The horror, the horror
Charles Mitchell
THE STRANGE WORLD OF THOMAS HARRIS by David Sexton Short Books, £4.99, pp. 128, ISBN 0571208452 Through condescension or unfamiliarity with the field highbrow critics are as apt to overpraise as to underrate the genre literature that comes their way. This debases the critical currency and has a bad effect on the writers in question if they take it too seriously — one thinks of John Le Cane and P. D. James (although thankfully she has now returned to form in her excellent
Death in Holy Orders). The wiser move for them is to plough on regardless, in the manner of the late Patrick O'Brian, for example, whose works are great indeed, but not to the standard of the Iliad or Jane Austen as some have incautiously pronounced.
There is some of this over-egging in David Sexton's The Strange World of Thomas Hams, Harris is the author of two very good books (Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs) and a bad one (Hannibal), featuring Dr Hannibal Lecter, a psychopathic psychoanalyst who becomes increasingly central as the series unfolds. These books have been filmed: The Silence of the Lambs was a great popular thriller: Manhunter, from Red Dragon, was a meaner, leaner, darker film that is better than many people think; Hannibal, again, was a clunker. The books are bestsellers, the films have made piles of gold, and Harris has achieved this satisfactory state of affairs without giving iiiterviews, which bespeaks some intelligence on his part, at least in the matter of self-preservation: a battery of publishers and studio publicists can presumably take the credit for pushing the product.
Sexton is a Harris fan, and he has written a longish feature piece on the man and his works. It's an easy and amusing read, cheerfully heartless, and written with Sexton's customary fluency, but on the short side for a book (I know the publisher is called Short Books, but even so, it can't have taken him longer than a week or two to churn this out). Other Harris fans are his only likely readers, but as these number several million that shouldn't worry Sexton greatly. Is there some hypocrisy in his taking FBI profilers Robert Ressler and John Douglas to task for selling their memoirs on the back of Harris's success?
Sexton is up against it when he tries to give us Harris the man. He talks a big game — quotes Douglas ('If you want to understand the artist, look at his work'), tells us that 'we have some facts and can make some inferences' — but in the end all we get is some background material of a not very interesting kind cobbled together with the help of his Internet browser, and the apergu that Harris is an affable but private sort of chap with a liking for books and a nasty imagination. One imagines that Douglas would not find this a particularly insightful piece of psychological profiling.
On the work, Sexton is more interesting, but he sells Harris too hard, and he lards his commentary with some highfalutin references to Baudelaire. At its best Harris's prose is intelligent and punchy. as Sexton says, but at its worst it is overblown and portentous. His two best hooks are police procedurals whose success is grounded in the balance he strikes between intricate and compelling descriptions of forensic scientific investigation and the sinister sicko inner lives of two serial killers, Dolahyde and Gumb. In his latest, weaker book, he loses this balance by giving us too little detection and too much Lecter. We are told by Harris ad nauseam that Lecter is a criminal genius, but we are not shown enough of Lecter masterminding his way through life to make us believe this. Even in The Silence of the Lambs, where Lecter is built up as the Evil Brain who can intuit the identity of a mass murderer from the confines of a prison cell, it turns out that he never needs to think about this very hard, since he knows who the killer is all along. Lecter has a good line in put-downs, but the rest is pretension and nastiness, and in seizing on the nastiness as Lecter's most winning feature Sexton leaves me behind. I expect he likes to watch slasher flicks, too, but he won't be seeing me in the foyer.
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