One of the joys of genre fiction scarcely found in literary fiction is accidental comedy. In contemporary literary fiction every effect is in some way ironic, as the scene written for poignancy implicitly references scenes written for poignancy in other novels, or a narrator’s induced panic recalls panic induced elsewhere, whether more skillfully, less, or differently. The effects in genre fiction, like effects in genre film, are entirely sincere. When they fail, there is no resort to interpreting that failure as the novelist’s comment on literary artifice, as when one says that one found a disturbing plot development in a literary work unrealistic and the other exclaims, “That’s the point!” Instead, the effect doesn’t take, the reader is unmoved, unamused, etc., and that novelistic artifice is exposed for embarrassment.
The primary effect intended by Thomas Harris in his 1999 novel Hannibal is dinner party sophistication. This is accidentally acknowledged in a “controversial” anthropophagy scene late in the action. There are other effects, such as suspense, disgust, of course, and occasional deliberate comedy, but in comparing Hannibal with the earlier installments in the Lecter series, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, one can see that the bad doctor’s promotion to the titular role has brought his education, mental acuity, and vaguely European refinement into central thematic place. We are to be charmed more than frightened. Harris’ work would usually be termed horror (sometimes psychological horror), as distinct from supernatural horror, but Hannibal unlike its predecessors isn’t much concerned with criminal investigation; the plot is powered by crimes not yet committed.
Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling is in trouble with the FBI for shooting a meth dealer. A Baltimore scion with useful connections to Washington, Mason Verger, was wronged by Dr. Hannibal Lecter decades ago, and now arranges an elaborate revenge involving a special breed of hungry Sardinian boars. He promises that they’ll start with Hannibal’s feet. Mason’s sister Margot, a lesbian bodybuilder, wants to have a child as a way to seize the Verger riches, and she has no loyalty to her sick brother. Barney, the former orderly at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Hannibal’s former residence, may be useful to her. The cannibal himself is living and eating well in Florence, ostensibly translating and curating at the Capponi Library, but his thoughts run often to Clarice. A dubious chief inspector Rinaldo Pazzi, something of a patsy, is after him. It is a combination of Starling’s courage and Hannibal’s ingenuity which will see Harris’ favorite pair safely through to the end of the tale.
After getting through the introduction to Mason Verger, a letter from Hannibal to Clarice, and some FBI procedural matters in Part I, Harris takes us to Florence for Part II. At night, the place is “artfully lighted”, and the Palazzo Vecchio is not just vecchio but “intensely medieval”. Harris is much impressed by the city, and he’s given himself the awkward task of expressing this through Pazzi, a local. The rain-coated inspector, in whom “the Italian sense of irony was strong”, stands “where the reformer Savonarola was burned” and more relevant to Pazzi’s tale, where “his own forebear came to grief”. His prize capture was a serial killer dubbed Il Mostro, and the culprit was identified using clues including Botticelli’s “Primavera” at the Uffizi Museum. That monster left not crime scenes but “tableaux”, one of Harris’ favorite words. French will do for any European setting, and once the author gets back to America he puts it to endless culinary uses. The apparent prosecution of Il Mostro earned Pazzi a fellowship at Georgetown and some nice dinners in D.C., which readied him for his next job: “his natural acquisitiveness and ambition had been whetted in America, where every influence is felt more quickly, including the death of Jehovah and the incumbency of Mammon.” Pazzi is soon off to Paris to make some business calls, promised quite a lot of cash in exchange for delivering Hannibal to Mason Verger. Harris takes the Parisian excursion as an opportunity to recommend that guilty husbands go to the Bon Marché department store where Pazzi buys his wife a nice peignoir in peach silk moiré. There’s a clear enough apology for Pazzi though, who has to be pretty desperate to go for the bounty on Hannibal; his Mostro suspect was the wrong man, the conviction was overturned, and his employment is in jeopardy.
The beast has been uncaged. No more cell and straightjacket, rather the Palazzo Capponi, and “dark clothing beautifully cut, even for Italy.” Hannibal has renamed himself “Dr. Fell”, but he speaks “clear Tuscan” and hushes the art historians at The Studiolo with his recitation of Dante. This we learn from Pazzi when he’s sent to ask after the previous curator whom Hannibal has replaced, before the inspector realizes who Dr. Fell really is. More capacious even than Hannibal’s palazzo is his “memory palace”, a device Harris insists upon several times. “Like scholars before him, Dr. Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr. Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there.” That enormous amount of information also includes ample material for the flashbacks to a difficult childhood which will serve to give the monster his due humanity, but those should only be hinted at here. For the more immediate purpose of plot, specifically Hannibal’s awareness of Pazzi’s dastardly designs, we soon understand the utility of the memory palace. Dr. Fell knows that Pazzi is a “Pazzi of the Pazzi” (a once noble, now disgraced family). How, we and Pazzi ask? “You resemble a figure from the Della Robbia rondels in your family’s chapel at Santa Croce,” Hannibal tells the nervy inspector.
Part III is titled “To The New World”. Hannibal suffers on the way there in economy class, where Harris notes that the twenty inches of hip room is “two inches more space than a slave had on the Middle Passage.” Cramped but serene, the doctor ignores the “freezing-cold sandwiches of slippery meat and processed cheese food” in favor of his own meal from an “elegant yellow box trimmed with brown from Fauchon, the Paris caterer.” Indeed he has “provisioned himself with wonderfully aromatic truffled pâté de foie gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from their severed stems.” The weeping line is pretty good, but all this delicacy distracts from Hannibal as cannibal, and it’s all vulgar in a different way. The author’s evident delectation, his possible identification with the killer as bon vivant, is soon lost when we visit Hannibal’s memory palace again and learn something of his deep past, a tale of orphanhood which will later bind him to Clarice with her famous father issues.
“It is an axiom of behavioral science that vampires are territorial, while cannibals range widely across the country.” The reader is told this just before Hannibal is shown prowling around Maryland, and is prepared to believe it and work with it, until Hannibal starts ranging widely, by which Harris means shopping widely. He buys a “supercharged Jaguar sedan”, a “late eighteenth-century Flemish harpsichord nearly identical to the Smithsonian’s 1745 Dulkin”, “heavy picnic plates with Gien French china in one of the chasse patterns of leaves and upland birds”, “an exquisite copper sauté pan and a copper fait-tout to make sauces, both made for Dehillerin in Paris”. These and sundry other goods he places in his new “pleasant refuge on the Maryland shore” rented from an unscrupulous German lobbyist. The psycho psychologist is now a sort of European pseudo-aristocrat, getting a taste of America without skimping on his old worldly comforts. Harris covers the novel’s preoccupation with the finer things thusly: “Dr. Lecter very much liked to shop.”
To be fair, much of Hannibal’s shopping above was in preparation for a little dinner party. With Clarice’s help Hannibal escapes Mason’s swineherd, and the two of them retreat to his rental home so she can recuperate. Margot Verger assists in the delivery of a third diner, FBI man Paul Krendler, who had been abusing his seniority over Clarice, and collaborating with Mason besides. Hannibal prepares the dining room with a care that we are to believe is part of his madness, though we like he are relieved to see that the “dark and forbidding sideboard looked less like an aircraft carrier when high service pieces and bright copper warmers stood on it.” Harris has one rather interesting decorating insight to do with floral arrangements which he seems to have made use of in the composition of Hannibal: “He could see that he had too many flowers in the room, and must add more to make it come back right again. Too many was too many, but way too many was just right.” Dr. Lecter provides Clarice the perfect gown and “exquisite beaded jacket”, lectures her on formal dinners which can be “far more engaging than theater,” and plays her some Henry VIII on that fantastic harpsichord.
The consummation of all the consumption in Hannibal approaches. “Dr. Lecter took off Krendler’s runner’s headband as you would remove the rubber band from a tin of caviar.” Here Harris hopes to unite the macabre with the mannered, as when Hannibal slew those policeman to the accompaniment of the Goldberg Variations, but the doctor’s tastes are far too specialist. Harris is simply trying too hard, having Hannibal bread Krendler’s brains in brioche crumbs and serve them atop croutons with a shallot and caper berry sauce. Later he and Clarice will all but marry and get settled in an “exquisite Beaux Arts” residence in Buenos Aires. Is the dinner scene the initiation Clarice requires, to become what she eats? Is the doctor’s brilliance, soon to be shared by Clarice, attributable to a diet of brains alongside the famous liver and fava beans? His predecessor at the Capponi Library, presumably brainy, did disappear without explanation. But Krendler is crass; he sings Bing Crosby, not Verdi, as Hannibal portions out his pre-frontal lobe, and he calls Clarice a “cornbread country cunt”. Krendler represents the concerns of The Silence of the Lambs, not just misogyny and Clarice’s resultant self-doubt but also Washington machinations, those grimy grey matters from which her elopement with the monster is implausible.
The reader who does find it plausible has been seduced, as Clarice is, by the table Harris and Hannibal have laid. That reader would readily join the doctor in the drawing room for a soufflé and glass of Château d’Yquem. The note on Pazzi’s tour of D.C. about the “incumbency of Mammon” in America, besides begging forgiveness for the excess luxury, is calculated to make Harris’ American readers feel like brutes, and seek an education under the care of this new Hannibal, who is here given a noble Italian pedigree, mixed with Lithuanian for the vague connection to Dracula. This education is primarily a matter of how one should spend one’s money. Hannibal is truly an airport novel, then, with its Florentine and French flourishes. It’s a battle of the trans-European epicurean Count against the American hog farmers and org-men which resolves for Clarice, if not for us, to a vision of the good life with that very bad man, whom she at least always honors with the designation “Dr. Lecter.”