Fiction:Towards the end of Hannibal Rising, the latest instalment of what has now become the Hannibal Lecter quartet, a French policeman resists the impulse to define the young cannibal with the following words: "What is he now? There's no word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we'll call him a monster."
Would that Harris had demonstrated similar wisdom. For the best part of three novels - Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999) - Lecter was a nightmare made flesh, a fairy tale ogre brought to life (for what could be Grimmer than a charming cannibalistic killer?). He was the single greatest villain that the crime genre had produced since Patricia Highsmith's Ripley, and through him Harris essentially created a new sub-genre that had not previously existed in such an explicit form: the serial killer novel.
The howls of outrage that greeted the publication of Hannibal were directed, in large part, at the relationship between Hannibal and Clarice, a Beauty and the Beast liaison in which Beauty appeared to succumb, willingly or via narcotic assistance, to the Beast's charms, yet there was a logical consistency to this that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the earlier novels.
In Red Dragon, FBI agent Will Graham's "gift" is to be able to think like a murderer, suggesting that the effective criminal and the good detective are not so dissimilar after all.
In Silence and Hannibal, Clarice Starling is entirely defined by her relationship with Lecter. She has no boyfriend, and no familial ties of consequence. Her attempts to engage with him in Silence, and the subsequent hunt for him in Hannibal, give her life meaning. It is a lover's pursuit, however perverse it may seem. She is defined by him in much the same way that the law is given meaning by criminality, while the opposite is not true. Without crime and disorder, the law has no purpose, but without law, criminality and disorder will persist, and even thrive. Without Lecter in her life to give it purpose, Starling has no life. She can no more kill him than she can kill herself.
No, the true error in Hannibal, and one that is repeated in Hannibal Rising, was Harris's decision to try to explain how Lecter came to be the way he is.
In Hannibal, he showed us the death of Lecter's younger sister, Mischa, consumed by starving collaborators fleeing the vengeance of the Russian army at the end of World War II. It was Psychology 101, an explanation so cursory as to suggest a dark joke at our expense: Lecter's sister was cannibalised, and hence he became a cannibal in turn.
In Hannibal Rising, the death of Mischa is revisited in more detail. While this revisiting is gripping, there is nothing revealed that we did not already know or suspect, and if it is a continuation of Harris's dark joke then it has worn thin since its first telling. This is a Portrait of the Artist As A Young Monster, a tale of how a gifted child could become a corrupt, homicidal genius. We accompany the traumatised Hannibal to Paris, where he develops deep feelings for Lady Murasaki, the Japanese widow of his deceased guardian, and begins hunting down the men who killed, and ate, his sister. His revenge is accomplished in suitably gruesome fashion, underscored by a dark humour that is probably the most admirable aspect of this otherwise deeply peculiar novel.
In fact, it may not be entirely accurate to call Hannibal Rising a novel at all. Harris wrote the screenplay before the book, and delivered it so long ago that the film is due for release early next year. This is a novelisation, then, rather than a novel, and its episodic nature betrays both its origins as a project for the big screen and Harris's fascination with an earlier literary tradition, one in which the narrative is powered by a series of loosely connected incidents rather than a strictly linear plot.
Neither is it a thriller in any conventional sense of the word: it is too studied, too strange. It alludes to Faust, to fairy tales, to European and Japanese literature, to art and, in its recurrent use of avian imagery, particularly swans, to the earlier novels. Meanwhile, the prose veers from the startlingly beautiful to the repetitious and barely functional ("On the shelves were art."), and at times the contrast between the two is so stark as to suggest the work of two entirely different authors.
Crucially, the book lacks humanity. There is no Will Graham or Clarice Starling to give it heart and soul. There is only the young Lecter, supported by characters who are either idealised, compromised or simply vile, and while we may feel some sympathy for the teenage boy, he lacks the attraction, however ambiguous, of his later incarnation.
And yet, and yet . . .
There is something almost admirable about Harris's determination to write a novel based on such a flawed premise: that Lecter's existence needed to be explained, even if in doing so all that was most interesting about him, the enigma of his evil, might have to be sacrificed. Hannibal Rising is not merely an unnecessary book, then, but arguably a destructive one. Underlying it is the sense that Harris wants not only to be finished with Lecter, but also to skewer our fascination with him.
He does not quite succeed, for Hannibal Rising, whether intentionally or, as is more likely, unintentionally, ultimately fails to convince as a plausible explanation for the figure of Lecter contained within the earlier novels, and in that there is a kind of triumph. As with Frankenstein's monster, something of Lecter has moved beyond the influence of his creator, and has entered the realm of myth.
John Connolly's latest novel, The Book of Lost Things, is published by Hodder & Stoughton
Hannibal Rising By Thomas Harris William Heinemann, 323pp. £17.99