Customer Reviews

Hannibal Rising

5 star:		(61)
4 star:		(88)
3 star:		(71)
2 star:		(66)
1 star:		(98)

 

 

First of all, if you are expecting yet another Red Dragon, Silence or Hannibal, this isn't quite it, nor was it intended to be. It's mostly the story of an 8-18 year old boy in Lithuania/France during the brutal Eastern Front and its aftermath in WWII. There are plenty of linkages as the character that is Hannibal is connected to the one we know from reading the previous three works (obviously, he turns into that guy), but he surely doesn't start out that way. I feel the need to defend this against the other reviews on this site, because it appears people had the wrong expectations regarding what this work was going to be. Don't let it stop you from buying and enjoying Harris' mind, because there are definitely flashes of Dragon/Silence here, but only that. This book is more about the semi-plotted revenge of a bright artistic teenager and his final revelation. The death of one and the beginning of another. One more thing, if you thought Hannibal wasn't a good book, then stop reading Harris altogether and don't bother reading this one. Keep my review in perspective, because I thought Hannibal was 5 stars and one of the most entertaining books I have ever read and the ending was brilliant, not stupid, because it is the last thing you would have expected. Harris isn't for the "happy ever after" crowd by any means. The ending of Hannibal is even better after you read this book. This one is for true Harris lovers, others need not apply, nor should you listen to them.

As an avid fan who counts RED DRAGON and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS among the greatest suspense novels of all time, I was eager to read 1999's HANNIBAL and this new book. As it turned out, I didn't much care for HANNIBAL, but even that was better than this one. I'm very disappointed.

This new novel is supposed to fill in details of the childhood and origins of Hannibal Lecter, but it is a far cry from the earlier books in style and quality. It is a series of short, sketchy chapters that reads like what it probably is, a swiftly produced novelization of a screenplay (the movie is already made and will be released soon). What we get is a lot of half-baked psychology and endless scenes of nauseating violence designed for no other purpose than to shock and revolt us. The central character himself barely makes an impression; he's almost--perish the thought--boring. And the rest of the cast is even less interesting. The writing throughout the book is surprisingly bad, and I'm having a hard time believing it is actually the work of Thomas Harris.

I guess teenagers may love this nonsense, and they'll all rush out and see the movie, too. The rest of us will have to cherish our memories of Harris's earlier novels and pretend this one never happened. But it did happen, and it will be a huge bestseller, and Thomas Harris will laugh all the way to the bank. How sad.

As a longtime fan of Thomas Harris' novels featuring Hannibal Lecter, I was very excited to read HANNIBAL RISING. The premise intrigued me: I'm one of those people who loves the recent slew of prequels, and the idea of learning the ghastly origins of Hannibal Lecter sounded simply delectable to me. [...] HANNIBAL RISING is not the equivalent of RED DRAGON or THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS - perhaps not even of HANNIBAL, for that matter. But I disagree with those many who have simply dismissed HANNIBAL RISING as "crap". True, it's not a great read, but it is certainly a fun one.

The book opens during Hitler's "Blitzkrieg" operation during World War II, when Axis troops spread across Europe and placed the majority of it under Nazi control. The Lecter family, which consists of the cultured Count and Countess as well as their talented son Hannibal and his little sister, Mischa, flees to their cabin in the woods of Poland to escape from the invading SS. Of course, things go to hell when a fighter plane crashes into the cabin, burning Hannibal's parents and leaving he and his sister to fend for themselves. Then a band of starving Russian thieves come across the cabin, and with nothing left to eat, they turn to Hannibal and his sister ...

The rest of the book deals with Hannibal as a disturbed teenager trying to deal with the pain over the loss with his sister when he is taken in by his uncle Robert and his dazzling wife, Lady Muraski, and subsequently his life as a young medical student in Paris, where he finally begins planning his revenge on the fiends who murdered his sister.

HANNIBAL RISING has nothing - NOTHING - in common with any of the previous Hannibal Lecter books. The character of Hannibal still retains his wit and remains fascinating, but is a little more reckless and humane than his older self, though he's still just as delightfully brilliant as ever. One of the problems with HANNIBAL RISING is that it feels rushed - and not without reason: Thomas Harris wrote and sold the screenplay for the film before he wrote the novel. That's a pity, because at times it feels like Harris is telling the story simply to wow audiences and grab some more cash, rather than because he has a story to tell. The action is fast, but the sentences are simple and almost completely devoid of the eloquence found in HANNIBAL and its predecessors. Much of the narrative reads more like a movie script than a novel, and there are some attempts at artistry that wind up reading more like grammatical errors.

Then there's the questions one would expect the origin story of Hannibal Lecter to clear up. Questions like, "Why does he eat people?" and "How did Hannibal become so sophisticated a killer?" are left unanswered. We get a sumptuous look at Hannibal's youth, but it seems a little far-fetched at times. Perhaps only am I bothered by this, as I was expecting a novel that encompassed most of Hannibal's life up until RED DRAGON. Still, at the end of HANNIBAL RISING we are left with a greater sense of who Hannibal Lecter is, even if we don't finish with the satisfaction one would wish for from an examination of Hannibal's dark beginnings.

And so the question one must ask oneself is "To read or not to read"? In my opinion, to read. HANNIBAL RISING may not be the masterpiece that THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS or RED DRAGON was, it may not have the intricacy and simple satisfaction proved by HANNIBAL, but if you can accept it for what it is, a horrific tale of grisly vengeance, then you won't regret it. On the other hand, those expecting to see a linear path from the innocent boy Hannibal Lecter to the horrific adult Hannibal Lecter may be left confused and enraged. I personally don't feel as though I've a bone to pick with Thomas Harris (sorry, I couldn't resist), but others may. The only way to know what lies in the darkness is to venture into it, and many will enjoy what they find in the darkness of HANNIBAL RISING.

For me, the book lost its credibility in the very first scenes, as Count Lecter and the rest of his family witnessed the opening guns of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, from their estate in Lithuania.

What's wrong with this, you may ask. Well---although postwar histories tended to glide over it, the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) had been annexed by the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact before the Germans invaded Russia. Among the first people the Communists dragged off were _nobility_...IOW, there'd be no way in the world that the Lecters would have been there to see it. Odds are, they'd have been enjoying an all-expenses-paid free tour of Siberia, courtesy of the NKVD.

So, if the Lecters couldn't have been there for the German invasion (during which, at least in the early stages, they were welcomed as liberators by people who'd been experiencing Stalinist benevolence) they couldn't have been there for the big retreat, which makes the Big Scene kind of impossible.

Our dear Dr. Lecter would probably never eat popcorn, and Mr. Harris should not make his readers consume the literary equivalent. As many have noted here, this is not up to the standards set by the previous novels.
As sparse as Hannibal was verbose, this book lacks the fire of the earlier books. The characters are sketchy at best, and without a list of the antagonists provided by Mr. Harris early on, I would not have kept them straight. As it was, they were interchangable, and their eventual demise should come as a surprise to no one who has ever read a book by Mr. Harris, or, dare I say, a book at all.
As an aside, the font is huge, and the amount of blank space used in this tome is immense. I keep wondering if I'm supposed to erect my own memory palace against the vast, unused canvas that forms the scaffolding of this book.
A single star, and were it permissible, lower. Actually sullies the good (?) name of Dr. Lecter from the earlier works and makes him closer still to a cartoon. Having finished this in a bit over 3 hours, there is almost nothing I can recall with the exception of the opening paragraphs. No keepers here, pop cultural or otherwise.
As another reviewer noted here, appears to have been phoned in for a paycheck- and I have some doubts that the person on the line was Mr. Harris. Read it, since you won't trust these reviews (I know I didn't), but this is not the erudite, educated and piercing Dr. Lecter you know and enjoy... this is his TV dinner equivalent.
Bon appetit.

Wow. Lot of negative reviews for this book. Now some points I will agree on with many of you....but for different reasons. I agree, most chapters were kind of choppy and not well laid out. BUT I was paying attention when I read the Prologue, and I understood that Harris was going for that intentionally as these chapters do represent the least developed rooms in Hannibal's memory palace. It does make sense.

Now as for more specific complaints that other's have touched on:

"The reasons for the cannibalism remain unclear": Folks if you really are interested in cannibalism, you will pick up and read other books on the subject. I have. The gulf between the regular joe and the serial killer is huge. Enough happens in Hannibal's developmental years to make the passage across that gulf pretty clear and comprehensive. There isn't much of a gulf between the serial killer and cannibalism. If anything, it's a natural progression. If a serial killer remains free and active long enough, cannibalism is going to be experimented with. So the cannibalism really isn't that interesting. It's a forgone conclusion.

"I wasn't convinced that those kinds of events in childhood would make someone be that way.": Well that's nice. But people making this assessment are looking at it from their point of view, which has likely always been safe, comfortable, and always well-fed. And you really should be careful about making declarative statements like that without making sure there isn't a REAL LIFE precedent. Go to Wikipedia and look up ANDREI CHIKATILO. Read about him. Look familiar? This is the real life example Harris is quite obviously using for Hannibal's childhood. The difference between the two, is that Andrei was insecure, disorganized, and inadequate. Hannibal is not.

"I wanted Hannibal to stay a mystery!": This complaint is ridiculous. Not to mention in direct opposition to other complaints. Funny that. Want Hannibal to stay mysterious? Don't read a book that describes itself as being about Hannibal's early life!

My Assessment: If you didn't like Hannibal (book 3) you aren't going to like Hannibal Rising. The chapters are patterned much like real memory. There are gaps and holes. These are easily filled by the reader's imagination. If the reader has an imagination. If you don't have one, or expect the books you read to lead you unerringly by the nose to exactly where the author wants you to wind up....you aren't going to enjoy Hannibal Rising. A big clue that most of these chapters derive from Hannibal's memory palace? Look at the descriptions of people. WOMEN are described quite well. Most of the men are not. Hannibal's father for example, seems almost overlooked, his uncle? May as well have been a cardboard cut-out. The only two types of men given slightly more attention are those respected for their minds (the childhood tutor, the medical school lecturer Hannbal works for), and those men deemed threats. And even then, the only features given description are those that obviously stand out. Women are described visually AND aromatically (occasionally texturally). The subtleties are noted. You really want to tell me such attention DOESN'T come from Hannibal's memory palace?

Overall, I liked the book well enough. Since Harris wrote the screenplay for the movie at the same time as the book, I'm going to be interested in seeing which aspects the director will give more attention to. I think the movie will be a nice companion piece to the book, as by design, the movie has to be made outside Hannibal's memory palace (as opposed to the book).

I don't think I've ever seen a book bagged as savagely on Amazon as this - so much so that, despite having pre-ordered and received my copy, I almost didn't bother to read it.

what a pleasant surprise, then to find a beautifully crafted, clever, literary novel, developing ever further one of the most complex characters of modern fiction, packed full of the same metaphor and figure as was Hannibal - a further stage in Thomas Harris' development from author of intelligent thrillers to a proper, literary, writer. Unlike most people, I liked Hannibal, but thought it was a bit baroque for its own good. With Hannibal Rising, Thomas Harris has kept the melody, but cut the ornamentation down to a plainsong.

The character Hannibal Lecter's progress from his walk-on part in Red Dragon is intriguing: Thomas Harris can scarcely have expected, let alone intended, that a character seemingly named for the sake of a cheesy rhyme would, er, consume thirty years of his professional life. In Red Dragon Hannibal Lecter was mostly a bogeyman (at that point he displayed the classic psychopathic trait of childhood cruelty to animals - which has long since been revised into an uncommon affinity for assorted birds and horses): only in the novel Hannibal did Harris really begin to extend a figure who transpired to be more supernatural than human (there are unmistakable resonances of Dracula) and not really immoral at all. Perhaps this is Harris' most shocking initiative of all: A heartless psychopath, via a preference for eating only the rude, is now given a full moral basis and, what's more, we're on his side as he wields the knife. That's a pretty subversive shift in perspective, and Harris has executed it without us even realising what he was up to. Yet people still complain.

The heart quickens briefly in the suspense, but mostly that's not what Harris is interested in, and nor can he really go to town since, by definition, we know what the outcome will be: Hannibal must survive, and given his superhuman faculties it is difficult to believe he is in any real danger throughout.

What Thomas Harris is more interested in is the figurative devices through which he explores his doppelganger and by which he binds him to the existing canon. For those who bemoaned the lack of the writer's craft in this book I can only suggest you read it again, for barely a word is wasted, and Harris' writing is as deft and lyrical here as ever I've read it. There are no accidents, and it is not one that evil is personified by the "totenkopf" (or "death's head") insignia, nor that unspeakable slaughter of innocents once again takes place in a barn, just as it did in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal (now we have a full circle: by rescuing Catherine, Starling has stopped her lambs screaming, and by avenging Mischa, Hannibal has stopped his). Every sentence is stuffed with allusions to the senses, and particularly smells, and sparks (such as those in Hannibal's maroon eyes) are a constant presence.

The best news is that - albeit another decade away, there is clearly more to come: Will Graham has been the most interesting and complicated of Lecter's antagonists, and it can be no accident that Harris has saved the most fascinating period of both of their lives - between Lecter's arrival in Baltimore and his only proper apprehension by Graham - for last. We have yet to find out what happened to Benjamin Raspail and Mason Verger, and Harris has positioned himself nicely to finish the cycle with the police procedural which most of his fans, judging by this site, seem to crave above all else.

Olly Buxton

The one strong aspect of all Harris's Hannibal Lecter series is the primal fear the reader experiences of pure evil in the form of the good doctor. Hannibal is one of the great villains in literature and when discovering that Harris was about to publish a novel about the evil man's beginnings, most devoted fans of the series waited for its release with baited breath. The one question on every fan's mind was: Will the new novel be just as good as or better than its predecessors? Well, to be totally fair...NO. Hannibal Rising pales in comparison to The Silence of the Lambs and even the much criticised, Hannibal. Why?

After reading the last page, I pondered this question and came up with a simple answer: Hannibal, in this latest instalment, is portrayed as almost an `everyman' character. Certainly, the child Hannibal, like many people at the time, during and after the second world war, experienced terrible hardship and true horror's that boggle the mind in their utter savagery. Sitting around a table with vodka fuelled Russian immigrants; the stories conveyed to me of their experiences, makes one wonder how people can be so cruel. But these men, having left war torn Eastern Europe, migrating to Australia to start a new life, having similar experiences as Dr. Lecter, did not morph into psychopathic serial killers with an acquired taste for human flesh.

To put it in a nutshell, the reason(s) offered in the novel as to how and why Hannibal turned into a cannibalizing evil genius with aristocratic taste, is simply not believable. To add insult to injury, the novel is generally a revenge tale, but unfortunately, the story does not provide enough emotion which justifies Hannibal's acts of revenge.

Granted the novel is a quick read, however, throughout my reading, I continued to ask myself, when is this story going to kick in and get scary or at least a little exciting? To my personal disappointment, the book never kicks in or becomes exciting because, all said and done; Thomas Harris has turned an intriguing character into just another run-of-the-mill serial killer. In other words, the old doctor has been stripped of his unique charm and sophisticated evil and is just another banal nut case.

To be honest, a fan of this series, I really wanted to like this book, and of course my expectations were quite high, too high. I wanted to write a noteworthy and positive, praiseworthy review on Hannibal Rising. To say the least a tad disappointed in the novel.

If you are a fan, by all means, pick up the novel and read it for yourself, and decide whether this last instalment stands up to the previous books.

Hannibal Rising, an honest 2.5 star rating.

I bought the book and read it before I saw all the negative postings here on Amazon. After reading these reviews, I have to ask: did these readers expect War and Peace? This book is a very fast and engaging read. Yes, the type is rather large and I finished it in a matter of hours, but does that make it a bad book? I found the whole set up very entertaining and believable as to how Hannibal became the monster he is in the other books. No one is truly evil from the second they are born - things happen to them, their environment shapes them, and society dictates how and why they become cold blooded killers. This is a novel about how a child's innocence is ripped from him and how he deals with those ramifications of the horror he endured as a small child. Now I want to know more... more about the transformation into the total nightmare he is in the other books!

This is the fourth book about Hannibal Lector ("Hannibal the Cannibal") and it's the best since _The Silence of the Lambs._ What it is, essentially, is the backstory to the earlier novels, describing in Harris's elegant, slightly harrowing prose the wartime experiences that made Dr. Lector, a very broadly educated near-genius, the psychopathic monster he became. His father was Count Lector, with an estate and grand house in Lithuania, his mother was a Sforza of Milan, and Mischa was the baby sister on whom he doted. Then the Blitzkrieg came, closely followed by the gangs of extremely unpleasant fascist partisans who collaborated with the nazis. And in the depths of a Lithuanian winter, what do you do when you run out of food? And you have a couple of small children handily chained up in the barn? No, it wasn't all Hannibal's fault. All in all, this is a very satisfying story of the protagonist's rise from the depths of a very personal Hell and his quest for very personal vengeance.

[I note that many of the reviewers before me have roasted both the book and the author, and I simply don't understand it. Contrary to some of the complaints, Harris never says -- or even implies -- that it was all the fascists' fault Hannibal became a psychopath. Quite the opposite: His experiences have awakened him to the person he always was. Having very much enjoyed the earlier investigations of Hannibal's psyche, I think the story of his early life helps explain his later mental state quite well.]