes crude remarks about Lady Murasaki’s anatomy, Hannibal savagely attacks him. “Flog no one else with meat,” a French police official warns him, but Hannibal will not heed that warning. While the book contains tranquil moments (“Hannibal sat on a stump in a small glade beside the river, plucking the lute and watching a spider spin”), Mr. Harris has not been summoned back from the Land of Writer’s Block to create lute-playing scenes.

A word about this elusive author: he has produced only five books since 1974, and his cult reputation as a superb thriller writer was once well deserved. After “Black Sunday” (about a blimp poised to attack a full stadium at the Super Bowl), he introduced Dr. Lecter and built two top-notch books around him: “Red Dragon” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Then something went terribly wrong. It took 11 years for Mr. Harris to add a new installment (“Hannibal” in 1999) that turned crisp, riveting precision into self-parody. The character lost all traces of his brilliance and ate the brains out of a living man’s sawed-open skull.

That was a hard act to follow, horror-wise. “Hannibal Rising” doesn’t come close. Its sadism is subdued (though still sickening), and its young Hannibal sounds nothing like the older one. The reader who begins with this new book will have no idea why any of the older ones are well regarded. Nor is there any notion of what makes Hannibal diabolically clever — beyond his rooting for Mephistopheles while watching “Faust” at the Paris Opera.

That glamorous setting is one of many, many theatrical cues and flourishes featured in the new book. Mr. Harris has specialized in highly visual imagery since his Super Bowl blimp days, but “Hannibal Rising” takes this tendency to crass extremes. Leaving no doubt that this book is part screenplay, Mr. Harris provides background music (part of Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel” for the eating of Mischa), symbolism (the brutalization of beloved swans), horror-prone settings during Hannibal’s medical school years (“Night in the gross-anatomy laboratory”) and grandiose locations for big thoughts. Hannibal’s major epiphany conveniently comes while he is contemplating the votive candles at Notre Dame.

Although much of “Hannibal Rising” is earnestly cinematic (watch out for an underwater corpse “no longer bald, hirsute now with green hair algae and eelgrass that wave in the current like the locks of his youth”), this material also has its campy side. The cannibalism is ugly but silly, with Hannibal menacingly wielding mayonnaise during one sequence. The story’s main villain is so evil that he’s seen getting a pedicure from a woman with a black eye.

And when this villain turns desperate, so does Mr. Harris. “We are alike!” the character cries. “We are the New Men, Hannibal. You, me — the cream — we will always float to the top!” Pity the poor actor forced to say those lines. Then remember that cream can turn sour.