Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Hannibal Rising

Lecter falling flat

Thomas Harris
Heinemann, 336pp, £17.99,

Philip Hensher

Thursday, 14th December 2006

Anyway, this account of Hannibal Lecter’s childhood and youth reveals him to have been seared irreparably by the experience of the second world war. He is born the scion of an ancient aristocratic Lithuanian house. His mother (‘of the Sforza on one side and a Visconti on the other’) is burnt alive, his infant sister Mischa (surely a boy’s name in Russian?) is killed and eaten by Nazi collaborators. Hannibal himself survives, but ends up, implausibly, in the family castle, now a Soviet orphanage. Even less plausibly, his uncle, Count Lecter, is permitted to take him back to Paris, where he lives with a Japanese noblewoman, Lady Murasaki (or ‘the Lady Murasaki’) in considerable splendour.

Lady Murasaki is an aesthete of a peculiarly annoying fictional type, forever twanging away or writing haikus, taking long, blossom-strewn baths or enjoying the apparently exquisite odours of burnt bark on a mica chip (I’m not convinced). Such pre- television forms of entertainment naturally allure the young Lecter into overwritten reveries — ‘Hannibal walked Lady Murasaki to her very chamber door’. Harris, I must say, seems rather vague about her abstruse pleasures: ‘Lady Murasaki’s poissonnier had for her four perfect sea urchins in cold seawater from their native Brittany.’ That wouldn’t go far: I once ate 50 as an hors d’oeuvre in Sicily.

Hannibal’s plan, naturally, is to kill the ghastly collaborators one by one. If you start rubbing your hands in anticipation of a series of demonically inventive murders, you’re in for a disappointment. Nothing here has the excellent grand guignol of the murder of the gentleman under whose severed face Lecter escapes from captivity in The Silence of the Lambs, or, in Hannibal, the gentlemen who are eaten by carnivorous pigs, suspended from the roofs of Florentine palazzi by their own intestines, or forced to eat their own frontal lobes. Harris goes into it all half-heartedly — ‘Grutas and Mueller carried Lady Murasaki bound and gagged up the gangway’ — but there’s scarcely one murder with any of the ingenious gusto of Harris’s best.

The problem is the connection to Hitler’s atrocities. Harris’s novels have always been in commendably bad taste; for the first time, he has written one uncommendably so. It is asking too much of the reader to enjoy Lecter’s lurid murders as an incidental consequence of Operation Barbarossa; you could write a comedy about Hitler’s Reich with more ease than you could a genre work of horror. At every level, Lecter’s origins demand to be taken with much less seriousness, and the Eastern front with more.