Word: lecter
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...Hannibal the Cannibal made his debut in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon and reappeared in the 1988 Silence and the 1999 Hannibal. All three novels were filmed, Red Dragon twice (once under the title Manhunter). Now there's a fourth novel, a prequel to the others - Lecter's life to the age 18. Hannibal Rising has just been published, with all the hoopla and suspense-mongering of a Harry Potter novel: a first printing of 1.5 million, and no advance copies to reviewers. On Feb. 9 there will be a movie version, for which Harris did the screenplay. That...
...Originally, Hannibal was a supporting character, too. The first two books have more or less the same plot. In Red Dragon, FBI profiler Will Graham, the man who caught and imprisoned Lecter, accepts his intercession and interference as a possible aid in finding a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy (because he leaves bite marks on his corpses). In The Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling is tracking Buffalo Bill, and again Lecter played the brilliant, deranged, unreliable consigliere...
...Hannibal was one of those supporting players, like Falstaff in Henry IV, whose extravagant personality propels them into the limelight. The trick to the Lecter character was genius uncorrupted by conscience. Inside him, polar opposites coexisted: elegance and heartlessness, fastidiousness and cruelty, insanity and insight. He's a great people-reader, exercising a hypnotic power over those he meets, and with an acute instinct for the emotional jugular. This is on display the first time Hannibal appears in the books - when Will Graham visits him in a prison cell in Red Dragon - "Graham felt that Lecter was looking through...
...only natural that Harris would look for redeeming features in the psychopath who'd lived in his head for a quarter century. He may also have fallen under Hannibal's spell. (Novelist Martin Amis, who admires the first two Hannibal books, said Harris has lately "gone gay on" Lecter") Could it be that, like Clarice, he began Silence as Lecter's skeptical profiler and ended Hannibal as his mesmerized partner...
...Whatever the reasons, Harris wants to shift the audience's take on Lecter from horrified fascination to pity, or sympathy, or empathy. Hannibal Rising is his most explicit defense: not guilty by reason of insanity, with its roots in a childhood trauma...