Thomas Harris
Dell
June 1999
486 pages
Buy the paperback at bn.com
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The Monolith of horror
fiction has arrived -- the dark flower in the garden, the fiendish
yin to George Lucas' childish yang. You may want to read Hannibal
twice: the first time devouring it eagerly like a bottomless
bag of potato chips, the second time pausing to savor Thomas
Harris' blend of workmanlike, journalistic narrative ("Mason
Verger, noseless and lipless, with no soft tissue on his face,
was all teeth...") and flights of eloquence ("Color
was interesting to see against the massive furniture and high
darkness; it was an ancient, compelling contrast, like a butterfly
lit on an armored fist"). Harris' work is deeply split.
It speaks of great beauty and great ugliness; great courage and
heroism, and great savagery and madness. He is perhaps the closest
thing to Dostoyevsky to surface in the American popular novel;
he achieves, triumphantly, everything Bret Easton Ellis fumbled
in American Psycho. At its best, which is on just about
every page, Hannibal represents the intersection of bloody
pulp and serious literature. The result is both horrifying and
intoxicating.
Impatient readers need not apply. The novel's eponymous figure,
Dr. Hannibal Lecter of Baltimore, does not "appear"
as such until well past page 100, though he makes his presence
felt with a teasing note of condolence to his lighter half, FBI
Special Agent Clarice Starling. After a botched drug bust --
bungled through no fault of her own -- Starling's career is at
stake, and we learn that she's been on shaky footing ever since
she closed the Buffalo Bill case. (Business as usual: insecure
male "superiors" are jealous of her brains and strength.)
Starling would just as soon put the horror of Dr. Lecter behind
her, but one factor dredges it all up again: the aforementioned
noseless wonder Mason Verger, hideously disfigured survivor of
a particularly twisted encounter with Hannibal. Verger, a meat
tycoon with infinite financial resources, is revealed to have
been a monster even before his clash with Lecter; he has a complicated
relationship with his bodybuilding younger sister Margot that's
best left unexplained here. From his prone position in his sickbed,
Verger orchestrates an elaborate plan to bring Lecter to him
alive. What he has in mind for his old nemesis is a cut above
Lecter's own former torment for Verger, which only involved hungry
dogs.
In a lengthy center section, Harris takes us to Florence, where
a disgraced Italian detective -- Starling's doppelganger, in
a sense, one of many doubles in Harris' "Lecter" trilogy
-- begins to sense that the monster is alive and well and living
in the Palazzo Capponi. The outcome of this section would seem
to render it unnecessary, but it gives Harris a chance to luxuriate
in Italian art and literature, as well as an opportunity to restage
the defenestration of Francesco de'Pazzi. Italian art and history
are rich with grand sanguinary moments like that, and Harris
relishes bringing it all back home to the gray parking lots and
pigsties of America. Hannibal demands to be taken on its
own heady, sensationalistic terms: The plot, for instance, redefines
"far-fetched." The "Lecter" books throw grim
forensic realism and psychotic fantasias into the same witches'
brew; newcomers will find the result unpalatable, while fans
of the previous two books will no doubt slurp it down like a
dish of ice cream on a hot August day.
And the good doctor himself? By now, Harris has turned Hannibal's
virtuosity into a kind of witty joke. Everything he does is done
with "infinite care." Everything he owns or wears is
of the finest quality, hand-crafted, expensive, obscure to all
but the most discerning connoisseurs. He has limitless intellect,
cobra-quick reflexes, the strength of ten men, and absolute indifference
to physical pain. In short, he's inhuman: a cross between Superman
and Dracula, a wildly implausible character, a mythological demon
thrown into the American shopping-mall culture -- and that's
the source of his fascination. The conflict in these books is
in the reaction of mere mortals to this example of malevolent
perfection. The one serious complaint I have is the backstory
concerning Lecter's long-lost, beloved sister. The doctor himself
would consider this -- and its apparent influence on Hannibal's
appetites -- a banal bit of psychobabble. It literalizes Lecter
too much; we're not looking to "understand" Lecter,
who represents bottomless madness, the X factor, the thing we
cannot impose meaning on, no matter how we struggle to put a
name to it. The void of the universe laughs at our attempts to
understand it, and Harris should have let Hannibal continue to
laugh as well.
I should say, however, that the way Lecter's complex intersects
with Starling's own (familiar from The
Silence of the Lambs) provides this 486-page journey
with a genuinely shocking wrap-up. Many readers will be extremely
unhappy with what becomes of Starling, experiencing it as a betrayal.
My only carp is that it comes slightly abruptly, and perhaps
needed an extra 20 pages or so to lay a more plausible groundwork.
But then, as I said, plausibility is not what these books are
about, and the book as a whole -- including the denouement --
feels emotionally right to me. Like its titular anti-hero, Hannibal
is larger than life. It lands with a heavy thud on the bestseller
list, casting its shadow across the comforting pap it shares
shelf space with. It also comes as a giant middle finger raised
to those who whine about all the violence in today's entertainment.
It will be quite difficult to adapt this particular Lecter
tale to the big screen; there are at least three passages that
would get an automatic NC-17.
I think of all the trite things Thomas Harris could have done
with this book -- doing a rerun of Robert Bloch's Psycho II
novel, in which Hannibal gets revenge on those making a movie
about his exploits (Bloch's novel wasn't trite, but it would've
been trite to rehash it), or having Hannibal run into a psychotic
copycat killer -- and I'm grateful he did what he did. He stretches
his legs in Florence and insists on giving us a tour; he cooks
up a finale that may piss off a lot of Silence fans; and,
almost incidentally, he serves up some of the most grotesquely
shocking moments I've read since ... well, since Harris' last
book. (For the curious -- and the strong of stomach -- there
is a dinner scene late in the book that is as hilariously macabre
as anything in the works of Bloch or Poe.) Hannibal is
ambitious and unstable and absolutely riveting, a tale so dark
it makes midnight look like pastel, yet shedding light on deeply
unsavory pockets of our psyche. That's the impact of great art,
delivered here with the force and vigor of great pulp. Hannibal
is a one-two punch to the brains and the viscera; fortunately,
there's a lot of both here to go around. |
