Hannibal

Rating:
Summary: Sensing The Kill
Review: Oh the disappointment! The total-sell out! How could he! It's tripe! It's one-dimensional! Non-existant plot! Woof!

Now, let's take this step by step.

Hannibal is a good book. Flawed, but well-written and exciting. And being positive and constructive people, we will start by talking about everything that Harris did right.

Pun unintended, the characters are all rich and tasty. Mason Verger makes for an delicious villain - his wrath is believable, as is his vigorous quest for revenge. It would have been very easy for Harris to turn him into some Khan-like Shakespear-quoting devil manifistation, yet he veers away from it, much like he veered away from it in the creation of Lecter himself. The Verger scenes are all gnash-your-teeth in apprehension, particularly the "Kitty Cat" sub-plot which, in my opinion, is an excellent example of using two pages of dialog to create a character who is truly sinister without going over the top.

Clarice and Lecter are both handled deftly, and the story, right up until the end of the book is defintely a collar-grabber.

Is the ending problematic? Yes it is. Is the book ridicolous or one-dimensional? Absoloutely not. I believe that many of us have confused the character that Jody Foster played in the film with the character that Harris created in his novels, and yet the two are different in many ways.

While the argument about Clarice's last few scenes in the book will, I'm sure, continue for a while (they will, no doubt, be absent in the film adapatation), let's first give the devil his due. Harris is not an idiot, and "Hannibal" is not a WWF event, where characters can go from pure good to pure evil within one commercial break. Does it all make sense? Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, but let's try to keep in mind the fact that underneath our bickering lies a well-thought-out piece of fiction. It might not be perfect, but it is certainly worth a read. I wish I could say the same about some of the so called "reviews", above.

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed a vague resemblence between the majority of the opions above and a pack of hungry animals, sensing the kill? I'm sure that an outsider, looking at Mason's instruments of revenge would have had a hard time telling them apart; after reading this page, I felt much the same.

Rating:
Summary: enthralling
Review: i thought it was just wonderful. lecter is up to his old tricks and even a few new curves were thrown in. a definate read for those who enjoy this type of book

Rating:
Summary: review reconsidered
Review: I read the book again and read the reader reviews, and there seems to be great controversy about Clarisse's character. The ending is still disturbing and hard to take, but readers who think Clarisse is a cardboard cutout at the end should reread those chapters again. It throws Lecter's villainy into higher relief, shows Clarisse can still match wits with Lecter, and sets up some very interesting possiblities for a sequel, if there is one. I agree, though, that it will be tough to bring this to the screen.

Rating:
Summary: A huge disappointment. Harris abandons his characters!
Review: What starts out as a hauntingly eerie flashback to the personal drama of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, ends with the biggest disappointment in literary history. Most of us who came to the wonderfully drawn characters of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter as a result of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, were expecting more of the psychological thriller from the original story. Instead, Clarice is left out in the cold (for a good 300 pages) while Lecter meanders through a silly, violent scheme by a former patient to capture and slaughter him as an act of revenge. What should have concluded with more of Lecter's attempts to draw Clarice out of her self-imposed nightmares, ends with a silly, drug-induced romance. This book is a nightmare for those of us who expected a psychological thriller in which Clarice Starling, through Hannibal Lecter's continued torments, became the strong heroine she was destined to become in full maturity. Thomas Harris has wasted ten years of his life for this hopeless drivel?

Rating:
Summary: Extremely suspensful, graphic and disturbing, weak ending.
Review: The book starts off strong and stays suspensful all the way through. There are some graphically disturbing scenes scattered throughout the book, seemingly more vivid than his previous books. The ending seemed not believable and somewhat contrived.

Rating:
Summary: Madness!
Review: What happend? Good God, I've been waiting in eager anticipation for this book ever since finishing Silence ( which I believed to be better than Red Dragon, although many disagree with me). The book was simply ludicrous. The stuff with the killer wild boars was laughable...as was Lector unscrewing a skull and eating from it. His relationship with Starling didn't feel right either. The set-up in Europe was nice though.

Rating:
Summary: Harris creates something completely different.
Review: When I bought Hannibal I knew what I was expecting. I knew what I thought I could reasonably expect given the genre and dictates of story. This would be the third part of the Silence of the Lambs/Red Dragon saga. It would be well written and a part of the same tradition. I had always been impressed by Mr. Harris's brilliance but I was not expecting something completely original. What happens in this book with these characters is something I never expected to see in commercial fiction. So I'm at a strange loss-- Did I like the book? Yes. Was it a good book artistically? Yes. Do I recommend the book? Yes-with caution. This is not comfortable fiction of any genre. It's not pushing the edge of the envelope it is outside it. Not for the faint of heart, mind or stomach. It is nothing like you have ever read before and if you are starved as I am for something new and different Hannibal is a welcome treat.

Rating:
Summary: Delicious
Review: Do not let the naysayers put you off this book. This is one to read for yourself. Harris is a wonderful writer, and Lecter has to be one of the finest characters of modern fiction. Given all this richness, its beyond me how people can dismiss the book because the ending does not fit their prejudices.

Rating:
Summary: Huge dissappointment
Review: I remember New Yorkers rushing out to bookstores the week Silence was released. Harris with Red Dragon had completely set the standard for this genre, and we weren't let down. Hannibal reads like it was written in the last few months, and Harris has obviously lost it. Bad storytelling and ludicrous ending, such a letdown.

Rating:
Summary: "Give in to the Dark Side of the Force"
Review: My wife and I pre-ordered HANNIBAL from Amazon in hardcover, something we almost never do. That's how much we wanted to read this. Well, we've read it and we're in agreement--Thomas Harris blew his readership a HUGE raspberry.

Short of posting a major spoiler I can't go into detail, but the ending totally contradicts everything we know about Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has ruined one of the most perversely fascinating student/mentor relationships in literature--and it's clear that this was a deliberate choice on his part.

Clarice Starling's once-promising FBI career has, in the intervening years, gone down the "Mulder track". At the mercy of all-male superiors who despise her for being (a) female, (b) too willing to speak her mind, (c) unwilling to sleep her way to the top, and (d) female, she's reduced to "loan-outs" to BATF and other scut jobs. The portrayal of constant on-the-job sexual harassment is so heavy-handed that it could have been written by Katherine McKinnon & Andrea Dworkin, and Clarice's inability use solving the Buffalo Bill case to secure herself a spot in Behavior Science strains credulity.

When Lecter, after a silence of seven years, writes her following a botched BATF-FBI raid, her former mentor Jack Crawford is able to wrangle her a spot on the Behavioral Science team at last. But it turns out that a former Lecter victim with wealth and influence, Mason Verger, is also interested in capturing the doctor--so he can feed him to his specially-bred man-eating hogs(!).

Most of the reviews have pointed out that the middle of the book is its best part, and I'd have to concur. Seeing Lecter going about his (legitmate and otherwise) business in Florence and later the U.S. is undeniably fascinating. So is the two-pronged hunt, as Lecter proves an elusive and resourceful adversary. But any goodwill the midsection generates is completely blown by the outrageous ending.

For the record, the book's as well-written as any of Harris's previous novels, though more episodic. But ultimately, this is a sour end-of-the-millenium work, and a profound disappointment.