Hannibal by Thomas Harris - my review (written in July 1999, AFAICR)
Review copyright (C) by Jaromir Król
*****
After
eleven years, Thomas Harris returns - and his return is marked by
one
of the most surprising and bizarre books ever written. And, at
the second and
deeper look, one of the most surreal and fascinating novels of
the decade.
As usual for Thomas, the book is full of delightful plays and
allusions, and
finding each of those might take a meticulous researcher years.
There are
numerous novelties - one of those is a play on names, not
appearing in Harris
before. Here we have Officers Burke and Hare - named after the
notorious
"body traders" from 19th century Britain (who gave many
a contemporary bobby suspicions that Jack the Ripper might be
following in their footsteps) appear. And we have an
FBI official named Noonan - could that be homage to Tom Noonan,
for his
excellent interpretation of Francis Dolarhyde done in "Manhunter"?
Perhaps
Thomas also plays in the ways Lewis Carroll did - he looks that
kind of a
man, as the numerous allusions ("Dr Fell") seem to
indicate :) - and someone
with a lot of time and passion (or a good scanner and OCR
software) might
find any such "tricks" in the book. :)
With "Hannibal" Thomas has proven that he is able to
enter other area of
writing than he previously has, and that he can operate as
perfectly in it as
he can in the other one. There were suggestions that such a
radical change
was taken because Thomas did not want H filmed and thus *stolen*
from him and
vulgarised the way SotL was. That may be true, but if it is, I
feel it is
subconscious. :) I believe that the primary reason was pragmatic
- Thomas
knew that H will obviously be compared to his previous works.
Thus, if he
wrote a novel closer to "Red Dragon", "Hannibal"
would possibly be named
"good yet obviously secondary to RD". If it were closer
to "Silence of the
Lambs", it would be "a good one, but still only a
follow-up to SotL". To
avoid this, he has taken a completely new route, going to the
surreal, the
bizarre, the Gothic and even close to the supernatural - and he
has
succeeded. The novel should not be taken as being close or *born*
of RD and
SotL - it is much more distant to them then they were to
themselves. It is a
novel of a radically new kind and should in fact be reviewed and
interpreted
*without* referring to SotL and RD. In fact, apart from the
characters, the
only thing that joins the books is the author, but they are
radically
different. So different that it would be unjust to rank them
together. If I
had to, I would rank them in this way - first place to RD, second
to SotL,
and third to H. But this is not right, as H should stand alone.
Let me
compare the situation to that with the novels of Stephen King:
comparing his
books such as "Salem's Lot" or "Needful Things"
*and* "Gerald's Game" or
"Dolores Clayborne" would be similarly wrong and unjust,
because they too are
essentially different. The first two are surreal and distant, the
way H is,
and the two others are dark, powerfully realistic, psychological
narratives -
as is RD and SotL.
The power of Thomas lies in the ability to make a - let us not
hide the fact
- technically shallow and unbelievable story look perfect. If you
read the
Salon review, you know it is 99% accurate - and yet it does not
seem to be
when you read the novel. Though stripped to six pages the book
seems weak and
blatantly cliched, Harris's wonderful narration and ability to
create and
form makes you forget all of this. The novel is actually only
rated as either
superb or horrible - no-one ranks it as "average".
Curiously enough, most
masterpieces of modern literature were ranked in precisely this
way at the
time they came out. Just take a look at Joyce (that is not to say
that H is
or will be a masterpiece - but I suppose Thomas will eventually
make it to
literature coursebooks with his trilogy - minus "Black
Sunday" - the way that
Poe did).
Now, with the definitely bizarre "Hannibal", Thomas is
free to choose - and
he may write a sequel of any kind. Including taking yet another *path*,
different from all RD, SotL *and* H (And may I add that if a
sequel is made,
*I WANT WILL GRAHAM BACK*! :) I have doubts about a sequel,
though, but if
one is written, it may be again entirely different, as I
mentioned - and as
Jack Crawford's death might indicate (Crawford connects all parts
of the
trilogy symbolically. His appearance is what opens "Red
Dragon", and his
death concludes "Hannibal" - this may indicate that the
line has come to an
end, or that it has arrived at a new beginning. If it is the
latter, I would
love it to have something to do with Will Graham...)
The novel, as usual with Thomas, is written on two levels - the
one for a
mass reader, and the deeper one, for the more sophisticated
reader familiar
with Thomas and his world - a reader to whom the author winks
quite a few
times in the novel. Here, Thomas blends the real world with his
creation even
more than in the previous novels - which creates a bizarre but
interesting
effect, very much in accordance with the spirit of the book.
There have been
suggestions that the book is homophobic but it is not. It is not
PC, either,
which is a good thing.
Time for flaws, then. There are some mistakes that an editor
could remove,
but I hear Thomas loathes people editing his works, and I do not
blame him.
But he did not notice some flaws, and it shows (although not
disastrously -
fortunately, they are nothing serious, and they disappear in the
massive body
of the novel). Firstly, I already mentioned that this novel is
completely
different from both RD and SotL, and it should be treated as much
more a
standalone one than any sequels usually are, but Thomas provokes
the almost
natural attempts at joining and automatically comparing H with
SotL by
referring to the previous novel's action too often. Most of such
references
are unnecessary fragments thrown in primarily for that purpose -
such as
Sammy's cameo in the beginning. They redirect the reader's
attention from H
to SotL, and make him concentrate less on H and more on its
predecessor - and
it should not be so. I fear it was done for publicity's sake.
This is even
more surprising when you consider the fact that Thomas makes fun
of the
Lecter-worship in the novel (I wonder if after H any "Hannibal
Lecter's
Fava-rite Cereal Killer Corn Flakes" appear? The name is (C)
by me, anyway.
;-)
I
mentioned the cliches - most pass unnoticed, but some of them
show through.
Apart from certain cartoony characters, the most annoying cliche
is the
Hollywoodish pattern of speaking. Here we have two Italians, and,
in private,
they speak English. This is perfectly fine - if you were to
narrate a sitting
of the Italian government, you would naturally translate all
utterances to
English. But what happens here is a bad silly cliche repeating in
many
mediocre movies - the Italians speak English, *and*, now and
again, they
throw in some Italian words and sentences. What it means is that
two natives
of Italy, not speaking perfect English, and having a conversation
in total
privacy, with nobody to hear them, actually talk in English!
Sometimes
authors make this ridiculous mistake to show that they speak the
particular
language; I suppose that here it is to maintain some sort of
realism for,
perhaps, a mass reader... but it is terribly annoying. It reminds
me of the
laughable 1960s' movies with Communist villains whose Russian
origin was
always indicated by the fact that, in Russia, with only Russians
around, they
spoke English with a heavily Scottish accent. Sillysillysilly!
Then, there are some factual mistakes. Some have already been
listed, so I
will mention others. :) An official police section using a *modem*
connection
in a case that important? Please. That might happen, but
definitely not in
Italy. And why not just block Pazzi's account after he was
murdered? Oh, and
a desktop theme is not a screen saver. As for Lecter's laptop
which wipes its
HDD in seconds - excuse me? Can you please show me a program or a
source for
a routine that does a *Government-secure* erasing of a few gigs
of data in
less than a minute? No? I did not think so.
Lecter is still not down-to-earth enough - he is a bit *too*
unreal. I
realize that this is the precise reason why he has fascinated so
many, but I
must admit that I have never been among those. It is probably
because I first
read RD, at twelve, than, a couple of years later, SotL, then I
watched
"Manhunter" and only then did I see the good but rather
overrated SotL the
movie. Thus, I must have been accustomed to - and liked - the
much more
realistic *and thus more dangerous* image of Lecter from RD,
unlike many
people who actually heard of Thomas Harris only after SotL the
movie came out
and who were and still are primary influenced by the movie - for
instance, I
have always been amazed by people saying that it is impossible -
for them, of
course - to read SotL, RD, and Hannibal and to think of the
characters now
without thinking of Hopkins, Foster, Glenn and generally Demme's
movie. For
me, like for Thomas, Lecter and all the other characters are as I
imagined
them in the beginning, and Hopkins et al. have never had any
influence on
them. I am actually glad that Thomas has not seen SotL the movie
and has not
allowed it to alter his own image of the characters involved.
(Thomas toys with the idea of Lecter's being Antichrist again -
as he did in
SotL, giving the doctor the sixth finger on the left hand. Here,
a Gypsy - a
nation traditionally associated with powers of "spiritual"
seeing -
recognises Lecter as Satan, or, more accurately, the Romanic
Shaitan. It
actually gets ridiculous near the ending, when the deadly boars
do not attack
Lecter, only seemingly because "they did not smell fear").
I am one of the opponents of the change of the title. It has been
confirmed
that the original, dark "Morbidity of the Soul" was
changed at the request of
the agent who felt "Hannibal" would sell better. A
horrible mistake, which
also gives a very good argument to attack both Thomas and "Hannibal"
to their
opponents - as all bad ideas do. I was very disappointed to learn
of the
change and the fact that Thomas actually listened to marketing
reasoning
rather than his own feelings.
Unlike some, I do not mind the flashbacks to Lecter's childhood,
or the
introduction of his sister - her "appearances", however,
get dangerously dull
and artificial in later parts of the book. But there is a problem
- Mischa is
an abbreviation of a Slavic name, all right, but it's a male name
- Mikhail,
sometimes spelled Michail in Latin transcription. I have never
met such a
variation of any Slavic female name (only Mischka, once), though
it does
exist, but in Western regions, not where it originally comes from.
It is a
bit funny to see a girl named Mischa - it sounds as if she had a
name of,
say, Edward. :) Perhaps it is not a flaw, though, and maybe I am
mistaken. I
know, though, that the book stole my night and, as the result, my
exam as
well... Anyway - neither is Lecter a Slavic surname, at least not
with this
spelling and pronunciation. By the way, judging by the
information in the
book, the routes taken by the Germans in the ex-Polish parts of
Lithuania,
and the places that the nobles chose for their residencies, I
might hazard
the guess that Lecter's family lived near Trakai. :) But
explaining Lecter's
tastes by placing him in the known time and place is a bit
peculiar,
actually... one might as well put him in the 1930s in deep Russia,
under
Stalin - there were some instances of cannibalism at that point,
too - and
many of those were more bizarre and inexplicable, actually.
The ending - I agree with many readers that it is the weakest
part of the
novel. It goes beyond the surreal into the impossible and the
ridiculous, and
the effect is... not too impressive.
But H is definitely a novel of the year (which doesn't really
mean anything) and perhaps one
of the most important literary achievements of the decade. We
will just have
to see if it becomes one of the most important ones in the whole
body of
modern literature.
Jaromir Król - a.k.a. "Jerry King" | \//\SS/\GO
****
