FICTION
Shrink sessions
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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After a string of revelations, yet another character in the popular imagination reveals himself.
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HANNIBAL RISING is the latest manifestation of a concerted effort to lure our best-beloved fictional characters into a public therapy session. The chaise lounge in our collective office has been warmed, most recently, by Batman, Superman, James Bond, Spiderman, Willy Wonka and Darth Vader, all freely spilling their guts so that we may strip away layers of heroism or villainy and figure out what makes them tick. The amateur social scientist may make much of this: We live, she would possibly say, in an age when we need to know what makes our heroes heroes and our villains villains.
The old anodyne
In Hannibal Lecter's case, Thomas Harris gives us the old anodyne of a troubled childhood, although one doubts if Hannibal was ever a child in the traditional sense of the word. He seems to have emerged fully formed, like a psychopathic young Athena; even when he is six, he talks like Anthony Hopkins. At that age, when his father hires a tutor, Hannibal shows him around his family's castle in Lithuania, pointing out a room that once held a mad uncle. "The walls were lined with hay bales to muffle his utterances," he remarks precociously, before asking his tutor if he knows the meaning of "lewdness". The dark glint, Harris indicates, is already in his eyes; it only needs a single incident to tip the piano down the stairs.
That incident is thoughtfully provided by a ragtag group of mercenaries, who kidnap Hannibal and his adored, adoring little sister Mischa, after the rest of the Lecter family meets a fiery end. Hannibal escapes, but not before the mercenaries, strapped for food as World War II rages around them, make a meal of Mischa. Through the ensuing years, as he moves in with his uncle, falls in love with his uncle's Japanese wife, and comes under investigation for his first forays into cannibalism, Hannibal battles first to recapture his lost memories and then to avenge Mischa's culinary demise.
Harris toys only half-heartedly with his pet theme of setting up a cat-and-mouse gambit between Hannibal and an investigator. The token policeman, Inspector Popil, is no worthy rival for Hannibal; unlike Clarice Starling, Popil can only entreat Hannibal at frequent intervals to come clean, and he spends the rest of his time making eyes at Lady Murasaki. She is Hannibal's true match here — a woman whom he admires and respects tremendously, the only person who stands any chance of diverting Hannibal from his grisly ambitions.
She also diverts Harris, intermittently, from his literary ambitions. Hannibal Rising could have been a really classic thriller if the presence of Lady Murasaki hadn't necessitated unsparing attention to chrysanthemum twigs and suzumushi crickets and haikus about night herons, daubed onto paper with calligraphy brushes. Hannibal Rising thrums with pace every time the Lady exits, machine-gun prose speeding Hannibal on his manic errands. His hits are little marvels of calculated organisation, detailed by Harris with Brechtian minimalism. Hannibal Rising is, in a sense, an inversion of the thriller genre's mechanism of dwelling lovingly on the gore and steaming impatiently through exposition, but Harris' mastery of narrative keeps that inversion from becoming an unfortunate compromise.
Tempting interval
The origin of Hannibal's dietary preferences is only ever elegantly hinted at, even though it is the engine that drives the narrative. After Hannibal becomes the youngest medical student in France, he is put in charge of preparing cadavers for dissection — a bit, one might think, like putting Goldilocks in charge of a porridge factory. But Hannibal is a picky eater, and his cannibalism is, at least in Hannibal Rising, less a matter of taste than a poetic soul's desire to do unto the others as they did unto Mischa. An interval persists between the end of this book and when we meet Hannibal next in the canon, when he is as confirmed a maneater as ever stir-fried a human liver with morel mushrooms.
That interval may prompt Harris to write another prequel, but he would do well to stop and consider its nature. Hannibal Rising works as well as it does less because it concerns itself with his rising than because it concerns itself with him, his familiar foibles and his unique contradictions. He may have entered "his heart's long winter", except that it seems its summer was pretty frigid anyway. So at least with Hannibal Lecter, there is little to be gained by any further literary psychoanalysis. Harris, and the rest of us, should just accept him for the glorious born villain that he is, and thrill eagerly to his macabre madness.
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