Robert McCrum
HANNIBAL by Thomas Harris (Heinemann)
When we last heard from Dr Hannibal Lecter he had just escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and was looking forward to his next meal. “I’m just having an old friend for dinner,” he said as he watched his hated prison psychiatrist disembarking from a plane in the mass murderer’s tropical hideaway.
In the catalogue of melodramatic villains, Hannibal the Cannibal stands alone. Only Beelzebub comes close, only Blake’s Apollyon gets near. Lecter has the villainous cunning of Moriarty, the schizoid charm of Jekyll and Hyde, the feline omnipotence of Goldfinger and the blood-crazed sensuality of Dracula – except that he likes to consume his victims in gourmet style, ideally with a bottle of fine wine.
Lecter’s embodiment of evil is truly awesome. He is a villain for our times: softly spoken, anonymous, manipulative, bottomlessly evil, omnivorous, savage, remorseless and so cool that his pulse never rises above 85, even when, in one memorable episode, he eats his nurse’s tongue.
Did the author, the ex-crime reporter Thomas Harris, have any idea what he might have conjured up in his first characterisation of the criminally insane psychiatric doctor? One thing is certain: having opened a Pandora’s box of devilish invention, he has been unable to ignore him, though perhaps he has been disturbed by his creation. Hannibal is only the third Lecter novel in as many decades – and, despite Harris’s promises of a follow-up to the wildly successful Silence of the Lambs, it took him nine years to provide it. (Its original title was The Morbidity of the Soul.)
Now we find Lecter in a starring role, not the show-stealing but comparative minor ones he played before. And it’s a starring role in what has been billed as the biggest publishing event ever -one million copies, the largest ever first-time hardcover print-run for a novel, were released around the world simultaneously this week. The movie rights have already been sold, for some $8,5-million.
To say that Hannibal grips like a vice, from its brilliantly realised opening to its horrifying and delightfully whimsical conclusion, is merely to glorify the mundane qualities of a blameless household tool. Hannibal grabs you by the ear, the eye, the throat and drags the reader helplessly around a switchback-cum-maze of narrative ingenuity.
Put it down? I sat skewered to my seat until the last page.
When the novel opens, it has been seven years since Lecter’s escape from the FBI, but agent Clarice Starling hasn’t forgotten him. He had got under her skin with his spooky intuition about her character. Starling “had heard things about herself so terribly true her heart resounded like a great deep bell”. The attraction of opposites, begun in The Silence of the Lambs, finds its resolution in Hannibal.
What’s more, Starling’s career is in trouble. She needs him as much as he’s obsessed with her. Wealthy Mason Verger hasn’t forgotten Lecter, either. He’s an archetypal Lecter victim, with a special reason to remember his tormentor. Lecter fed his face to the dogs. Verger now lies, “noseless and lipless, with no soft tissue on his face”, plotting Lecter’s annihilation.
As well as having a deep and seemingly instinctive understanding of narrative, Harris is a writer steeped in the Bible. Hardly a page goes by without a reference to Scripture. Verger, for instance, knows that Lecter was “going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it” – a direct allusion to Job’s encounter with Satan. Never mind the relentless onrush of the denouement, every line of Hannibal is suffused with the sense of a titanic struggle with evil in its blackest form.
But if this were simply a tale of evil, it would be a joyless, cold-hearted and inferior exercise in genre. What lifts it to the level of art is the humanity Harris finds in Starling and, most surprisingly, in Lecter himself.
With Hannibal, Harris has surpassed himself. It has wit, erudition, golden dialogue and it does that thing most novels can’t do: it describes almost constant action.