Meet Hannibal Lecter.... (Red Dragon - Thomas Harris)

Member Name: hugon

Product:	Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
Date:	24/08/01 (539 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well paced, Engrossing

Disadvantages: None

Red Dragon is the first Thomas Harris novel to feature Hannibal Lecter, the others being Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. This novel is widely overlooked, and it is often thought that the Silence of the Lambs is the first (I thought the same until it was pointed out to me by another dooyoo user.) book to feature Lecter. However, this is probably due to the fact that Lecter’s part in the book is quite small. This book has also been made into a film, Manhunter, which I cannot comment on as I have yet to see it.

The book centre on a killer known as “The Red Dragon”, who is preying on well to do families. The book starts not long after his second attack on a family, bringing the total number of people he has killed to ten. His attacks seems random, and the police are at a loss to what he will do next, and where he will strike, which leads them to call on Will Graham, a retired investigator who left the force some years previously after capturing the notorious Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, leaving him both scared mentally and physically. Graham is renowned for his lateral thinking, and his ability to put himself in the killer’s shoes and work out what makes him tick, and by doing so, work out how he is going to try.

Graham’s mind alone doesn’t seem to be enough to capture the Red Dragon, so in an attempt to stop him before he kills again, Graham must face his enemy Lecter and play cat and mouse in order to gain Lecter’s view of the situation, to see if he can shed any light on the case. However, the Red Dragon has also been in contact with Lecter, who has managed to give the Dragon Graham’s home address, so Graham must look behind him wherever he goes.

I’ll admit that I read the Silence of the Lambs shortly after seeing the film Hannibal in the cinema and I wasn’t overly impressed by it. I thought it went very slowly, and was overly laboured in places, which made it qui
te a dull and unsatisfying read. Red Dragon matches Silence of the Lambs for pace, but it manages to carry it off more effectively, this time instead of being boring, it builds up a sense of tension and fear instead. The writing is wonderfully descriptive – every location is precisely described to allow you to build the scene up in your own mind. The book is about 350 pages long, and divided into 54 chapters, which means some of the chapters are very short, only 2 or 2 pages long. This manages to keep your interest up, as it stops the book from getting stale and laboured – each chapter details a separate event, and the short chapters mean the events keep coming quickly. I found the start of the book to be rather slow, and I expected it to be a little dull like the Silence of The Lambs, but the pace soon gathered, as you figured out what was going on and the characters became a little more developed.

The strength of writing is shown in that he doesn’t have to describe the gore and violence of what is quite a disturbing man. Much of the action is implied rather than described, with just the bare bones statement about the action, rather than a full-blown description of what is seen. This makes the book easier to stomach if you don’t really like that sort of thing, but also keeps your mind in check while you’re reading it.

Because the book draws you in so well, and requires quite a lot of concentration on your behalf to visualise everything, it isn’t the easiest book to read at times, and does require quite a bit of concentration on your behalf in order to get the full effect of what is written. I found myself having to reread some lines a couple of times so that I fully understood and appreciate what was being written.

The chapters mostly take the viewpoint of one or other of the main characters – of Graham or of the Red Dragon, but occasionally they will take the point of one of the smaller charact
ers from the book. This enables you to get a variety of viewpoints and opinions on the events, and it is written in such a way that you get a gradual build-up of character as you progress through the book – as Graham learns more about the killer, so do you, and you begin to see what makes him tick and what he is capable of.

The book has three main characters, each one brilliantly illustrated so that you soon begin to pick up the peculiarities of each character and start to understand where they fit into the story. There Hannibal Lecter, although he isn’t really featured much in the story, he is developed quite fully into the character that we are more familiar with in the later books of the series – calm, educated and cold. You can almost feel the hairs pricking up on your neck as you read his lines, and imagine the perfect pronunciation as he questions you and tries to catch you out, you can almost feel his glare piercing through you and him examining your mind.

The Red Dragon (he has a more sensible name, but giving it away would spoil it somewhat for you) is a character quite similar to Lecter. He is revealed early in the book, but that is all part of the plot – part of the fascination is seeing how he works his thoughts and feelings into his everyday world, and how he judges those around him. He has a skewed view of the world; he sees himself as superior and doesn’t see what he is doing as wrong, just the natural thing to ease his progression from this world to the next. He’s developed nicely from the start, the information about him is gradually fed to you in small pieces, you get a sense of his history, what happened to him and the childhood he had, and why he feels the way he does, and it’s done in such a way that you can almost sympathise with him. He has the same cold, distant and methodical approach that Lecter takes, analysing everything thoroughly before he acts, planned right down to the final
letter. I felt the scenes with him to be the best, they are full of tension as he approaches his actions so slowly, getting closer and closer to his goal before carrying it out, you get a sense of what is going to happen, and I felt myself willing it not to happen.

As a lead character, I felt Graham was slightly under used. While his distance may be seen as result of his mental state after his encounter with Lecter, at times I felt it was unnecessarily so, and surprisingly I empathised more with the Red Dragon as I felt his character was described better. I also found some of the deductions he made to be a bit far fetched, I know he is supposed to be a leading investigator of such crimes, but at times he seemed to be able to make incredible steps from very small shards of evidence. The human side of Graham is shown in a very close relationship with his wife, where you can see the love and warmth of his character, but again, this was rather underused, and perhaps if this had been developed a little further, he would have been a stronger character and drawn a little more support during the book.

The plot is excellently done, not over complicated so that it becomes convoluted and difficult to understand, but not overly simple either. It is more or less a game of minds between the Red Dragon and Graham, but you find the Dragon is quite far ahead of Graham, and has many tricks up his sleeve, which keeps the plot going nicely, and turning in some unexpected directions, maintaining interest all the way through the book.

I’d definitely recommend the book, to both fans of suspense and thriller novels and other books. If you can set aside the time to get into the book, its highly enjoyable and rewarding, and nowhere near as gruesome as I was expecting. It has a slow start, but give it time, and you’ll definitely enjoy it. Aside from the slightly weak character if Graham, it has all that’s required and more – a devious and evi
l villain, a plot that keeps you in suspense to the end a decent set of supporting characters. It’s hard to put down once you start going – it has that “one more chapter” feel about it. With the Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal just released on DVD, it might be a nice idea to see the story that began Hannibal’s legacy.

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