thomas harris monster maker

Thomas Harris, monster-maker

(An extended version of something I wrote for my Writer's Block column

last week in Business Standard)

"In the Green Machine there is no mercy. We make mercy, manufacture it

in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain." - Thomas

Harris, Red Dragon

Genre writers aren't usually held up to very high literary standards:

when was the last time you saw leading critics getting sullen about,

say, Stephen King or John Grisham writing their latest novel (perhaps

their second of the year) with one eye on a subsequent movie

adaptation? Which is why it's noteworthy that so many critics and fans

have protested the Hollywoodisation of Thomas Harris's Hannibal Lecter

books. [The Lecter franchise created by big studios to cash in on the

popularity of Anthony Hopkins's performance in Silence of the Lambs

reached its nadir with the bloated film version of Red Dragon, which

diluted the powerful story by reworking the script to give Lecter a

larger part. It wasn't a movie completely devoid of interest, but it

felt like such a waste given that Michael Mann had made a solid film,

Manhunter, out of that book 15 years earlier - with a great

performance by William Petersen as the haunted Will Graham. Edward

Norton seemed insipid by comparison.]

But then Thomas Harris tends to evoke strong reactions; he isn't seen

as the archetypal popular writer. Oh, he operates within the broad

format of genre fiction alright (the genre in his case being the dark

psychological thriller) - you'll find all the staples of pacy

bestseller writing, the accent on moving the story along, in his work.

But he also takes the reader to places where the usual popular novel

won't go. His attention to detail, the intensity of his narratives and

his talent for plumbing the depths of the soul [editor's note: always

wanted to use that phrase!] - these are things that skirt, dare we

suggest it, Literary territory. Consequently, while his sales don't

quite match those of the King/Grisham/Archer brigade, he has a cult

following that runs deeper, and which includes even heavyweights like

Martin Amis.

Harris was in his 30s when he began his writing career, after having

worked as a crime reporter for a few years. Black Sunday (1975), his

first novel, was a political thriller about a terrorist plot to bomb

the heavily attended Super Bowl final - possibly killing 100,000

people at one go. Michael Lander, a deranged Vietnam veteran and

dirigible expert, becomes the terrorists' instrument for "delivering

death from the sky". Instrument is apt: Lander is more machine than

man himself, past traumas having entirely cauterized his human

feelings. He is also Thomas Harris's first monster, an amoral

sociopath who would prepare the ground for more famous protagonists to

come. Black Sunday feels a little dated today, but it has many of the

concerns that would become associated with Harris's writing: notably

the theme that nature is cruel and unsparing; that primitive,

atavistic impulses are forever boiling just beneath our civilised

exteriors, and that it takes very little for them to come to the

surface.

Of course, these aren't particularly original ideas - Harris himself

often references William Blake, among other writers, who have dealt

with them before - but his treatment of them within the thriller

format is startlingly effective, and never more so than in his second

and best novel, Red Dragon (1981). This is the story of Will Graham,

an investigative agent who reluctantly comes out of retirement to help

trace a psychopath who has murdered two families. Graham has a talent

for getting into a killer's mind, thinking the way he does, and

thereby anticipating his moves. This is not, of course, an

drive is Graham's private conundrum, one that was famously voiced by

Nietzsche: "Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster." This

is set against the compelling parallel story of Francis Dolarhyde, the

"Red Dragon".

For help in capturing Dolarhyde, Graham turns to another killer he

caught years ago - and thus the Hannibal Lecter legend is born. Harris

gave Hannibal the Cannibal a leading part in his next, most famous

book, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), which became an equally popular

film. And in the florid, over the top Hannibal (1999), Harris handed

the stage almost entirely over to his gentleman monster.

Hannibal is overdone in parts, and disconcertingly different in tone

from anything Harris wrote before it, but much of the criticism it

received was misdirected. The ending, in which Clarice Starling -

epitome of youthful idealism in Silence of the Lambs - becomes the

Monster's Bride, was roundly vilified; Jodie Foster even refused to

play Starling in the movie version of Hannibal because she felt this

went against everything the character stood for. But in fact, Harris

did a fine job of establishing the circumstances that bring about the

change in Clarice's worldview between Silence of the Lambs and

Hannibal, and the change itself is consistent with something that runs

through his work: that people with the strongest commitment to

idealism are also poised most precariously at the edge of insanity.

"We don't invent our natures, Will," Lecter says to Graham in Red

Dragon, "they're issued to us along with our lungs, our pancreas and

everything else." Monsters walk amidst us, says Harris, and there can

be no explanation for why they are what they are. Much of his work is

founded on this idea, and this was partly why his fans felt so let

down by a flashback to Lecter's childhood in Hannibal, which seems to

"explain" his actions. But a closer reading of the book shows that

this isn't the case - Lecter is just as enigmatic, as unknowable, as

ever.

But whether that will remain the case in the next book seems doubtful.

Behind the Mask, about the young Lecter, is due out this year, and

predictably a film version is simultaneously underway. Harris

aficionados (I'm among them) will be hoping the author succeeds in

maintaining at least some of his integrity. Hollywood's Green Machine