Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris.
Title: Hannibal Rising.
Author: Thomas Harris.
Genre: Fiction, horror, thriller, WWII, cannibalism.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2006.
Summary: Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck. He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him, in his head, locked in his memories. Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki. Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him. His little sister, Mischa, and the men who killed her become clearer and clearer in his mind. When he is old enough, he visits his demons in turn, armed with vengeance.
My rating: 6.5/10.
My review:
♥ The door to Dr. Hannibal Lecter's memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit spaces, early baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of the Topkapi Museum.
Everywhere there are exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression.
Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter's earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted Attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.
The palace is a construction begun early in Hannibal's student life. In his years of confinement he improved and enlarged his palace, and its riches sustained him for long periods while warders denied him his books.
Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the latch. Finding it, let us elect for music in the corridors and, looking neither left nor right, go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most fragmentary.
We will add to them what we have learned elsewhere, in war records and police records, from interviews and forensics and the mute postures of the dead. Robert Lecter's letters, recently unearthed, may help us establish the vital statistics of Hannibal, who altered dates freely to confound the authorities and his chroniclers. By our efforts we may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world.
♥ He watched the German bombers pass over high. Their vapor trails made a musical staff and Hannibal hummed to his sister the notes the black puffs of flak made in the sky. It was not a satisfying tune.
♥ Still visible in the foundations of the lodge are the stones of an altar built in the Dark Ages, by a people who venerated the grass snake.
Now Hannibal watched a grass snake flee that ancient place as Lothar cut back some vines so Nanny could open windows.
♥ Dusk and firelight glowing on the painted timbers of the hunting lodge, shining in the dusty eyes of trophy animals as the family gathered around the fireplace. The animal heads were old, patted bald years ago by generations of children reaching through the banister of the upper landing.
♥ His mate swooped down beside him, poked him with her beak, waddled around him with urgent honks.
He did not move. A shellburst in the field, and Russian infantry were visible moving in the trees at the edge of the meadow. A German Panzer tank jumped a ditch and came across the meadow, firing its coaxial machine gun into the trees, coming, coming. The swan spread her wings and stood her ground over her mate even though the tank was wider than her wings, its engine loud as her wild heart. The swan stood over her mate hissing, hitting the tank with hard lows of her wings at the last, and the tank rolled over them, oblivious, in its whirring treads a mush of flesh and feathers.
♥ "Do you wonder if I am worth your time?"
"Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him."
♥ Hannibal was interested to see how Mr. Jakov got along with the houseman, Lothar, and Berndt the hostler. They were bluff men and shrewd enough, good at their jobs. But theirs was a different order of mind. Hannibal saw that Mr. Jakov made no effort to hide his mind, or to show it off, but he never pointed it directly at anyone. In his free tim3, he was teaching them how to survey with a makeshift transit.
♥ When the Eastern Front collapsed, the Russian Army rolled like lava across Eastern Europe, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ashes, peopled by the starving and the dead.
From the east and from the south the Russians came, up toward the Baltic Sea from the 3rd and 2nd Belorussian Fronts, driving ahead of them broken and retreating units of the Waffen-SS, desperate to reach the coast where they hoped to be evacuated by boat to Denmark.
It was the end of the Hiwis' ambitions. After they had faithfully killed and pillaged for their Nazi masters, shot Jews and Gypsies, none of them got to be SS. They were called Osttruppen, and were barely considered as soldiers. Thousands were put in slave labor battalions and worked to death.
But a few deserted and went into business for themselves...
♥ Headmaster was capricious. He could be kind, or cruel when his failures goaded him.
♥ It was here, in this room, that he had last seen Cook, and for a moment Cook's great round face appeared to him in vital clarity, without the scrim time gives our images of the dead.
♥ One large gilt picture frame remained, threads of canvas sticking out of it where the painting had been cut out of the frame. It had been the largest picture in the house, a romanticized view of the Battle of Žalgiris emphasizing the achievements of Hannibal the Grim.
Hannibal Lecter, last of his line, stood in the looted castle of his childhood looking into the empty picture frame in the knowledge that he was of his line and not of his line. His memories were of his mother, a Sforza, and of Cook and Mr. Jakov from a tradition other than his own. He could see them in the empty frame, gathered before the fire at the lodge.
He was not Hannibal the Grim in any way he understood. He would conduct his life beneath the painted ceiling of his childhood. But it was as thin as Heaven, and nearly as useless. So he believed.
They were all gone, the paintings with faces that were as familiar to him as his family.
♥ The youngest end of the dormitory had the brooder-house smell of a kindergarten. The youngest hugged themselves in sleep and some called out to their remembered dead, seeing in the dreamed faces a concern and tenderness they would not find again.
Further along some older boys masturbated under their covers.
♥ Lady Murasaki opened the casement. The evening light touched her face and Hannibal, out of the wastes of nightmare, took his first step on the bridge of dreams...
♥ Lady Murasaki was in the water. In the water was Lady Murasaki, like the water flowers on the moat where the swans swam and did not sing. Hannibal watched, silent as the swans, and spread his arms like wings.
♥ She came closer, the candle lamp in her hand. "Hannibal, you can leave the land of nightmare. You can be anything that you can imagine. Come onto the bridge of dreams. Will you come with me?"
She was very different form his mother. She was not his mother, but he felt her in his chest. His intense regard may have unsettled her; she chose to break the mood.
"The bridge of dreams leads everywhere, but first it passes through the doctor's office, and the schoolroom," she said. "Will you come?"
Hannibal followed her, but first he took the bloodstained peony, lost among the flowers, and placed it on the dais before the armor.
♥ He stood before the draped easel and raised the cloth. The count was painting Lady Murasaki nude on the chaise. The picture came into Hannibal's wide eyes, points of light danced in his pupils, fireflies glowed in his night.
♥ Hannibal's voice was rusty with disuse, but the butcher understood him. He said "Beast" very calmly. It sounded like taxonomy rather than insult.
♥ "Stand in there."
Hannibal stood in the middle of the cell. The commandant shut the cell door with a clang that made the drunk stir and mutter.
"Look at the floor. Do you see how the boards are stained and shrunken? They are pickled with tears. Try the door. Do it. You see it will not open from that side. Temper is a useful but dangerous gift. Use judgment and you will never occupy a cell like this. I never give but one pass. This is yours. But don't do it again. Flog no one else with meat."
♥ "Regard, Hannibal," the chef said. "The best morsels of the first are the cheeks. This is true of many creatures. When carving at the table, you give one cheek to Madame, and the other to the guest of honor. Of course, if you are plating in the kitchen you eat them both yourself."
♥ "You dud not need to do this for me."
"I did it for myself, because of the worth of your person, Lady Murasaki. No onus on you at all. I think Masamunedono permitted the use of his sword. It's an amazing instrument, really."
Hannibal returned the short sword to its sheath and with a respectful gesture to the armor, replaced it on its stand.
♥ Lady Murasaki let Inspector Popil wait through one hundred beats of her heart before she appeared on the staircase. He stood in the center of the high-ceilinged foyer with his assistant and looked up at her on the landing. She saw him alert and still, like a handsome spider standing before the webbed mullions of the windows, and beyond the windows she saw endless night.
♥ "Did you kill the butcher?"
"Paul Momund killed himself. He died of stupidity and rudeness."
Inspector Popil had considerable experience and knowledge of the awful, and this was the voice Popil had been listening for; it had a faintly different timbre and was surprising coming from the body of a boy.
This specific wavelength he had not heard before, but he recognized it as Other. It had been some time since he felt the thrill of the hunt, the prehensile quality of the opposing brain. He felt it in his scalp and forearms. He lived for it.
♥ In front of the post office was a post box on a pole. The dog strained toward it against the leash and raised his leg.
Seeing a face above the mailbox, Rubin said, "Good evening, Monsieur," and to the dog. "Attend you do not befoul Monsieur!" The dog whined and Rubin noticed there were no legs beneath the mailbox on the other side.
♥ "You know my hand is always on your heart." And she put it there.
On his heart. The hand that held Popil's hat was on his heart. The hand that held the knife to Momund's brother's throat. The hand that gripped the butcher's hair and dropped his head into a bag and set it on the mailbox. His heart beat against her palm. Fathomless her face.
♥ He stopped in front of a tapestry called "The Sacrifice of Isaac" and looked at it for a long time. "Our upstairs corridors were hung with tapestries," he said. "I could just stand on my tiptoes and reach the bottom edges." He turned up the corner of the fabric and looked at the back. "I've always preferred this side of a tapestry. The threads and strings that make the picture."
"Like tangled thoughts," Lady Murasaki said.
He dropped the corner of the tapestry and Abraham quivered, holding his son's throat taut, the angel extending a hand to stop the knife.
"Do you think God intended to eat Isaac, and that's why he told Abraham to kill him?" Hannibal said.
"No, Hannibal. Of course not. The angel intervenes in time."
"Not always," Hannibal said.
♥ ..and the Trebelaux stared sightless from his barrel on the bottom of the Marne, no longer bald, hirsute now with green hair algae and eel-grass that wave in the current like the locks of his youth.
♥ He is growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been.
♥ "He knows you are first in the class," she said. "He's proud of that. His interest is largely benign."
"Largely benign is not a happy diagnosis."
♥ "Are you sleeping, Hannibal?"
"When there's time. I take a nap on a gurney when I can't sleep in my room."
"You know what I mean."
"Do I dream? Yes. Do you not revisit Hiroshima in your dreams?"
"I don't invite my dreams."
"I need to remember, any way I can."
♥ She has put on irritation like a winter kimono. Seeing that, can I use it to keep from thinking about her in the bath at the chateau so long ago, herfaceandbreastslikewaterflowers? Like the pink and cream lilies on the moat? Can I? I can not.
♥ The candlelight played on St. Joan and gave random expressions to her face like chance tunes in a wind chime. Memory, memory. Hannibal wondered if St. Joan, with her memories, might prefer a votive other than fire. He knew his mother would.
♥ He rested his gloved hand lightly on the brain. Obsessed with memory,and the blank places in his own mind, he wished that by touch he could read a dead man's dreams, that by force of will he could explore his own.
♥ The pounding of the executioner's mallet registered as a twitch in the corner of Louis Ferrat's eye as he sat on his bunk, his hand on the sleeve of his companion, the clothes. Hannibal saw him imagining the assembly in his mind, the uprights lifted into place, the blade with its edge protected by a slit piece of garden hose, beneath it the receptacle.
With a start, seeing it in his mind, Hannibal realized what the receptacle was. It was a baby's bathtub. Like a falling blade Hannibal's mind cut off the thought and, in the silence after, Louis' anguish was as familiar to him as the veins in the man's face, as the arteries in his own.
♥ Hannibal looked at Louis Ferrat, reading his face as intently as he had studied his neck, smelling the fear on him, and said, "Louis, something for your client to consider. All the wars, all the suffering and pain that happened in the centuries before his birth, before his life, how much did all that bother him?"
"Not at all."
"Then why should anything after his life bother him? It is untroubled sleep. The difference is he will not wake to this."
♥ "You attended the execution?"
"Yes."
"Why, Inspector?"
"I arrested him. If I brought him to that place, I attend."
"A matter of conscience, Inspector?"
"The death is a consequence of what I do. I believe in consequences."
♥ "Louis, you must remember. Klaus Barbie shipped the children to Auschwitz. Who told him where the children were hidden? Did you tell him?"
Louis' face was grey. "The Gestapo caught me forging ration cards," he said. "When they broke my fingers, I gave them Pardou-Pardou knew where the orphans were hidden. He got so much a head for them and kept his fingers. He's mayor of Trent-la-Forêt now. I saw it, but I didn't help. They looked out of the back of the truck at me."
"Pardou." Popil nodded. "Thank you, Louis."
Popil started to turn from him when Louis said, "Inspector?"
"Yes, Louis?"
"When the Nazis threw the children into the trucks, where were the police?"
Popil closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded to a guard, who opened the door into the guillotine room.
♥ Just before nightfall Hannibal approached Lecter Castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; it is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.
♥ At the edge of the woods a big tree had been felled across the trail, and a sign said in Russian DANGER, UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE.
Hannibal had to lead the horse around the fallen tree and into the forest of his childhood.
♥ Hannibal looked at the lodge and the lodge looked back. All the glass was blown out. The dark windows watched him like the sockets of the gibbon skull. Its slopes and angles changed by the collapse, its apparent height changed by the high growth around it, the hunting lodge of his childhood became the dark sheds of his dreams. Approaching now across the overgrown garden.
There his mother lay, her dress on fire, and later in the snow he put his head on her chest and her bosom was frozen hard. There was Berndt, and there Mr. Jakov's brains frozen on the snow among the scattered pages. His father facedown near the steps, dead of his own decisions.
There was nothing on the ground anymore.
♥ He stood at the head of the grave. At the sound of Hannibal's voice, Cesar raised his head from cropping.
"Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in a Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day."
♥ She went to him and put her ear against his chest. "You smell of smoke and blood."
"You smell of jasmine and green tea. You smell of peace."
♥ Hannibal rested his forehead against the cage. The little birds turned their heads to look at him using one eye at a time. Their songs were the Baltic dialect he heard in the woods at home. "They're just like us," he said. "They can smell the others cooking, and still they try to sing."
♥ "It's Kolnas' children, isn't it? You fold cranes for the children."
"I fold cranes for your soul, Hannibal. You are drawn into the dark."
"Not drawn. When I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me."
"Out of silence you came to me, and you spoke to me. I know you, Hannibal, and it is not easy knowledge. You are drawn toward the darkness, but you are also drawn to me."
"On the bridge of dreams."
The lute made a little noise as she put it down. She extended her hand to him. He got to his feet, the cherry trailing across his cheek, and she led him toward the bath. The water was steaming. Candles burned beside the water. She invited him to sit on a tatami. They were facing knee to knee, their faces a foot apart.
"Hannibal, come home with me to Japan. You could practice at a clinic in my father's country house. There is much to do. We would be there together." She leaned close to him. She kissed his forehead. "In Hiroshima green plants push up through ashes to the light." She touched his face. "If you are scorched earth, I will be warm rain."
Lady Murasaki took an orange from a bowl beside the bath. She cut into it with her fingernails and pressed her fragrant hand to Hannibal's lips.
"One real touch is better than the bridge of dreams." She snuffed the candle beside them with a sake cup, leaving the cup inverted on the candle, her hand on the candle longer than it had to be.
She pushed the orange with her finger and it rolled along the tiles into the bath. She put her hand behind Hannibal's head and kissed him on the mouth, a blossoming bud of a kiss, fast opening.
Her forehead pressed against his mouth, she unbuttoned his shirt. He held her at arm's length and looked into her lovely face, her shining. They were close and they were far, like a lamp between two mirrors.
Her robe fell away. Eyes, breasts, points of light at her hips, symmetry on symmetry, his breath growing short.
"Hannibal, promise me."
He pulled her to him very tight, hi eyes squeezed tight shut. Her lips, her breath on his neck, the hollow of his throat, his collarbone. His clavicle. St. Michael's scales.
He could see the orange bobbing in the bath. For an instant it was the skull of the little deer in the boiling tub, butting, butting in the knocking of his heart, as though in death it were still desperate to get out. The damned in chains beneath his chest marched off across his diaphragm to hell beneath the scales. Sternohyoid omohyoid thyrohyoid/juuuguular, ahhhhhmen.
Now was the time and she knew it. "Hannibal, promise me."
A beat, and he said, "I already promised Mischa."
She sat still beside the bath until she heard the front door close. She put on her robe and carefully tied the belt. She took the candles from the bath and put them before the photographs on her altar. They glowed on the faces of the present dead, and on the watching armor, and in the mask of Date Masamune she saw the dead to come.
♥ Milko made the slightest adjustment of the heart that we make before we kill.
♥ Bees were loud in the orchard and several buzzed around his figs until he covered them with his handkerchief. García Lorca, now enjoying a revival in Paris, said the heart was an orchard. Hannibal was thinking about the figure and thinking, as young men do, about the shapes of peaches and pears..
♥ "Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis."
♥ His note to Lady Murasaki asked if he might visit. He found a branch of wisteria to go with it, suitably withered in abject apology. Her note of invitation was accompanied by two sprigs, watermelon crepe myrtle and a spring of pine with a tiny cone. Pine is not sent lightly. Thrilled and boundless, the possibilities of pine.
♥ "I don't want a conviction, I want him declared insane. In an asylum they can study him and try to find out what he is."
"What do you think he is?"
"The little boy Hannibal died in 1945 out there in the snow trying to save his sister. His heart died with Mischa. What is he now? There's not a word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we'll call him a monster."
♥ "I am Kleber, citizen of France, and I am calling the police."
"Let me call them for you." Hannibal put down his glass and picked up the telephone. "Do you mind if I call the War Crimes Commission at the same time? I'll pay for the call."
"Fuck you. Call who you please. You can call them, I'm serious. Or I'll do it. I have papers, I have friends."
"I have children. Yours."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"I have both of them. I went to your home in the Rue Juliana. I went into the room with the big stuffed elephant and I took them."
"You're lying."
"'Take her, she's going to die anyway,' that's what you said. Remember? Tagging along behind Grutas with your bowl.
"I brought something for your oven." Hannibal reached behind him and threw onto the table his bloody bag. "We can cook together, like old times." He dropped Mischa's bracelet onto the kitchen table. It rolled around and around before it settled to a stop.
Kolnas made a gagging sound. For a moment he could not touch the bag with his trembling hands and then he tore at it, tore at the bloody butcher paper inside, tore down to meat and bones.
"It's a beef roast, Herr Kolnas, and a melon. I got them at Les Halles. But do you see how it feels?"
♥ Waiting as the canal boat came, slowly slowly. Time to think. Part of what he did at Kolnas' café was unpleasant to remember: It was difficult to spare Kolnas' life even for that short time, and distasteful to allow him to speak. Good, the crunch he felt in his hand when the tanto blade broke out the top of Kolnas' skull like a little horn. More satisfying than Milko. Good things to enjoy: the Pythagorean proof with tiles, tearing off Dortlich's head. Much to look forward to: He would invite Lady Murasaki for the jugged hare at Restaurant Champs de Mars. Hannibal was calm. His pulse was 72.
♥ "I love you, Lady Murasaki," he said. He went to her.
She opened her eyes and held his bloody hands away.
"What is left in you to love?" she said and ran from the cabin, up the companionway and over the rail in a clean dive into the canal.
♥ Women pick up surveillance faster than men do, as part of their survival skills, and they at once recognize desire. They also recognize its absence. She felt the change in him. Something was missing behind his eyes.
♥ Rufin took Lady Murasaki's hands.
"You told me he might freeze inside forever," she said.
"Do you feel it?" Rufin said.
"I love him and I cannot find him," Lady Murasaki said. "Can you?"
"I never could," Rufin said.
♥ He dined alone and he was not lonely.
Hannibal had entered his heart's long winter. He slept soundly, and was not visited in dreams as humans are.
♥ He was a maverick middle son, and his enthusiasm for the October Revolution estranged him from his family, and took him to Russia. The son of shipbuilders spent his life as an ordinary seaman. Ironic, agreed the two old relatives riding behind the hearse through the falling snow in the late afternoon.
♥ He was not torn with anger at Grentz. He was not torn at all by anger anymore, or tortured by dreams. This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing.
♥ America fascinated him. Such abundant heat and electricity. Such odd, wide cars. American faces, open but not innocent, readable. In time he would use his access as a patron of the arts to stand backstage and look out at audiences, their rapt faces glowing in the stage lights, and read and read and read.