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Sorry I’ve been away, not had much time for reading lately; but you’ll be pleased to hear I finally, finally got around to reading Hannibal.

I knew a lot about the weirdness in Hannibal ahead of time, but was not prepared for how gibberingly insane it got. If you’ve only seen the movie adaptation, you don’t know the half of it.

Several years after catching Buffalo Bill, Clarice Starling is not as successful in the FBI as she should be. When she kills a drug dealer in self defence only to discover the latter was carrying her young child with her at the time, her career ends up in the toilet.

Hannibal Lecter responds to this new persecution in the press by sending Starling a letter. Lecter’s only surviving victim, a (literally) faceless, crippled paedophile millionaire called Mason Verger, catches wind of this and restarts his vengeful manhunt.

Thomas Harris is remarkably gifted at making the vulgar and violent appear truly beautiful, and this is never more apparent than in Hannibal.

Harris dips in and out of past and present tense, finds verbs in sentences to be optional and occasionally will almost break the fourth wall as watching the story unfold from ten feet away. Whatever happen in the book, however outlandish or mundane, presented to us via the medium of Harris’ writing it is still to some extent engrossing.

Once Starling’s predicament is established, the story grinds to a halt in Florence, where Lecter is livin’ it up under a false name after some plastic surgery. For dozens of snore-inducing pages we follow disgraced Italian cop Rinaldo Pazzi trying to identify and then catch Lecter.

Considering Hannibal is 200 pages longer than its older brothers, much less happens. Somehow there is room for a flat-out hilarious description of a palace inside Lecter’s imagination that he would visit while incarcerated. This is a literal palace in his mind, architecture and decor included, that is described page by page. It’s… dumb.

Be warned, I’m now going to address the last 100 pages of the book, and it’s going to get very spoiler-y, very graphic and very strange.

One character excised from the film is Margot Verger, Mason’s lesbian bodybuilder sister and rape victim (yay!).

Sterile due to steroids, she sticks with Mason so she can get a sample of his sperm, impregnate her girlfriend with it and inherit the Verger fortune. Her story  culminates in her forcing him to ejaculate by sodomising him with a cattle prod and then choking him to death with his pet eel.

Clarice runs away with Hannibal. Then Lecter digs up her father’s bones(!) and shows them to her, and they become lovers.

Lecter then kidnaps Krendler, a higher-up in the FBI who’s had it in for Starling. They have a dinner together, with Lecter and Clarice eating pieces of Krendler’s still living brain.

And then Clarice breastfeeds Lecter.

Yep.

Clarice.

Breastfeeds.

HANNIBAL LECTER.

Would you believe that despite all of this, I quite enjoyed it?

As I said before, Harris’s prose saves the book’s bacon repeatedly even during story sags. It’s nowhere near as good as the prior two books, but it’s a unique read and gives story resolution (however unsatisfactory) to a number of characters introduced almost two decades earlier.

Overall, I can just about recommend Hannibal on the basis that you’ll never read anything else like it.

But then, I’m not sure you’d want to.