Hannibal. By Thomas Harris. William Heinemann. 16.99 in UK.
A New York editor, who had known Thomas Harris before he became a virtual recluse, recently described him to me as the Cheshire Cat of American literature: he has been fading further and further away until all that is left is his smile. That smile - dark, disturbing and filled with sharp teeth - is his work.
Hannibal is only Harris's fourth novel in a 25-year writing career, and the third - after Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs - to feature the cannibalistic serial killer, Dr Hannibal Lecter. The weight of expectation that rests upon it is huge, and I suspect that some readers will be disappointed by this strange, violent and sometimes frustrating book.
Mason Verger is a wealthy, paralysed, paedophiliac murderer with one eye and no face, who emotionally torments children and drinks martinis made from their tears. As one of Lecter's first victims - Lecter made him cut his own face off - he is determined to avenge himself on the doctor by feeding him, feet first, to specially-bred hogs.
But Verger needs bait to lure Lecter into his trap. That bait takes the form of Clarice Starling, the FBI agent who, by allowing Lecter to feed on her emotions, tracked downand killed the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. But Lecter, now hiding out in Florence, has his own reasons for taking the bait, and they have more to do with Starling than the insane, twisted Verger...
Hannibal is essentially a book of four movements, with an extended coda at the end, of which the second and fourth movements are the strongest, in particular the Florentine chapters dealing with the gradual disintegration of Lecter's carefully-constructed cover. It is impeccably researched, marvellously-written and peppered with Harris's dark humour, such as the tale of the lunatic Sammie who puts his mother's severed head on the church collection plate because it is the nicest thing he has.
The difficulty with Hannibal is that Lecter and Verger are both simultaneously villains and victims, but for the novel to succeed it requires us to sympathise with the plight of Lecter more than with Verger's torments. Since there is no Buffalo Bill and no Tooth Fairy to distract our attention and allow Lecter to exist in a grey area composed of equal parts charisma and lethality, Harris engages our sympathies for the doctor by making Verger a complete monster, almost a cartoon, and by humanising - even softening - Lecter to the point where he is sometimes almost unrecognisable as the cold-blooded, vaguely reptilian killer of the earlier novels. In effect, it's a double-bluff, a preparation for the book's closing pages, but it is a gamble on Harris's part that does not entirely pay off.
Yet it is this final, dreamlike coda that is likely to remain with readers, infuriating as many as it amuses. Early in Hannibal, Harris posits the question of what still seems wicked to us, now that we have apparently become inured to evil. The coda, it appears, is his attempt to provide a possible answer. It is blackly, bizarrely funny, horrific, emotionally wrenching and just about ambiguous enough to succeed. It is like nothing that has ever been attempted before in the modern thriller, and confirms Harris's status as a master of the genre.
There are other minor problems with Hannibal, including Harris's love of law-enforcement jargon and a nagging suspicion of snobbery on the author's part that may extend to his readers. In the end, it is the most flawed of the Lecter novels, but it should still be welcomed and savoured. My guess is that Harris's smile will flash only one more time before it finally fades forever.
John Connolly's first novel, Every Dead Thing, was published earlier this year by Hodder & Stoughton.