Lecter falling flat

Hannibal Lecter is, surely, a fictional character who needs no introduction. It’s one of the grosser stupidities of this almost limitlessly stupid novel to think that those readers who have enjoyed the grand guignol of Thomas Harris’s other Lecter novels, Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal would welcome an account, even an explanation of his hero’s habits. In theory, one ought to be curious how it is that someone ends up thinking it quite entertaining to cut slices off a human brain (for instance) and sauté them at table before sharing the dish with his girlfriend and the still living victim. In practice, one doesn’t give a toss. Lecter’s an aesthete/psychopath. Who cares how he got that way? This is rather like reading the school reports of Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Anyway, this account of Hannibal Lecter’s childhood and youth reveals him to have been seared irreparably by the experience of the second world war.