The demons of Thomas Harris

WRITER'S BLOCK

"In the Green Machine there is no mercy. We make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain."

- Red Dragon, Thomas Harris

GENRE WRITERS AREN'T usually held up to very high literary standards; when was the last time you saw leading critics getting sullen about, say, Stephen King or John Grisham writing their latest novel (perhaps their second of the year) with one eye on a subsequent movie adaptation?

So it's noteworthy that many critics and fans have protested the Hollywoodisation of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter books "" expressing disappointment that Harris may have sold out to big studios, especially after the bloated new film version of Red Dragon.

But then Harris has never been your standard popular-fiction writer. Oh, he operates within the broad format of genre fiction alright (the genre in his case being the dark psychological thriller) "" you'll find the staples of pacy bestseller writing in his work.

But he also takes the reader to places where the usual popular novel won't go. His attention to detail, his talent for plumbing the darkest depths of the soul...these skirt, dare we suggest it, Literary territory.

Consequently, though his sales don't quite match those of the King/Grisham/Archer brigade, he has a cult following that runs deeper, and which includes even heavyweights like Martin Amis.

Harris was in his 30s when he began his writing career, having worked as a crime reporter for a few years. Black Sunday (1975), his first novel, was a political thriller about a terrorist plot to bomb the heavily attended Super Bowl final "" killing 1,00,000 people at one go.

Michael Lander, a deranged Vietnam veteran and dirigible expert, becomes the terrorists' instrument for "delivering death from the sky", and he's more machine than man himself "" his human feelings have been entirely cauterised. He is also Thomas Harris's first monster, an amoral sociopath who would prepare the ground for more famous protagonists to come.

Black Sunday feels a little dated today, but it contains many of the concerns that would become associated with Harris's writing: that nature is cruel and unsparing; that primitive, atavistic impulses are forever boiling just beneath our civilised exteriors, and that it takes very little for them to come to the surface.

These aren't particularly original ideas "" Harris himself often references William Blake, among other writers, who have dealt with them before "" but his treatment of them within the thriller format has been startlingly effective, and never more so than in his second and best novel, Red Dragon (1981).

This is the story of Will Graham, an investigative agent who reluctantly comes out of retirement to help track a psychopath who has murdered two families. Graham has an indefinable talent for getting into a killer's mind, thinking the way he does, and thereby anticipating his moves.

But this also causes a private conundrum, one that was famously given voice by Nietzsche: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." Graham's predicament, together with the parallel story of Francis Dolarhyde, the "red dragon", gives the book immense emotional power.

For help in understanding the murderer's mind, Graham turns to another killer he caught years ago. Thus the Hannibal Lecter legend is born. Harris would give "Hannibal the Cannibal" a leading part in his next, most famous novel, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), which became an acclaimed film.

Monsters walk amidst us, Harris believes, and there is no explanation for why they are what they are. "We don't invent our natures, Will," says Lecter in Red Dragon, "they're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and everything else."

This was one reason why critics were annoyed by the florid, over the top Hannibal (1999), where a traumatic childhood incident is apparently used to "explain" Lecter.

However, a closer reading of the book shows that this isn't really the case "" Lecter is just as enigmatic, as unknowable, as ever.

Whether it will remain that way in the next novel seems doubtful, however. Behind the Mask, a prequel about Lecter's early life, is due out this year, and predictably a film is already underway. Harris aficionados have reason to be nervous. Hollywood's Green Machine can be merciless too.