Hannibal Rising...and Falling

Well, I did it. I finished Hannibal Rising. Last week my mother had to have an angiogram (she has some clogged arteries that she can thank years of smoking and a love of doughnuts and cheese coneys for) and I accompanied her to the hospital. If you ever have to take a family member for an angiogram, take a couple of books--it's a long day. The patient isn't allowed to move for a couple of hours after the procedure because of the risk of bleeding, so you're kinda stuck for a while.

Being stuck for a while provided the perfect opportunity to take my own medicine and knock out the beast that is Thomas Harris's Hannibal Rising. Check out my earliest posts for the scoop on my initial thoughts on this book.

And now for the final analysis: it's "a-ight. " There were some moments that were downright enjoyable; when the young med-student Lector cuts his teeth, so to speak, on his first victims, you see some of the gory magic of that character from Silence of the Lambs. He was his frightening-yet-charming-and-darkly-humorous self. But then Mr. Harris has this character behave in a way that is so wildly out-of-character and ridiculous that I almost threw the book across the hospital room. I can't tell you what bothered me so, in case you're actually going to be foolish enough to read it or see the movie, but I can say that he turned Dr. Hannibal Lector, the monster of three other books and a character thought by many to be the best villain in popular literature, into a wussy. In one scene that lasts barely more than a couple of pages, Thomas Harris tries so hard to make Hannibal a round and complex character that he makes him a joke. Dr. Lector is supposed to be an unknowable evil, a veritable monster whose motivations might be examined, but never completely understood, by the reader. I, like anyone else who has picked up Hannibal Rising, wanted some glimpse of how Hannibal got started down his path as a truly frightful fictional serial killer; I wanted to know what sort of monster he was. But now I feel like Dorothy in the throne room in the Emerald City; a voice cries out, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," and yet the illusion is already over. The monster is really just a man. By giving the young Dr. Lector vulnerability, Thomas Harris made him...too human. I wanted to see what made the monster a monster, not see the man inside the monster. That makes him much less intriguing and far less scary.

Now when I watch The Silence of the Lambs, and hear Hannibal the Cannibal tell Starling how he ate the census taker's liver "with some fava beans and a nice Chianti", I will no longer get a horrified chill down my spine. I'll just feel a little sad.

Darn you, Thomas Harris. You should have left your wizard alone.