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| Books,
Iain Silvester,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F3
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The new best seller by American writer Thomas Harris, is a truly bizarre novel. The story starts 7 years after Silence of the Lambs with a dissollusioned Starling trying to cope with a failing career, and a still at large Dr. Lector living a scholarly life in Italy. The new villain of the piece is Mason Verger, a cycloptic multi-millionaire and ex patient of Dr L. who was convinced whilst on acid to do unspeakable, deranged acts of self-mutilation by the good doctor. Now he wants revenge by capturing H. and feeding him alive to, wait for it, man-eating pigs! . Harris' writing style is as good as ever, with his attention to the minutae and language of forensics and behavioural patterns especially convincing. The main problem I had with it was it's lack of any real morality, you realise that Harris wrote it so you would be rooting for his now iconic anti-hero, who was when I last checked, a multiple murderer and lest we not forget a cannibal. How convenient his predilection rhymes with his name! I did have a hard time dealing with all the allusions to the inate evil in Lector, with many characters in the book describing him as The Devil Himself as if this would give the book some Milton style weight to hide the mass market, airport lounge fodder it really is. This is not to say this a bad book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as it became more and more ridiculous. Yet Harris seems fully aware of the ridiculousness of the story and knows that whatever he wrote to follow Silence of the Lambs would garner huge interest, so maybe he just didnt try that hard.
Heinemann
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