Why Wavid Hates Hannibal

[columbianus Rex]

I'm curious, Wavid, as to why you despise Thomas Harris' Hannibal. You briefly mentioned a few reasons--"implausible plotlines, characterisations straight from the music-hall"--in "Forum 101" but I was hoping that you might expand on them.

[John Self]

In lieu of Wavid, read Martin Amis's review of it in The War Against Cliché - a little bit of which is extracted in the Yellow Dog thread (I think) in the Reviews forum...

[amner]

Finally read Amis's critique, John. It's very good indeed I have to say, and obviously puts paid to me coming up with something original to say about the blasted book.

What I will say though is that Hannibal is - as I've written before - one of only a couple of books I've actually thrown at the wall in fury over. Like Mart says, the previous two books are genuinely good and worth going for but this...?!

I thought, as I ploughed through it that Harris was effectively taking the mick, that he'd had so much pressure from above and around him to come up with a sequal that he decided "right, you buggers, you asked for it", but I fear that was just me being his apologist. Simply put, it's a howling dog.
.

[John Self]

I haven't read Hannibal or indeed The Silence of the Lambs, but I did read Red Dragon last year, largely because in all the reviews (including Little Mart's) of Hannibal, everyone said how great the earlier books were.

I have to disagree. It left me pretty much cold. Here is a review from another site that I posted at the time.

---

Red Dragon starts very well, with the discovery of a family brutally slain in the same way as another one had been the previous month. Immediately, and wrongly, the detectives presume the killer is going to strike on the next full moon - I thought this was a sly dig at the way every serial killer has to have some quirk to get his own film these days - then I realised that Red Dragon came out 20 years ago and is probably to blame for it... Anyway, we pretty quickly get to find out whodunnit and the plot of the book is really concerned with whyhedunit and whosnextforit. We also get, of course, the literary genesis of Hannibal Lecter. It is brilliant and daring of Harris to make him only a tangential character, and to have his "real" story in the past and largely untold, but it is also the book's fatal flaw because Lecter is the most interesting character in miles.

The actual killer in the book is a boring nutter. And here's the rub: for all Harris's interest and effort in the whydunit aspect of the story, it's all very pat. Well, he done it because his granny was nasty to him as a child and he has a deformed palate. (This is a problem in almost all crime storytelling. Cracker, the best TV series of the 1990s, was a masterpiece of creative writing, plotting, dialogue and wit, but the psychology behing the killers was always much too neat and simple for my liking. He didn't hit puberty until late! She was made to act like a guide dog for her blind sister! The only one there that hit the spot was Albie Kinsella, from the story "To Be a Somebody," with his seething nest of class-paranoia, post-Hillsborough trauma and grief for his father. But I digress.) Is that all there is? So it would seem.

I've read that Harris takes so long to write each book because of all his research. I think he should do a little less research as he's frequently incapable of wearing it lightly: one chapter begins

The Brooklyn Museum is closed to the general public on Tuesdays, but art classes and refreshers are admitted. The museum is an excellent facility for serious scholarship. The staff members are knowledgeable and accommodating; they often allow researchers to come by appointment on Tuesdays to see items not on public display. ... Entrance to the Brooklyn Museum on Tuesdays is through a single door on the extreme right.

Just think of the work that went into finding the publicity brochure he copied that from! Dialogue is occasionally top-heavy on research too, with one character nonchalantly wondering aloud:

"Maybe Dolarhyde knew the maxillary arch survives fires a lot of times."

But this is slightly over-griping, as the writing is generally pretty good, featureless enough to enable swift page-turning but not so bland as to be boring. Otherwise, the book seems to cash in a lot of standard thriller chips towards the end: the trick where you think the baddie's shooting someone else but actually he's shooting himself; the cartoonish resurrection of the baddie when it's all but over; the explanatory here's-how-it-all-happened monologue which was already excruciatingly awful back in 1960 in Psycho; and the Jerry Springer/He Man-esque moral of the tale right at the end.

Ultimately the greatest crime in Red Dragon is that it didn't leave me with anything.

[Wavid]

I have to say that I enjoyed Red Dragon, but found The Silence of the Lambs rather unsatisfactory. I thought RD was quite original, pacey and well written. Harris' deep research was telling in places, I found some of the psychological insight fascinating. Although I concur with John that the reappearence of the killer at the end is ludicrous.

Hannibal is a mess, IMO. The storyline is bizaare and even more divorced from reality than most thriller fare. Lecter is the focus of the book, and makes you wish that he was back to being a bit player, as before. We all had an opinion on lecter's character before the book, but not many of us would have had him down as being the camp, foppish character presented in Hannibal. The worst thing about the book, I suppose, is the fact that it was such a disappointment after what were one great, and one good thriller. Perhaps everyone should have known that the downward trajectory was going to continue.

[John Self]

...By backward projection, does that mean Black Sunday is one of the great masterpieces of literature...?

[Wavid]

Probably not.

I've never read it actually - is it any good?

[John Self]

How should I know - what do I look like, a Harris-reader or something?? :?

[columbianus Rex]

Forgive me if I'm making an unnecessary fuss over this, but I still can't understand why Hannibal receives such a lashing from the folks in this thread. I'm not defending Harris, mind you, but I would like some details. Wavid, what about Lecter makes him "camp" and "foppish" in your opinion? Amner, what is it, specifically, about the novel that inspires you to deem it a "howling dog"?

I have finally read The War Against Cliche as well, but I'm no more enlightened than I was before. The critiques that Amis offers are vague and general: he calls the book "a snorting, rooting, oinking porker, complete with twinkling trotters and twirlaround tail", but he fails to provide evidence; when he sums up the plot in the middle of the article, we have a feeling that he does so with a smirk, yet we never know why he's smirking. It seems that Amis is actually criticizing the reviewers of Hannibal, and not Hannibal itself. This, I can understand. Hannibal is genre fiction and not "a plausible candidate for the Pulitzer Prize" (as one reviewer gushed); but it is not a literary abomination, either. Amis wants to convince us otherwise, but he seems content to merely tell us that it's bad and leave it at that.

[John Self]

As you know I haven't read Hannibal but, as I thought Red Dragon was poor and most people seem to think Hannibal was much worse, I am prepared to believe the naysayers.

You are right, columbianus, I think, to say that most of the vitriol is directed against what Hannibal has been held up to be, more than simply the book in isolation. Certainly that is the sole reason for Amis's critique as he says at the start of it. (And actually he is pretty detailed in his criticisms of it.) But Harris attracts this with his posturing and self-mythologising behaviour - the Pynchon-esque shyness from publicity, the portentous preface to the collected Lecter edition, the ten years between books... He takes himself too seriously and it shows: the working title for Hannibal, after all, was The Morbidity of the Soul ("Well," as Amis says in his review, "someone must have had a word with him about that.")

And of course some might say that all genre fiction, being by definition prescriptive, is a literary abomination... And what's the difference between that and "bad" anyway, but degrees of hyperbole?

[amner]

Columbianus RexI would like some details ... Amner, what is it, specifically, about the novel that inspires you to deem it a "howling dog"?

I picked the book off the shelf last night to try and answer the question for you. It began to irritate me almost immediately (the book, that is, not your question or the shelf, even).

I ought to say, straight up, that I when I read Hannibal I actually knew the ending before I got fifty pages in because a reviewer in the Sunday Times gave it away. No, that’s wrong, 'gave it away' sounds like it was unintentional. She deliberately explained the ending in order to stop people buying the book. Sacrilege in the Crime ‘genre’ that, but she did it. Being only at the start of the book I was annoyed (although it taught me a valuable lesson about not reading a review until you’ve read the damn thing) and it made me want the book to succeed. So you see, I was already on its side, but even then it failed magnificently.

The flaw is this: Harris believes his own press. He thinks he’s the goth-horror meister, and so he piles on grim detail after grim detail, cruelty upon cruelty and buckets of blood flow into each other time and time again. There they are, the odd little touches that everyone likes: the brittle, spiky action sequences (the botched FBI op at the start rattles along like a train), the blobs of culture (hey! Look! Florence! Culture!), the forensic detail (and I mean detail), the uneasy frisson of a cruel remark (Mason Verger overtakes the Good Doctor in this regard and probably helped Gary Oldman think it was a good idea to take on the part in the movie). But he tries too hard and the final result is like being invited to a restaurant with a top reputation and then being forced to eat all your courses mixed up in a single saucepan.

Much has been made of giving Lecter wings and asking him to come out from the shadows. It’s a good point. Lecter’s place in the ensemble cast of the first two books works because there he’s able to act as an anti-Chorus, casting snide doubts into the supposed clear thinking of Clarice Starling and Will Graham. Now, as a major player, he’s exposed, and it’s unedifying. So, Harris attempts to muddy the waters by bathing Lecter in cultural excess (we’re all philistines, right?). It doesn’t work. The closer Lecter gets, the less frightening he becomes.

Maybe Harris is playing a game, much in the way that I thought the second series of the Lakes was playing with us. The absurdities of the plot do not add anything to the (melo)drama as it unfolds, they just appear stupid.

As Lecter wakes up to his fate (being hunted by Verger’s henchmen – so that he can be fed to boars, natch) he manages to avoid international security difficulties by travelling economy. Well, of course. But this allows him to revel in being hunted once again and oddly we are expected to sympathise with him. Of course, having had Harris’s research thrown at us for dozens of pages about just how frickin’ cultured and un-'us' he has become, we do not care. OK, so your little sister became a tasty alternative to turkey one cold Christmas to some starving German soldiers. We still don’t care. And frankly it’s not enough to explain your absurd proclivities, Hannibal.

Getting Lecter to the US takes a long, long time and for much of that period there is little for Starling to do, other than suffer for the mistake, which aren’t hers, obviously, made in that opening sequence. As the major character from the The Silence of the Lambs, this represents another trick missed by Harris. The only real conflict for her comes from her evil and corrupt masters within the Bureau (Krendler, a bit character from Silence, in particular): but she cannot be dispensed with easily (like Will Graham or Jack Crawford from the earlier stories) because she has a final, absurd, part to play.

Ah, and there’s the rub; the finalé. The ending, as everyone surely knows by now, involves Lecter’s supposedly ‘natural’ apotheosis from the Angel of Death to the Great Moral Redeemer, as he crucifies Krendler in the worst way he can – by mocking his declining intellect (he forces him to eat parts of his own brain). Then he runs off with Starling to Argentina. Like you do.

Harris’s real villains, then, are the people who deserve it? Krendler’s a Bad Man, so he deserves to eat his own brain? Verger steals children’s innocence, so it’s OK for him to be disfigured and brutally slain. Hell, it seems that all of the great man’s victims deserved it. He’s a commentator on our times, of course! We get it now. Oh, and you’re only bad because the Nazis made you like that? Well, why didn’t you say? And Clarice is genuinely good and so the monster can gain redemption by taking his bride. Sure, she won’t understand for a few weeks, but if you take her to the opera enough times and shovel enough Poilly Fumé down her gullet she’ll eventually come round. It’s a fantasy and it should fool no one. If you want fierce, painful, moral and real, read David Peace, now there’s a man who surely suffers for his art rather than letting us do it for him.
.

[columbianus Rex]

Much thanks for that detailed critique, amner; you've put my mind to rest.

[Lucoid]

I haven't read any Harris myself, and don;t really have any desire to, at least while my bookcase is crammed full of other unreads, but my boyfriend has Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal in his pile of books to read, so when he's finished I'll give you his verdict.

You've a long wait, by the way, as he's a VERY slow reader. He may be done in a year (he's got to get through The Silmarillion yet).

[amner]

I haven't read any Harris myself, and don;t really have any desire to, at least while my bookcase is crammed full of other unreads, but my boyfriend has Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal in his pile of books to read, so when he's finished I'll give you his verdict.

You've a long wait, by the way, as he's a VERY slow reader. He may be done in a year (he's got to get through The Silmarillion yet).

So, we're a year on Lucoid, did he get through the Harris omnibus?

[Lucoid]

Yes, he did, and enjoyed it thoroughly. To tell the truth, I forgot all about this post and will ask for his in-depth opinion later to update you whenever I next visit.

[amner]

Noticed on the "Who's Online" link that the Yahoo! Slurp Spider was checking this thread, which is coincidental because I saw the poster for Hannibal Rising on my way in to work this morning:

http://ia.ec.imdb.com/media/imdb/01/I/05/42/71/10m.jpg

The tag line is:

HIS GENIUS UNDENIABLE
HIS APPETITE INSATIABLE

Now, my question still remains, after all these years, and Little Mart asked it too, why is he a genius?

[amner]

Actually, just to prove that real serial killers aren't cultured 'genius' academic types, check this out:

Serial Killer or Computer Programmer (http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/)?

[amarie]

Well I got 9 out of 10 for that, but considering where I work that's not too surprising...

[amner]

True, true. Mind you, as all computer programmers are serial killers anyway...

[amarie]

Well, quite.

[Lucoid]

Yes, he did, and enjoyed it thoroughly. To tell the truth, I forgot all about this post and will ask for his in-depth opinion later to update you whenever I next visit.

I really shouldn't make promises. I do hope no-one was holding their breath in anticipation.

[Ang]

Actually, just to prove that real serial killers aren't cultured 'genius' academic types, check this out:

Serial Killer or Computer Programmer (http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/)?
I got 10 out of 10 but I was judging by the look of the photograph rather than the look of the person.