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Hannibal Rising

Lecter falling flat

Thomas Harris
Heinemann, 336pp, £17.99,

Philip Hensher

Thursday, 14th December 2006

It must be said, however, as Disraeli said about Gladstone’s Balkan pamphlet, that of all these atrocities the worst is Harris’s prose. Somebody has got at him. The honest punchiness of The Silence of the Lambs has been replaced by every single terrible trick of the pseudo-literary novel. There are the verbless sentences of description — ‘Evening in Paris, soft rain and the cobbles shining.’ There are the awful mock-poetic passages in the historic present — ‘He shivers and is still, like a bird dies.’ There are revolting flashbacks in memory set in italics. However, if Harris has been persuaded of the merits of this sort of thing, he has not yet found out about the split infinitive, or what ‘oblivious’ means.

It’s all gone terribly wrong. Of course, Harris knows nothing whatever about his settings, and never has. Aubergines grow in Lithuanian gardens, Scotland is practically at the North Pole, there is a Paris station called the Gare de l’Este, and a small French village market sounds like the ground floor at Harrods — ‘Lady Murasaki’s objective was Legumes Bulot, the premier vegetable booth, to obtain fiddlehead ferns …’ But all that might have been forgiven if he had indulged his undoubted talent to write total nonsense about repulsively elaborate murders. He is well-equipped for that. What he is not fit to address are the atrocities of a real major war or psychological realities. It seems altogether too late to start fretting about the childhood traumas of a character who was never anything more than a toytown monster.