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Hannibal Rising

12:18 / 06.12.06

So I preordered this and it arrived yesterday morning. There are no previews anywhere yet, so as I'm half-way through now, I thought I'd start this thread.

Thoughts so far? Nice descriptive prose, far superior to the likes of Dan Brown or most other blockbuster authors, with well-drawn characters and vivid locations. It begins with a note about Lector's memory palace as introduced in "Hannibal", which almost suggests that the novel is some kind of psychiatrist's report.

It seems lighter, thus far, than the earlier novels, which may have some connection to its origin as a screenplay - however, I did sit and read half in one sitting, so it works on that level at least. And I have a feeling it's going to get a lot darker before it ends.

More later.

13:42 / 06.12.06

Does it feel like a cash-in? Does it feel like a movie tie-in? Because to me, it reeks of desperation. Why can't Harris invent a new character? Or try something new?

I loathed Hannibal. Loathed it. It was boring and uninteresting and predictable until the end. The end was awesome.

However, Red Dragon and Silence... are two of my favorite serial killer novels ever. You can imagine my heartbreak when we are given a shitty sequel and then a prequel. And the Brett Ratner film Red Dragon.

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14:22 / 06.12.06

Actually, I loved the book "Hannibal" and preferred it to "Silence of the Lambs" (which puts me into a minority, I know). It had a very over-the-top, operatic, grand guignol quality I appreciated, though I can see why so many people hated it (I still think the book is Harris giving a giant "Fuck You" to people who loved the film but hadn't read the books).

But this new one... odd that there was so little fanfare, h'mm? I mean, with "Hannibal" there was a HUGE amount of press pre-release (perhaps because it was both the "Lambs" sequel and also the first book Harris had done in ten years... this guy ain't prolific). In fact, as I'm reading this one, I can't help but feel that it's a little rushed (and Harris spends way more time telling then showing). It's very short for him also, with large print and if you take out all the blank pages there's actually only about 290 or so pages of actual text (not that shorter books are a bad thing, but it seems unlike him). I don't think it's a BAD book so far (though it's getting ripped to shreds on Amazon), but I also don't think it's anything special. But then again, Harris was always one of those authors that I like, but not love, if you catch my drift. This one just seems like a cash-in, what with the new film coming out soon.

Bottom line is, I think Harris has milked the Hannibal Lector franchise for all it's worth and I think it would be a good artistic choice for him to try a new topic with his next book (which will probably be released 8-10 years from now).

21:34 / 06.12.06

I'm a not-read-it naysayer, to be honest, sceptical on the grounds of Hannibal being one of my most disappointing reading experiences ever; and also unconvinced that we need a book about the origin of the character - in RD and SOTL, his not-quite-central role in the books strikes me as more effective than any centre-stage one would have been, and I'm also concerned that this new tome might almost look like (as with Hannibal) Harris trying to 'explain' or almost justify Lecter, which would remove the interest for me. And strike a strange note on a moral level, really...

Can the people who have read, or are reading, it confirm/deny either way to this prejudiced sceptic, please?

22:44 / 06.12.06

Okay, finished it now...

...and I have to say, at this point, I'm a little disappointed. Despite one big reveal, ended with more of a whimper than a bang, and added little, I feel. Not bad, just... slight.

I felt this way about Hannibal too, though, and now I remember it very fondly, and want to read it again. So who knows.

POSSIBLE SPOILER:

There does seem to be quite a bit of moral justification here, in terms of who is being killed - innocents warrant revenge, but the deaths of Nazis and turncoats and killers does not - people turn a blind eye. A minor point, I know, but the lack of this obvious moral justification was always something that fascinated about Lector.

23:43 / 06.12.06

Does it feel like Harris is rationalizing having Hannibal as a killer? Is it making him more of a human character?

Oh, well, he's killing Nazis, so he's not that bad.

Wouldn't it have been more fascinating if he was killing random rude people?

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02:20 / 07.12.06

Yeah, it's kind of the problem I had with those Dexter books (you know, the serial killer who only kills other serial killers?) Like, I was flipping through the start of the second book of that series and the first character you see Dexter kill is like, a pedophile or something. And I'm thinking, "Well, yeah, most people hate pedophiles anyway and they'd probably want to do the same, so this isn't a big ethical dilemna here!" I don't mind that Harris wants people to like Hannibal, I just wish he would make it more difficult (it's obvious that Hannibal could be seen as a dark side version of Harris, but maybe I'm wrong).

Almsot half-done now and I have to agree with most of the negative reviews on Amazon. It does seem more like an "outline with notes" then a full-fledged novel. And it has a whole almost "Kill Bill" vibe that I never really pictured Hannibal's past being like. When I first read "Red Dragon" years ago, they tell you that Hannibal has only six known kills (or some kind of number like that), and I used to wonder what kind of people it was that he had killed. Now that I know, I feel let down. I'm hoping for a cameo by Mason Verger or something, anything to spice this book up.

09:10 / 07.12.06

Hmm, if Harris is still picking away at the backstory he established for the character in the first two books (as he did with Verger in Hannibal), then almost certainly not my thing.

Always felt that Harris has chickened out of the obvious route of having Lecter go after Will Graham (more comprehensively than at the end of RD the book, I mean), and if he’s just spending the new book telling us that his victims were ‘baddies’ anyway, that makes his sociopath tendencies a bit less evident , to my mind. And that makes the character a lot less interesting.

A lot of the press reviews for Hannibal were quite favourable, though – reckon it’ll be the same for the new book?

10:26 / 07.12.06

I'd be surprised - this is nowhere near as good as Hannibal.

MtM has it - it's too rational. Lecter kills because his sister was killed. He's a cannibal because... He's scared of dogs because one bit him when he was a kid. Ho-hum. How mundane. (I made the last one up, btw. Not a spoiler.)

It's a little bit like The Count of Monte Cristo, this, isn't it?

14:01 / 07.12.06

Hannibal is being characterized as an anti-hero when he wasn't ever one of those. He was always that angel of death waiting and waiting for his opportunity. He's an agent of dread and malice, always hinting at the possibility of violence. Then, in Silence... when he escapes, we're supposed to feel queasy and uncomfortable. Is he going to come back? What's he going to do?

Now he's like Frank Castle with a bit of class. Boring.

Whisky Priestess

09:49 / 08.12.06

Now I remember what Dan Brown's writing reminds me of - dumbed down Thomas Harris ...

... or I suppose you could say that Harris is a more intellectually snobbish version of Dan Brown. Loathed Hannibal, by the way. So over the top, and oddly predictable. Thought it was a real waste of what used to be a really interesting character.

09:31 / 15.01.07

I went off the series after Hannibal - I thought it was pretty crummy. I was just reading about Hannibal Rising on the imdb – reading a discussion of the novel. One line, where someone was listing what they felt were the mis-steps in the book nearly made me laugh out loud: “Hannibal destroying the speed boat with the rocket launcher took the cake, for me.” Actually that’s nearly made me LOL all over again, just typing it out. I didn’t think it was possible for Thomas Harris to haemorrhage any more credibility, but apparently it is. Maybe his next book can be set in the 23rd century where doctors insert a disk containing Hannibal’s personality into the shell of a titanium robot ninja, which then escapes to wreak havoc on humanity. Although now I think on it, I’d probably go and see that.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

16:28 / 15.01.07

I can't help but think that the only reason there was any interest in Lector was because Hopkins plays him in a film. Harris writes Red Dragon. It gets turned into Manhunter. The world goes on as before. He writes Silence of the Lambs. The world refuses to go crazy over his prose. It gets turned into a film, everyone goes crazy ape bananas. And then people are surprised that the writer of two serviceable but not particularly extraordinary books writes two more stunningly okay tomes? If anything, the creation of sexual tension between Starling and Lector and/or the battle of wits is more the work of the film than the book. And the problem of Hannibal is that we're never given a reason to believe that he is in any way interesting. It reeks of being written so that that nice Sir Anthony can play the part in another film.

23:56 / 16.01.07

I think that ignores the book's ending, which to many seemed to be spitting in the face of those who only knew the character from the films. It seemed unfilmable, and many thought it was deliberately so. And having watched the film of Hannibal and re-read the book recently, it is certainly true that they had to change almost every scene to make it work as a movie, including the whole climax.

Which raises a interesting point - is Hannibal Rising the end of the franchise? How can there be another Lector film when the endings of the film and novel "Hannibal" were so different? How can you reconcile that...

SPOILERS...

... that in the book, Clarice and Lector are loose in Europe, loved-up psychopaths together, but in the novel, they are apart and Lector now has only one hand?

Whisky Priestess

09:55 / 17.01.07

Surely you mean in the film they are split and Hannibal's one-handed?

I'd forgotten how shit the novel's end was. Again, film is far superior.

I should add that although mightily talented, Hopkins was a relative Hollywood nobody before "Silence". If anyone (apart from Harris, who also owes all these people an enormous debt) is to thank for Hopkins's, Hannibal's and Harris's current star power, it's the scriptwriter (poor unsung bastard - I don't even know who wrote it), Jonathan Demme who directed it so well, and Jodie Foster for making it bankable at the production stage.

16:48 / 17.01.07

Yes, of course. That should read, "But in the film..." I'd edit the post, but then yours would be incomprehensible.

14:03 / 18.01.07

Ted Tally screenplay, I think? And he did the screenplay for the utterly redundant Red Dragon (‘Manhunter’ remake) too, if memory serves.

22:29 / 18.01.07

Oh dear...

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23:44 / 20.01.07

That was one of the things I liked about "Hannibal" actually, that it seemed to be a big "Fuck You" to all the people who saw the film "Silence of the Lambs" but didn't bother with the book. Even the title struck me as a "Fuck You". I mean, he knew after "Lambs" all the public really wanted from him was Hannibal, so what does he name his next book? "Hannibal". Which means he's either pandering to the lowest common denominator, or his tongue is in cheek. Bear in mind, I'm not claiming that these are admirable motivations, but I can see why he'd get frustrated. Biting the hand that feeds and all that. I really do think he meant for "Hannibal" to be unfilmable, what with the gruesome violence, the main villian having no face, the whole brain eating scene at the end, Clarice becoming his cannibal love slave, and so on.

I know a lot of people hated "Hannibal" because of that whole grand guignol aspect and the whole camp aspect of it, but at least it seemed that Harris was trying as a writer. I didn't get that feeling with "Hannibal Rising". Again, the whole "feels like an outline" thing. I guess that Harris is just one of those writers who I thought was cool in high school but have just outgrown after finding better writers.

Whisky Priestess

14:48 / 22.01.07

I don't understand why he'd really want to fuck with his public, though - especially since it would have increased in size tenfold after the success of "Silence" the movie.

God, whatever happened to enjoying one's success?

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02:52 / 24.01.07

I dunno, maybe he's just an asshole.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

18:46 / 01.02.07

Wow, a 'Hannibal Rising' movie already? Did Harris write this at the same time as the movie was being made, a la 2001?

21:54 / 01.02.07

Yeah. The film was finished months before the novel was, apparently.

22:24 / 02.02.07

Hannibal Lector isn't meant to be the anti-hero. He's the straight up hero of the novels, and is probably Thomas Harris' Mary Sue alter-ego, and not his 'dark side' at all; rather Lector is what Harris secretly wants to be.

It seems to fit. Lector never loses in any contest that he finds himself engaged in; his superhuman intellect and preternatural perception allow him to effortlessly subdue any opponent. He's never at a loss for a cunning turn of phrase, can play the lute, do higher mathematics for fun, draw with the skill of Escher, perform acts of observation on par with Sherlock Holmes, can cook like nobodies business, etc.

Lector even gets to turn a self-reliant, confident career woman -- one who he met while he was in prison, no less -- into his personal mind-controlled fuckbunny. I bet Starling cooks all the meals in THAT household.

Yeah, i think it's safe to say that Lector is who Harris wishes he could be. That's why Lector has the heroes ending in Hannibal, and that's probably why the new prelude is so thin: Hannibal Lector is basically a suped up Batman villain and the origin likely was not something Harris spent a lot of time imagining while he masturbated to his secret stash of cannibal porn.

More seriously: He got paid eight figures to write this new book (plus one more in the future) and I doubt he cares whether or not his writing is all that sharp. The money is in the bank...let's just crank a couple of quick steamers out on the barely literate American public and go retire in Maui.

Sounds like a plan to me.

00:51 / 03.02.07

Yeah, i think it's safe to say that Lector is who Harris wishes he could be

I'd be careful about that. I don't think it's safe to say that. I don't think Harris wishes he could eat people's brains and or livers. I think he wishes he was a super-genius, but not a super-criminal. Harris may wish to be free from society's rules and regulations regarding, y'know, people-eating, but we can't say for sure.

Either Harris thought this was a good way to explore his most successful creation, or he was motivated by the paycheque. Whether or not he wishes he was Hannibal is pure speculation.

We could almost say that James Ellroy wishes he was Lloyd Hopkins. Or that Philip Roth wishes he was Zuckerman. Or Frank Bascombe and that guy who wrote Frank Bascombe.

Jack The Bodiless

11:37 / 13.03.07

I think the major problem with the whole franchise (and it is a franchise. Dino De Laurentiis owns the rights to make movies about the character, and some reports are that he pretty much blackmailed Harris into writing the screenplay, upon which he then based the novel, saying that he'd make it without him if necessary) is that it's based on a cipher, rather than a character. Lector is an antagonist and/or a catalyst for narrative change in Red Dragon/Manhunter and Silence Of The Lambs, hence the reason why he works so well in those settings - he was never meant to be the sole focus of either of those books, and it's only really Anthony Hopkins' panto performance in the movie adaptation of Silence... that's caused him to be now. When you've got a cipher like that and you flesh him out as a character in his own right you inevitably reduce him at the same time, because in giving him his own narrative weight you risk losing that detached, mysterious and unpredictable quality hat made them attractive.

It's the problem Jamie Delano had with John Constantine when he started on Hellblazer and that Joss Whedon had with Angel - does this character have legs? Can he carry his own show/film/book if I give him that third dimension, or am I going to ruin what made him work in the first place? I think Delano and Whedon carried off the gamble, largely because their characters had motivation, purpose, a reason to be doing things that would drive a narrative. Lector doesn't, at least not yet. He was (I think) supposed to be a sympathetic antagonist in Hannibal, although the book and movie were such abortions that that's just supposition, and in Hannibal Rising we get back story. We don't yet have a narrative in which the Lector we know today is the protagonist, around which the narrative is based. So it still doesn't work...

miss wonderstarr

11:40 / 13.03.07

Could have been worse.

Other working titles for the book were Behind the Mask: The Blooding of Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal 4, Hannibal IV, The Lecter Variations, The Lecter Variation: The Story of Young Hannibal Lecter, Young Hannibal, The Adventures of Young Hannibal, and Young Hannibal: Behind the Mask

11:43 / 13.03.07

So Hannibal vrs Jack Reacher is out of the question then?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:26 / 26.04.07

I... enjoyed it.

I also thought it was absolute balls, really.

(And I liked the ending to Hannibal- novel- I just thought it was very badly written).

Hannibal Rising is better written than Hannibal, but... well, when I reread Red Dragon and Silence a few years back I was struck by how good Harris' prose actually USED TO BE. Hannibal was a BIG drop-off in terms of writing.

Hannibal Rising? Weeeelll......

SPOILERS

This explains nothing. Absolutely nothing. The thing that made him work as a character was his implacability; as someone said above, he's an angel of death. A force of nature. To understand him, you'd have to actually BE him, and Graham only ever comes close to getting what's going on in that head. THAT was what I found fascinating, and that's why I still think Red Dragon is the best Lector novel.

Hannibal Rising is a revenge novel. His motivations are clear to see. His victims are all bastards. We get told at the end that he's become a monster, but there's no connection between the young Hannibal and the total Lovecraftian otherness of the Hannibal we know from the other novels. It explains NOTHING, but explains too much at the same time. I'd rather have read how, from the events in HR to the older Hannibal, he had become this amoral beast. But that's not a reason for Harris to write another crap book.

Hannibal's become Pinhead- as a Cenobite in the first couple of Hellraiser movies, the guy was actually terrifyingly unknowable. By Hellraiser 3 he's become a wisecracking shit horror movie antihero. (To continue the offtopica parenthetically, the fifth movie at least tries to get him back to his original status).

Hannibal wasn't a great novel. I think it was the movie, however, that destroyed the character once and for all; all Hopkins' panto villain shit really took away any of the fear.

Hmm. I still think Red Dragon is a classic of the genre; Silence a decent thriller, Hannibal a good story wasted on some shit writing.

Hannibal Rising? Yeah, a fun afternoon's read, but ultimately BALLS.

23:49 / 27.04.07

Hear, hear, Stoatie.