Monster's fall

Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter prequel is better than its reputation suggests, but the gentleman monster has clearly run out of worthy adversaries.

The querulous sense of betrayal that has greeted the publication of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Rising "" a prequel which details the childhood, adolescence and early youth of the world's most famous fictional cannibal "" is a measure of how deep the Hannibal Lecter cult runs.

Fans everywhere are dismayed by what they perceive as the demystification of a character who was never so terrifying as when he existed in his own void; enigmatic, unknowable, resistant to analysis.

A recent Times Online review titled "An indigestible back-story is hard to swallow" (yes, expect more such gastronomic punning; it comes with Lecter territory) points out that while Harris's other monsters can be explained, "Lecter seems simply to be, and from that comes his power".

Fan forums across the Net were lamenting Hannibal Rising long before it was even published. And Harris, who started his career 30 years ago as one of America's most provocative popular writers, is now being accused of having sold out to Hollywood.

He simultaneously wrote a movie screenplay for Hannibal Rising and the film, with Gaspard Ulliel (a former fashion model, no less) playing the young Lecter, is ready for release next month. None of this is very good news to old-time Harris fans whose attitude to genre fiction was forever altered by the superb Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs.

It's a pity that the burden of expectations has made it so difficult to read Hannibal Rising on its own terms, for though it doesn't approach the quality of Harris's best work, it still is written with the care and attention to detail, one associates with the man.

This isn't just a lazily thrown together hack project. If you can jettison the Lecter baggage (and of course that's a very big "if"), it's even a pretty good thriller "" though marred in places by the peculiarly overwrought writing that was also on display in its immediate predecessor, Hannibal. ("I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart," Hannibal's Japanese stepmother tells him. "My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing," he replies. No haiku, fortunately.)

I can't agree with the view that the new book amounts to a summary explanation of Lecter, a simplistic "this is why the monster became what he became". Despite all the exposition, the character remains, in essence, just as unknowable as ever.

When we first meet him he's eight years old, standing with his baby sister Mischa near a castle moat, throwing bread to black swans, and there's something immediately unsettling and otherworldly about the setting.

Long before Hannibal and his family are visited by horrors from the world outside, we already sense that he's a strange little boy, certainly a frighteningly precocious one.

"Hannibal could always read, or it seemed that way," we're told: his nanny read to him when he was two, he lolled against her and looked at the words on the page, and soon after she found him reading aloud by himself.

At the age of six, he discovered Euclid's Elements and started measuring the height of towers by the length of their shadows, "following instructions which he said came directly from Euclid himself". (If such a child isn't already primed for a life in psychopathy, who is?)

It might be instructive to try and view this book in the same way that an untrained reader would have viewed Harris's masterpiece Red Dragon in 1981. Red Dragon (which introduced Lecter in a small but very effective part) also gave us the background story of a serial killer "" Francis Dolarhyde, or the "Tooth Fairy".

The general framework was that of pop psychology (harelipped boy abandoned by parents, mocked by other children and raised by a sadistic grandmother, grows up to become schizophrenic psycho who murders families and conducts a self-affirming private ritual with their bodies), but it was presented to us in a detached, matter-of-fact tone "" as if to suggest that even when all the details of a life have been laid bare, some things still exist beyond the realm of human understanding.

The treatment of Lecter's early life in Hannibal Rising is not very different. If this were a first book, it might have been better received.

Where Hannibal Rising does fall short in comparison to the first two Lecter books is in its inability to provide the monster with a worthy opposite number.

In Red Dragon there was Will Graham, one of Harris's most powerfully drawn characters, a detective who understands the psychotic mind better than he wants to.

Silence of the Lambs had Clarice Starling, the young FBI intern with demons of her own but with a personal integrity and a courage of conviction that appealed to the gentleman in Lecter.

Hannibal Rising briefly tries for something similar with a character named Inspector Popil, who hears in Lecter's voice "something he recognized as Other...the prehensile quality of the opposing brain". But this is never followed all the way through.

Harris has become much too interested in his protagonist to allow the stage to anyone else, and thence lies the problem. Lecter was fascinating as a supporting player manipulating events from the sidelines, playing mindgames with worthy adversaries; but when operating in isolation and as the central figure, without anyone to bounce off, he doesn't make the cut "" if you'll pardon another pun.

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EXTRACT

"War crimes do not end with the war, Hannibal." Popil paused to read the advertising on each facet of the ashtray. "Perhaps I understand your situation better than you think."

"What is my situation, Inspector?"

"You were orphaned in the war. You lived in an institution, living inside yourself, your family dead. And at last, at last your beautiful stepmother made up for all of it." Working for the bond, Popil put his hand on Hannibal's shoulder. "The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp. And then the butcher spews filth at her. If you killed him, I could understand. Tell me. Together we could explain to a magistrate..."

Hannibal moved back in his chair, away from Popil's touch.

"The very scent of her takes away the smell of the camp. May I ask if you compose verse, Inspector?"