Review: The Silence of the Lambs

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.