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450 words

“Hannibal Rising’ by Thomas Harris (Delacourte, 336 pp., $27.95)

Categories: e

By CARLO WOLFF

c.2006 Newhouse News Service

(UNDATED) Hannibal Lecter, the most famous cannibal in literary history, is almost engaging in this fourth book about him. This one is set in the Europe of Lecter’s youth – World War II and its immediate aftermath.

Writer Thomas Harris supplies some color to his characters and purpose to his writing, but this time, the gore is stylized. In the end, there is precious little thrill to “Hannibal Rising,” an overly intellectual thriller.

Where “The Silence of the Lambs,” Harris’ key Hannibal book, was a brilliantly dramatic exploration of evil, “Hannibal Rising” feels forced and a tad tired. It’s clearly time for Harris to move beyond Hannibal, even though he’s still “alive.”

This account of Hannibal’s childhood and early adulthood centers on vengeance, involving trickery, chases and honor. It’s vivid – Harris always writes with immediacy – and efficient, but soulless; Hannibal is a cold fish who, weirdly, is also an incurable romantic. He’s no man of passion except when it comes to his sister, Mischa, whose gruesome murder he avenges with designer brutality.

“Hannibal Rising” has its allure; Harris effectively mixes straightforward narrative and flashback in constructing his creature of singular taste. Young Hannibal moves from a privileged childhood as a scion of Lithuanian nobility to a young manhood versed in culture, cuisine and medicine.

Harris’ portrayal of Vladis Grutas, chief perpetrator of the horror that seeds Hannibal’s monstrosity, is especially compelling. Here, Hannibal spies Grutas in a sterile, spotless bathroom:

“Grutas had his hands behind his head. Tattooed under his arm was the Nazi lightning SS insignia. He twitched his muscle and made the lightning jump. “Boom! Donnerwetter!’ He laughed when the woman captive flinched away. “Noooo, I won’t hit you more. I like you now. I’m going to fix your teeth with some teeth you can put in a glass beside the bed, out of the way.”

In “Hannibal Rising,” the plotting is crafty if a bit schematic, the writing is careful, and Harris’ erudition is impressive; the book will send you to the dictionary more than once, and that’s just the English dictionary.

Harris also gives his gory but bloodless, curiously emotionless narrative an unsettling perfume of incest in the subplot of Hannibal’s largely cerebral affair with Lady Murasaki, his exotic, exquisitely sensitive and chilly aunt. Like the novel itself, this affair never seems quite consummated, but its tension keeps you reading.

Harris is expert at building tension, after all. Release, however, can be a problem for him.

PH END WOLFF

(Carlo Wolff wrote this article for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. He can be contacted at books(at)plaind.com.)

2006-12-18-BOOKS-HANNIBAL

AP-NY-12-19-06 1407EST