Not wargame related but I recently finished reading Hannibal Rising and though I'd post some comments about it.
Be warned, I fully discuss the book so if you haven't read it then feel free to skip this post.
The Wikipedia link above has a succinct description of the plot of the book. Suffice it to say that the book serves as a way for Harris to explore and ultimately rationalise the behaviour or his iconic character Hannibal Lector. Lector, we are told, develops into a monster in reaction to the murder and cannibalisation of his younger sister during WWII. Hannibal and his sister are the sole remaining members of his family left after a Stuka bomber and a T-34 explode outside the family hunting lodge killing everyone except the two children.
They are found by a roving band of German Freiwillig volunteers that are now marauding around the country-side eating everything and one they find.
At one point Harris infers that Lector may have participated in the eating of his sister and that it is his attempt to cover-up this memory that leads him to track down and kill the men who ate her. Sadly this is not pursued and we are left with a rather hollow story that seeks to almost exonerate Lector's later behaviour by having his victims be evil men who are deserving of death.
This doesn't jibe with how the character later develops. Lector is a monster that kills and eats a musician in Red Dragon for playing out of tune. Hardly a man worth death in any rational context. There is no way to see how this malevolent creature in the later books and films, the man who attempts to kill Will Graham and his family by directing the attention of a serial killer towards them.
The later Lector is a more traditional violent sociopath. And the Lector in Hannibal Rising is almost heroic. How are we to resolve this incongruity? In Hannibal Rising Inspector Popil correctly identifies Hannibal as not having a human core, of being an "other" who will kill again and again but Harris seems loathe to paint Lector in the colours of his particular pathology.
Harris does, I think, like Hannibal Lector too much. And he is therefore unwilling to cast the character as the inhuman sociopath that he is.
Its telling that in the acknowledgements Harris lists no books on violent behaviour. Nothing similar to Lonnie Athens and his work on the development of violent criminal behavior. After his violent experiences in the war there is nothing that appears to push Hannibal from being a shattered victim of violence to someone who actively participates in it himself. There also appears to be little to explain Lector's subsequent cannibalism unless Lector actually does participate in eating his sister. A thread, again, left unexplored.
Hannibal Rising is an interesting read but only as an action-adventure novel. Lector's experience in this book is almost no different than any 'action hero" except that ultimately he enjoys the killing that he does. As an exploration of Lector's subsequent behaviour as an adult is is lacking. Harris should have read fewer books about post-war France and more books about the development of violent sociopathic behaviour and the book would have been better. That and perhaps develop some detachment from the Lector character to allow him to explore the development of Lector more realistically.
