“Hannibal Rising”
Thomas Harris
Review by Aaron Lovell
(04/10/2007) Is it possible to know too much about a fictional character? Oftentimes, larger-than-life figures in books and films tend to benefit when their past is somewhat obscured. A few blank spots on a résumé can foster a legend and help build a myth.
One must be particularly careful with the back story of a villain as beloved as Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Over the course of three previous books (and four accompanying films — the book “Red Dragon” was made into a movie twice), Thomas Harris created a character who was intelligent, menacing, and darkly humorous: a psychopathic, cannibalistic forensic psychiatrist. In the books and with Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning portrayal, Lecter titillated audiences as he helped a young F.B.I. agent catch various serial killers, usually before settling down and eating some of the other characters.
But back story is exactly what “Hannibal Rising,” the most recent volume in the series, provides. While earlier installments offer hints about Lecter’s origins — asides about attending John Hopkins University, his high-brow cultural tastes, that refined palate — here Lecter’s childhood and adolescence is laid out in the easily filmable light of day. Mr. Harris actually wrote a screenplay alongside the novel, and the big-screen version of “Hannibal Rising” hit theaters with a resounding thud last winter.
It is in providing this history that the book falls short. We follow Lecter as a precocious child living in prewar Lithuania. Knowing what we know about the character’s adult life, the idyll is almost high comedy: We learn about Lecter’s above-average intelligence and his penchant for math and problem-solving, his kindness toward animals, and his stable and loving family life. It was a creamy life of luxury, privilege, and pastoral calm in a Lithuanian castle.
Of course, dark clouds are gathering in the form of the Nazi advance on the Baltic region. After spending the better part of the war in a secluded hunting lodge, Lecter’s family is killed during the Nazi retreat and soon a group of marauding Lithuanian thugs move into the lodge, eventually eating Lecter’s little sister in the process.
But the heavy-handed foreshadowing doesn’t end there. Throughout the book are little incidents that play on our knowledge of Lecter’s later life, with throwaway lines becoming punch lines — for instance, when a headmaster says, “Hannibal Lecter, report to my office.”
As the war ends, Lecter escapes and ends up in a Soviet orphanage housed in . . . wait for it . . . his family’s former mansion. The boy soon takes up with relatives on the Left Bank of Paris, where he eventually begins medical school and is soon pursued by a detective for his first killing. (Lecter murders a French butcher, on loan from central casting, who insulted his stepmother.)
“Hannibal Rising” really stalls as the protagonist goes about dispatching the gang that killed his sister. Rather than rooting for the attractive F.B.I. agent to stop the serial killer, a la “Silence of the Lambs,” this time we’re put in the awkward position of pulling for the antihero Lecter as he travels through postwar Europe to catch and kill his former tormentors in the most gruesome ways possible. One is drowned in a vat of formaldehyde full of cadavers, another gets a stiletto through the head, and plenty are sliced and shot in the book’s climax, which is so hackneyed it reads as if it’s been cribbed from the laptop of the laziest scriptwriter in West Los Angeles.
 Thomas Harris
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Mr. Harris, a former Associated Press reporter, is adept at spinning these grisly yarns, and, for all of its faults, “Hannibal Rising” is nothing if not a page-turner. If you’re planning a long summer weekend at the beach or a leg-numbing flight, you could do worse than reaching for this in the airport bookstore.
But longtime fans of the series might very well be let down by the book’s description of the young Lecter, as such a towering figure of evil is reduced to what is little more than a grudge. In shining the light on Lecter’s younger years, one gets the feeling we suddenly know too much. Perhaps that mystery is what really made Lecter so formidable all along.
With hints, suggestion, and innuendo, the mind can conjure up all sorts of terrifying images. But when it’s all laid out in “Hannibal Rising,” Lecter suddenly seems to exist only on the page — and he’s a lot less scary.
“Hannibal Rising”
Thomas Harris
Delacorte, $27.95
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Thomas Harris lives in Sag Harbor.
Aaron Lovell, a frequent visitor to Montauk, writes about real estate and high finance in New York City.