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HANNIBAL
by Thomas Harris
(Delacorte, 486 pp., hc, $27.95, 1999)

Considering how long Thomas Harris and his best-known creation have impinged on the popular consciousness, it's more than a little surprising to keep in mind that Hannibal is only Harris' fourth novel. As Robert Bloch was to Norman Bates, Harris is guaranteed of being regarded first and foremost as the "father" of Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter, and given the increasingly glacial time between Harris' books - it's been eleven years since The Silence of the Lambs - it's unlikely he'll ever do anything to eclipse that distinction.

Perhaps even more eyebrow-raising than his impact are the concessions granted the author. The manuscript for Hannibal - the first of two books contracted for in a decade-old deal worth in the vicinity of ten million dollars - was turned in only in March, and fast-tracked toward blockbuster publication with a speed more often lavished on quick cash-ins on such trendy events as dead princesses and homicidal former football players. Also in Harris' contract was a provision barring Delacorte from changing a single word of his manuscript. More on that self-defeating clause in a few moments, but it's just one of several nails in the coffin of a novel that falls far short of living up to expectations. Certainly Hannibal isn't a debacle on the level of Ira Levin's stupefyingly wretched Son Of Rosemary, but in the end, this is due to not much more than the virtue of its own failed aspirations.

Hannibal picks up seven years after its predecessor left off. FBI agent Clarice Starling, who in The Silence of the Lambs interviewed the imprisoned Lecter before his escape, has since become "a rising star that stuck on the way up." Following a drug raid that turns into a bloody shootout, Starling is sacrificially scapegoated by agency brass eager to save hypocritical face after such public relations disasters as Waco and Ruby Ridge. Her travails earn her a letter of commiseration from the heretofore silent Lecter, whose potential recapture is at this point the only thing that can salvage her career.

The intervening years have been kinder to Lecter, who, with a surgically altered face, has immersed himself in high culture and scholarship in Florence, Italy. He is, however, the subject of a longstanding multimillion-dollar bounty offered by Mason Verger, a hideously disfigured survivor of Lecter's original reign of terror whose family's meat fortune (ironic touch, that) provides him unlimited funding for his vindictive scheme to capture Lecter alive and slowly feed him to a herd of specially bred swine. Lecter's time in Florence runs out after he is recognized by a chief police inspector who would rather trade cash for glory, which sets the major players on a multitude of collision courses.

All of which certainly holds potential enough, and to be fair, in no way does Harris spend the whole time falling on his round, bearded face. Plotwise, there are periodic high points of interest and inspiration, and about 380 pages in, he kicks into a 50-page sequence that's as bravura as anything he's ever done, before undoing himself with a terminal deterioration into silliness. Mason Verger is a uniquely repellent creation, and there's simply no way Hannibal Lecter can be boring. Lecter is at heart the answer to the postulate of what it might be like had Leonardo da Vinci, an across-the-board genius in each of the seven basic divisions of human intelligence, been motivated toward evil. Lecter has over the course of Harris' last three novels moved steadily closer to center stage; here we finally learn what went into his making.

And Lecter's actions, barbarous and grotesque though they may be, are informed by such a refined sense of aesthetics that Harris seems to be suggesting, by contrast, that they are driven by a purity no one else can touch. From the self-serving power plays of Washington bureaucrats and rogue law officers, to the malignant soul of Mason Verger and the squalid soap opera of his family life, all are paragons of corruption when compared to the amoral rectitude embodied by Lecter. Fresh meat, for instance, has only ever been a commodity to the greedy Vergers; Lecter, on the other hand, truly savors it. It's a intriguing distinction that could have had far greater impact in the hands of a writer exhibiting more control.

But, like his creation, it would appear that Harris' worst enemy has become his own ego. Few writers are so monumentally gifted and able to regard their work with sufficient objectivity that they can afford to dismiss the mere notion of copyediting . and by contractual disdain, no less. Thomas Harris, sad to say, isn't one of them.

It's possible my judgment has been clouded by time - after all, I read Harris' debut, Black Sunday, in my mid-teens - but I don't think so. I've always recalled his early novels as having had genuine craft to them, if not art, and written not so much with what could be called a "style" as with a transparency of prose that marked his origins as a journalist and never got in the way of the story. In trying now to develop a style of his own . well, whatever he's been up to this past decade, he hasn't been boning up on Strunk & White.

From start to finish, Hannibal's prose is marred by an awkward, inconsistent meandering between present and past tenses, often in the same paragraph and sometimes even in the same sentence. Harris also insists on numerous distracting narrative intrusions of forced omniscience: "We will go with him now." As well, there's roughly as much story here as there was in Silence, but bloated into half again as many pages, and he appears at times to be struggling to maintain his own interest. Take the character of Paul Krendler: a crooked, backstabbing Department of Justice official whose depiction as an ultrachauvanistic, sex-obsessed pig is so one-dimensional and over-the-top it lapses into parody long before the end.

And it's in the end where Harris performs the equivalent of amputating his own legs, betraying the fundamental natures of his long-established characters with a resolution so beyond belief it could succeed only as farce. Worse, it's an insult to the intelligence with which he used to credit his readers, seeming to imply that all a troubled career woman needs to give her life meaning again is the fatherly doting of a man, even if he does happen to eat human livers, and that all a psychopathic murderer needs to find redemption is to suckle at the wine-dripping nipple of a mother surrogate. That howling sound you may have noticed right about now is Sigmund Freud, laughing in his grave.

Whatever went wrong here, be it an inability by Harris to go with any of the endings that would've made logical sense, or having too many years to get good and bored with his material, can only be speculated. But it does make understandable Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme's abrupt loss of interest in helming a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, once it was known what he would have to work with.

It's an example well-followed, for the conclusion of this triptych of novels that unfortunately goes out not with a bang, but with a simper.