HANNIBAL RISING

by Thomas Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2006

So now we know. The reason Hannibal Lecter is so civilized is that he’s the son of European aristocrats; the reason his draftsmanship is so impressive is that the uncle who took him in after he was orphaned by the Nazi fellow-travelers who seized his castle and hunting lodge during WWII was a noted painter the boy greatly admired; and the reason he became a murderous cannibal is that that his parents’ killers, driven to starvation by the frigid winter, killed and ate his beloved sister Mischa and fed the broth they made from her little body to Hannibal, an unwitting junior Thyestes. Of course they did.

 

It’s a sign of Thomas Harris’s achievement in tracing his voracious hero’s course from Red Dragon (1981) to Hannibal Rising that such an enormous audience would want to know where he came from and what made him the way he did that the fourth installment in the Lecter saga is absolutely review-proof. In explaining the sources of Lecter’s fetishistic respect for courtesy, his eidetic memory, and his deep sense of culture amid the carnage (often his own carnage), Harris is responding not only to their appetite for knowledge but their need for reassurance. This most riveting of modern bogeymen wasn’t born that way; he came by his sociopathic habits through his toxic immersion in the most horrifying political realities of his time.

 

Harris’s prequel suggests a revealing analogy: the origin stories of comic-book superheroes from Superman to Batman when they jump the shark to the silver screen. Instead of simply borrowing the opening chapters that kicked off their four-color adventures, these prequels, heavy with retrospective knowledge, have to load each detail with ironic significance even as they’re pumping up the story with Hollywood firepower. The result is a demystification that leaves heroes looking less heroic and villains less villainous, because, after all, they’re just reacting to the past histories that have been created specifically for them to react to. It’s surprising but utterly logical that Hannibal Rising, which shows its hero butchering only for the most unimpeachable reasons, is much less like Harris’s crowning achievement, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), than like its problematic blockbuster sequel Hannibal (1999).

 

The obvious contrast to the comic-book analogy is Sherlock Holmes, the mythic sleuth whose adventures Conan Doyle chronicled for 40 years without ever yielding to the temptation to provide him with a backstory. Even though he’s a Victorian good guy rather than a contemporary bad guy, Holmes retains more essential mystery than Lecter because the qualities that make him so memorable are never explained away except in pastiches by lesser hands. With Hannibal Rising, Harris, ever eager to demystify his monstrous hero, confirms the promise he showed in Hannibal as his own most determined imitator. The good news about this latest installment is that it will presumably be the last—and, of course, that it should make an equally review-proof movie.

Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2006

ISBN: 978-0-440-24286-4

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Categories: FICTION