Hannibal RisingThomas Harris
If you are a fan of Hannibal Lecter, you might not want to read Hannibal Rising. Sometimes things are better left alone, for mystery's sake.
Hannibal Rising describes Hannibal Lecter's childhood and the events that make him the crazy killer that we all know and love. As a big fan of the other books in the series, I didn't even hesitate before pre-ordering a copy. When it finally arrived, I tore through it in a day, but at about 300 pages, it isn't very long, especially considering the font is rather large and after most chapters a blank page is inserted.
I enjoyed it at first, but I soon realized the problem with Hannibal Rising: its existence. Lecter's ability to scare the public comes in part from the fact that he simply is. Explaining the birth of the monster violates the a major rule of creating fear in the audience: don't give away too much; let the audience scare itself.
To me, it is truly more frightening to imagine that Lecter simply is. If he exists, simply a freak of nature, then other freaks will exist as well. However, as we find out very early in the book (so I'm not spoiling anything here), Lecter's evil is a direct result of the horrors of WWII.
Give me a break.
I'm certainly not belittling the horrors of war. But it's a rather mundane thing to have created an evil as great as Hannibal Lecter. C'mon! This is HANNIBAL LECTER. He is legend. He deserves something better than this. I suppose the problem is that no suffering would be too great to justify the deeds Lecter later performs.
And furthermore, Lecter only kills really shitty people in Hannibal Rising. Every single one deserves it! Instead of a cold-blooded killer who enjoys taking life, the young Lecter does so out of revenge, to purge the world of people who contribute nothing and who only take and hurt others. He is a vigilante, out to right the wrongs of his past. No one dies unnecessarily.HUH???
What happened to killing a violinist because he played off-key??? The man who bit the face off another man for no reason?? Harris gives a glimpse into the birth of something in Hannibal Rises, but it isn't the Hannibal Lecter we have come to know.
In a nutshell: Harris has created an interesting story, for anyone other than Hannibal Lecter. Unfortunately, in this novel, Lecter doesn't live up to the legend that has already been created for him.
Bibliolatry Scale: 2 out of 6 stars
1 comment:
Hello.
I guess you are absolutely rigth, as the very same Hannibal said in the book "silence of the lambs" something about that he was anoyed with all the search for a cause of his "madness", bored for the theory that everything wrong in a mind is a cause of something that happened earlier in his life, instead of just asuming that he is "as is".
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