Lecter falling flat

Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an explanation of his hero’s habits. In theory, one ought to be curious how it is that someone ends up thinking it quite entertaining to cut slices off a human brain (for instance) and sauté them at table before sharing the dish with his girlfriend and the still living victim. In practice, one doesn’t give a toss. Lecter’s an aesthete/psychopath. Who cares how he got that way? This is rather like reading the school reports of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

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’.