Hannibal- - - - I recently read Hannibal, by Thomas Harris, the third Hannibal Lecter book after Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. (Lecter is only a secondary character in Red Dragon.) If you haven't read the first two books, I recommend them--they're quite good. But the third one is really a letdown, especially in the second half. There are three main reasons for this. General Decrease of Writing Quality. Maybe when one of your books becomes a grand-slam motion picture sensation, you figure the audience for your next book will be a lot stupider. Or maybe you figure it'll be a bestseller no matter what and you aren't motivated to make it any good. Or maybe your editor no longer has the power to keep you in line. Whatever the reason, there's a noticeable slump in the writing. Harris has an annoying tendency to switch tenses between past and present at will. He also has a tendency to repeat himself, i.e. you get reminded at the start of Chapter 5 what happened at the end of Chapter 4. Speaking of repetition, there is a detective Pazzi in this book who once tracked down a serial murderer... in almost exactly the same way that another detective caught Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon. I guess there's only a limited number of good ways to catch serial killers. Hannibal Lecter as Superman. Okay, previously Hannibal Lecter was a brilliant insane psychiatrist with artistic talent and a remarkable sense of smell. But in this book, Harris pumps up Lecter's IQ to superhuman levels, absurd levels. Hannibal Lecter not only speaks flawless accentless modern Italian, he is also completely fluent in fourteenth-century Italian dialects, indeed he is the world's greatest authority on pre-Renaissance Florentine art, literature, and history. Hannibal Lecter is conversant with string theory (I'm not kidding) and enjoys perusing Stephen Hawking's papers, looking for errors. Hannibal Lecter subscribes to every academic journal there is. Hannibal Lecter could probably fix your car, even if it were a lowly sort of car and not a supercharged high-end Jaguar such as Hannibal Lecter would drive. Past a certain point it just gets ridiculous. Also, there is the difficulty, familiar to science fiction readers, of how a presumably-non-superintelligent author can supply words and actions for a superintelligent character. Lecter gives a supposedly brilliant lecture on Dante which I found not very impressive (but very short-- I wish all the lectures I sat through were over in five minutes). Hannibal Lecter as Hero. In the previous books, Hannibal Lecter was not mistaken for a role model. He was, perhaps, a cool villain, but he wa still a dangerous and unpleasant lunatic who ate people and should be perpetually confined in the deepest dungeon available. Now Harris has decided to root for Lecter as a charming aristocrat of exquisitely refined sensibilities who drives around in supercharged Jaguars and eats people. Not only is this change of perspective morally repugnant, but it requires that the book have a number of characters who are so cartoonishly evil, or corrupt, or male-chauvinistic, or uncultured, that the reader will not mind when they are killed and/or eaten. (Hannibal does still kill innocent people as well, mainly when he needs to take their job, or their house, or their plane ticket, but these incidents are glossed over and not described in any detail.) Like any bad sequel, it's really pretty depressing. I suppose there might be a fourth book, in which Clarice Starling would wake from her hypnotic trance and hopefully blow Lecter's psychopathic genius brains out. But it wouldn't be enough of a fix somehow. |