HARRIS, Thomas, The Silence of the Lambs, Guild
Publishing Ltd./William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1989.
Octavo;
hardcover, with silver-gilt spine titles; 295pp. Moderate wear; rolled; text
block and page edges toned. Dustwrapper well-rubbed. Good.
As
I’ve mentioned before, I’m no fan of the ‘serial-killer chic’ that
preponderated during the 80s and 90s. Having been raised on a steady diet of
Agatha Christie, I expect my fictional murderers to be a coherent and
well-reasoned bunch, with clearly stated motives; psycho killers fly right in
the face of all that (they’re mad, don’t you know?). This trend set Patricia
Cornwall and her ilk onto a money-spinning path and made every televisual FBI
agent a profiling savant and
world-class plumber of the depths of the human psyche. In short, every facet of
serial-killing mayhem became a well-worn trope which, in time, as these things
do, began to voraciously feed off itself, as various writers started to pull at
the fabric of the notion and break it down into different shades and nuances.
It was a literary and filmic Heraclitan fire that eventually reached its point
of zero entropy.
Interestingly,
as I’ve also said before, the notion was not entirely new. Robert Bloch and
Alfred Hitchcock set up the trend with Psycho,
written in 1959 and filmed in 1960. Back then, FBI agents were simply the
drone-like servants of a faceless government agency - constantly eschewing
personal glory for the collective good of the whole - while private eyes and
detectives were the Cool Kids. It would take another almost thirty years before
the likes of Kay Scarpetta and Fox Mulder would show up to tread the boards.
I’ve
read Patricia Cornwall’s books. Well, I’ve read most of them: there was a point where I realised that life is too
short. That point was where Scarpetta’s nemesis was revealed to have been
subtly influencing other serial-killers, without their awareness of him doing
it, and sending them after Scarpetta, her partners and her offspring. Given the
“long game” orchestrations necessary for establishing these plans, it became
increasingly obvious that Scarpetta’s frenemy was not only psychic (as well as
psycho) but also able to travel through time. At that point I gave up. It’s
interesting to note that James Herbert did the same thing with his series of
ghost novels with Ash the psychic investigator as their main protagonist – the
ghosts were mainly haunting other
phantoms, not the people living in the houses they occupied. Tropes feeding off
themselves…
In
the history of the Academy Awards and
the ranking of cinema by vestedly interested parties, only five horror films
have won Oscars: “The Exorcist” (1973),
“Jaws” (1975), “The Sixth Sense” (1999), “Black
Swan” (2010) and “Silence of the Lambs”
(1991), which, incidentally, is one of only three films to make a clean sweep
of the awards in its year. I was already heartily sick of serial-killers by the
time the movie came out, so it was some time before I saw the film. When I did
finally see it, I thought it was okay, although I kind of felt that Jodie
Foster’s Clarice Starling came off as a sort of cut-rate Dana Scully –
obviously, I was watching quite a bit of “X-Files”
by this point. There was just one question that I came away with – what was all
the guff about lambs being quiet? I didn’t catch any particular reference to it
in the film - and that may well give some indication of my level of
concentration during the process – but it’s the sole enigma that I took away
from the movie. Accordingly, I snaffled a copy of the book when it showed up at
work and decided to give it a whirl: perhaps the literary source of the tale
would be a little more forthcoming.
Upon
diving into this book, one thing became immediately obvious: Thomas Harris
doesn’t waste any words. There are certain writers who are florid in their
style and others whose writing can only be considered spare; Harris’s style is
almost as spare as a haiku. In this
work, paragraphs feel baggy and overstretched if they run to more than two
sentences. Having just waded through Toni Morrison’s Beloved (more later), I felt as if I’d just stepped out of the
Amazon Basin and into the Gobi Desert. This writing is lean. If a single sentence isn’t doing the work of three, then it’s
wasted space. It’s certainly refreshing. Stephen King has said that writing is
tough for most writers but a torment for Thomas Harris, and this level of
craftsmanship is clearly self-evident. It’s like Gustave Flaubert taking a
single day to polish one sentence of Madame
Bovary.
This
level of focus pays off well with the characters which populate the novel. It’s
often been said that living with a psychologist must be an exercise in second-
and third-guessing, and of reigning-in every word or gesture for fear of it
being extensively over-analysed; I’m guessing that working in the real-life FBI
Behavioural Science Department must be like that, but dialled way up high.
Procedure and regulations dominate the activity of Harris’s Federal Department,
and everybody cites rules and guidelines as they sift the evidence mounting up
around them. This sometimes makes them feel a bit like robots, but does the
double-duty of revealing those procedural aspects of the FBI to the uninitiated
reader. Nowadays, we’re all hip to the way the Feds work, but back in 1988,
this would have been a handy primer.
The
writing serves to do many things in this book; however it does make the
characters seem, on the one hand, paranoid and emotionally stunted and, on the
other, bland and characterless. This is really its only drawback. By the time
we get to the works of Kathy Reichs, many aspects of forensic law-enforcement
have become commonplace truisms; when this book was being penned, Harris was
held back by the double-task of not only writing a thriller, but of educating
newbs about how the FBI gets its work done.
The
other thing that the writing is doing though, is sketching the various locales
where the investigation takes place. Harris outlines struggle-town Middle
America with the deftest, lightest of touches, creating subtle – tiny - word pictures that conjure up
entire vistas in no space at all. Abandoned white goods at a river’s edge;
creepy rose-patterned wallpaper in a funeral home; the smell of a government
vehicle’s interior – all are conveyed with a beautiful impact. Conversely, it’s
what Harris chooses not to depict
that lets him down: for example, there are many hints of things going on in
Buffalo Bill’s basement but Harris chooses to write around them rather than about
them. We are told of “tableaux” in certain rooms, but not of what (although
really, we do know); there is a hand
protruding from a bathtub full of solid plaster, but it’s almost a throwaway
reference. Harris uses a switch from precision to casual as a way of suggesting
the horrors abounding throughout the book and often this method seems coy rather
than an unwillingness to fling open the doors of the grand guignol.
That
being said, the scenes where Clarice Starling confronts Hannibal Lecter
springboard exactly from this technique and are peerless in doing so. The
moments where Lecter appears in the book dial the creepy factor up immensely.
Despite being behind bars and nets, strapped to trolleys, in strait-jackets and
hockey masks, we always feel that Lecter is only a tiny lapse of attention away
from some hideous act of mayhem. We feel Starling’s tension every second that
she’s in his company and our attention also becomes instantly laser-focussed.
Harris’s precision-slash-obfuscation technique translates to the dialogue
masterfully: each word is laden with hidden or extra meaning; what is not being
said is almost more important that what is. Here, the coyness is part of
Lecter’s character, and it works terrifically.
Lecter,
predictably, is the gun-character of the book. His malevolence is right beside
us every step of the way and we feel Starling’s torn emotions about whether to
leave him to rot behind bars, or to use him as a resource. Remember those
diagrams that show the gravimetric effects of planets on a grid of outer space?
Lecter is like a black hole which funnels the gridlines of the narrative down
in his wake. Reading the book for the first time, I was impressed by how well
Sir Anthony Hopkins was able to capture the subtleties of the character in the
movie. I think the only thing he missed was the six fingers on one hand (and
maybe he did even that – I’ll have to check again).
Conversely,
Clarice Starling seemed a little too much of the Everyman for my taste (and I’m
using that term specifically). There were moments where her learned experience
lent benefits to the investigation but there were others where her unique
personality seemed to be of little consequence. To clarify: there is very
little personality involved at all in this character. She bounces off the other
players in the story, her observations rounding out their personae while saying nothing about her own. With her superior
officers she plays the Good Soldier and bounces regulations and procedure
around the court; with other characters she rationalises their behaviour with
internal monologues laced with psycho-babble. There is a museum scientist – the
guy who tells her about Death’s Head moths – who develops a crush on her (or maybe
he just wants to make a cocoon out of her skin? It’s hard to tell) and we have
no idea from Starling whether she realises this, or if it is at all
reciprocated. In short, Clarice Starling is a very loosely-sketched concept,
and anything which individualises her is more or less beside the point. It kind
of harks back to the days of Robert Bloch, when FBI agents were the faceless automata of the Government.
Is
this deliberate on Harris’s part? It’s unclear, and also uncertain as to
whether it’s an exercise that has any point. Maybe he’s underscoring notions of
gender equality in the FBI; maybe not. The choice to make Starling female is
deliberately contrived to make her seem more vulnerable when she finally takes
on Buffalo Bill in his basement of horrors, but it has very little impact on
the story otherwise. The same rationale, incidentally, is the reason that
Cornwell’s main character is a woman and also Kathy Reichs’s – we are
programmed to feel more uneasy when a woman falls into danger than when a man
does, as every slasher-flick ever made is a testament to.
In
the final analysis, this is a great read - especially if you like masterful
writing - only let down a little by its clunky characterisation in some
instances. I did finally get to find out what the hoo-ha about the quiet lambs
was all about, so I can put that to rest, and I’m interested in seeing the film
once more to compare and contrast while it’s still fresh. Hannibal Lecter
stands out as the sine qua non of
serial killers and all the literary ones who followed in his wake are anaemic
shadows to be ignored – or not – as your tastes dictate.
Three-and-a-half
Tentacled Horrors from me, with a nice Chianti and a side of fava beans.
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