Crime: Hannibal Rising and The Naming of the Dead

Well, the Thomas Harris was disappointing and the Ian Rankin wasn't.

I've always loved Harris's imagination and the dense weave of his dark materials, but Hannibal Rising, if you wanted to get harsh about it, is somehow simultaneously over the top and thin, and sloppy and hysterical with it.

I still like the idea of a contemporary personality with its roots in the Second World War, though. Apart from anything else it turns on the thesis that we are shaped largely by our times and cannot be extracted from them. I think it's Anthony Lane, in that great piece Laura linked to in the comments on the Dec 12 post, who makes the point that quite a lot of people got out of WW2 without turning into cannibals and murderers, but Harris knows that perfectly well and there's another character in the novel who's been equally exposed to unimaginable horror, the wildly exotic Japanese step-auntie, yet who seems relatively psychologically undamaged. Nature and nurture are duelling banjos, as any sibling knows.

And the book does have one moment, not to be giving away the plot or anything, that does resonate deeply with the Hannibal character as conceived and written in the earlier books: the idea that once a taboo is broken it cannot be unbroken, and the break releases the breaker into a kind of nightmare freedom where anything is permitted. Harris wisely does not go on about this even as much as I just have in that last sentence. He just shows you and lets you work it out.

The new Ian Rankin, I'm glad to say, is not one of the Organised Crime and Corruption at the Top ones that I've always found relatively boring just because I'm so much more interested in serious loonies than I am in boys' toys and games. The Naming of the Dead does in fact have both organised crime and corruption at the top in it -- Rebus's old nemesis Morris Gerald Cafferty features prominently, and Rankin even seems to be taking a leaf out of Harris's book (as it were) by lightly playing up the similarity of mind between criminal and detective, a la Sherlock Holmes's last stand at the Reichenbach Falls -- but the (really excellent) plot turns on a single deranged person, and the way that people can get caught up and woven into other people's nets.

And as Rebus ages you can see more and more clearly how Rankin got to be where he is, because he's now well into that thing that all the really good crime writers with one major sleuthy character do: they progress the life story of their detective figure through the self-contained events of each novel, and one of the great pleasures of reading the books is to watch the writers working along the two axes at once.

(Val McDiarmid's brilliant turn in The Last Temptation with Tony Hill and Carol Jordan's everlasting UST -- to make Carol as sexually damaged as Tony and prolong the agony for another God-knows-how-long -- is a case in point. Apparently there's a new Tony Hill novel due in September. They'd better get on with it before they get too old to care.)

Rebus, however, is now cruising for the end of his working life. Watch Siobhan. I always thought it was a crying shame that P.D. James let her Cordelia Gray character slide in favour of concentrating on the increasingly smug and annoying Adam Dalgliesh, and I hope that Rankin won't make the same kind of decision.

Patrick White to Father Christmas, December 1918

[Spacing, punctuation and spelling are sic, assuming, as one safely can, that David Marr's Random House edition of White's letters is to be trusted.]

Lulworth, December 1918
TO FATHER XMAS
Dear Father Xmas.
Will yoy please bring me
a pistol, a mouth organ
a violin
a butterfly net
Robinson Cruso
History of Australia [NB -- he was six]
Some marbles.
a little mouse what runs
across the room
I hope you do not
think I am too greedy
but I want the
things badly

your loving
Paddy.


[Cross-posted at Sarsaparilla]

Quick bedside table reading pile IQ test

Which of these is most unlike the others?

a) Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead
b) Nicholas Jose, Original Face
c) Elizabeth George, What Came Before He Shot Her
d) Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising
e) Linda Lear, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature

Re-thinking the fugitive phenomenon

It turns out that this blog was well-named, I think. 'A fugitive phenomenon' was what Nicholas Jose called Australian literature in his essay on it for Australian Book Review last year (November 2005), and so, for me, here, it seems to have proved.

It's not that I've lost interest in blogging, quite the reverse; I never feel short of things to say over at Pavlov's Cat, and have a blogroll as long as your arm of people I check up on regularly, sometimes daily. And it's not that I've lost interest in Aust Lit; quite the reverse, again.

One problem is that most of the projects in which one gets involved are to some extent confidential, and you don't get to my my age without learning the value of discretion -- as well as, God knows, the price of indiscretion.

If one is reviewing a book, say, then it would be naff in the extreme to talk about the book en blog before the review that was commissioned and paid for by somebody else has actually appeared in whatever that publication was. If one is involved in an evolving team project then its details are likely to be confidential for excellent legal and other reasons. If one has just spent an hour on the phone to one of one's littery mates and caught up on a raft of gossip, most of it is the kind of stuff you don't want to be spreading around in public.

And if some scandal or kerfuffle or beat-up erupts, such as the Rosemary Neill piece in the the Weekend before last's Australian about the alleged disappearance of Aust Lit in the universities, then chances are one knows many of the players and has some inside knowledge of what the history of Aust Lit has been over the last few decades (ie its entire life as a university discipline) in particular universities.

No, between them the laws of libel and the fear of embarrassing or hurting one's friends and colleagues leave me with nowhere near as much to say on this topic as I thought I would have. Not publicly, anyway. And when it comes to pure information and summary on the subject, Perry at Matilda was already doing a fabulous job of this nearly a year before I ever took up blogging at all.

So it may be time to broaden my horizons: to keep the Australian accent, but use it to chat about books-and-writing issues in a more general way. For instance: did you know there's a new Thomas Harris out? Hannibal Rising is the back-story: how Hannibal Lecter got to be like that.

I come from a generation of people who were shaped by the Second World War in the sense that one way or another it brought our parents together or determined their circumstances and circumscribed their lives. Even in Australia this was true, and most Australians who were born between 1940 and 1960 have their own parents/war story to tell. But for the children of Europe, before, during and after the war, their lives were wrought and blighted in a way no safe Australian can well imagine; this is at the heart of Elizabeth Holdsworth's essay 'An die Nachgeborenen: for those who come after', which has just won Australian Book Review's inaugural Calibre Prize for essay writing.

And it's the wartime horrors of this European background that Harris uses for his famous cannibal. Hints and memories that appeared in Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, have been fleshed out (sorry) and brought to the foreground as, this time, the main event. I haven't actually read this book properly yet, but I've flicked through and can see where it's going. I think Harris is an underrated writer and I'm looking forward to this one, not just to be creeped out (crept out?), which I always enjoy (and yes I know it isn't nice), but also to appreciate his considerable storytelling technique and style.

Bottom line

As so often, I am again indebted to that amazing chronicler and conduit of useful information, Perry Middlemiss at Matilda -- this time for pointing me in the direction of Adelaide crime writer Kirsty Brooks's blog. Here's a quotation from it: something that ought to be written, in letters of fire, on all the forms that aspiring students of Creative Writing fill in when they're applying to get into the courses.

You fall down but you pick yourself up again. In this field, your success is never guaranteed, but your love of it should be, you should love reading and writing and if you love something, no doubt you’ll be happy to do it a great deal, and to sacrifice many other things for it.

Lines

I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
I will post to this blog more often
Etc

ABR, another taking-off litblog

After a tentative start, Australian Book Review has revamped its blog and is now functioning as a comments-enabled team effort. It's already shaping up as a lively and eclectic space, and if editor Peter Rose keeps up that level of reportage will soon turn into an alpha source of inside information and goss. To say nothing of raising -- and re-drawing -- the literary profile of Adders, which would be all to the good.

Beattie's Book Blog

NZ bookperson Graham Beattie is someone I know because we were once on a literary-prize-judging panel in Auckland, his home city, where he took us out to a wonderful dinner at a harbourside restaurant. He's just sent me the URL of his brand-new blog, which is here.

This (among other reasons) is why I've always liked reading David Malouf

Because every now and then -- as here, in 'Mrs Porter and the Rock' from his new book Every Move You Make -- you come across something like this:

'She had never fathomed what men were really up to, what they wanted. What it was they were asking for, but never openly, and when they didn't get it, brooded and fretted over and clenched their jaws and inwardly went dark ...'

Indeed.

The Broken Shore, encore une fois

Peter Temple's The Broken Shore was published last year to rave reviews, including mine for the SMH, and it's just won the Colin Roderick Award for 2005. This award is given by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies at James Cook University for the best Australian book, in any genre, published in the previous calendar year: The Broken Shore won out over, among other shortlisted things, Kate Grenville's The Secret River and Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers.

As I can no longer find my review online, I reproduce it here in an attempt to lure anyone who hasn't read this book yet to do so at the first opportunity.

Synchronistically, if that is a word, this news comes within days of my stumbling over another rave review of Temple, this time of Identity Theory which I haven't read, at the blog Head Butler, where Jesse Kornbluth says this. But in the meantime, here's mine from last year:


The Broken Shore
By Peter Temple
Text Publishing, 320pp, $29.95

Detective Senior Sergeant Joe Cashin, badly damaged in the line of duty, has been seconded to a job in the relative quiet of his childhood home town on the southern coast of Victoria. When he isn’t walking his two black standard poodles through the countryside or trying to find a comfortable position for his damaged body in a chair or on the floor while he listens to opera, Cashin spends his non-work time planning the rebuilding of the ancestral ruin in which he lives.

But then a highly respected and well-heeled local is found dead in his own home, and the body shows the marks of torture. The evidence points to three Aboriginal boys from the local community, but it soon starts to look as if there might be quite a different story behind this murder.

It’s hard to know where to start praising this book. Plot, style, setting and characters are all startlingly good, and even lovers of crime fiction will recognise that Temple has taken his writing beyond the usual boundaries of that admirable genre, though it still follows the mainstream conventions. There’s the idiosyncratic detective, a troubled loner with signature tastes in music, alcohol and/or books. There’s the tight plot full of red herrings and false trails, and the deft interweaving of a romance sub-plot involving a suitably foxy heroine. And there are some very, very horrible moments as the action unfolds.

Temple’s greatest gift is for the creation of his characters: their back-stories are sketched in with great economy and clarity, their general cast of mind is conveyed through small details, and their motivations are revealed detail by small detail. But most of all, Temple has an astonishing skill in conveying the feeling between his characters: the slow accretions of trust, the red haze of hatred, the fine strands of hostility in the weave of desire. When this book is made into a movie – and it will be – the real test for the actors will be in the two-handed scenes where they have to play off each other, because the emotional currents running between the various characters are so deep and strong as to be almost visible.

Temple has an acute ear for the speech patterns of a certain kind of Australian man. Although the story is not actually told in the first person, we see events from Cashin’s point of view so the style tends to be that of the character’s own very Australian inner voice, laconic to the point of occasional incomprehensibility, its humour deadpan and drier than a chip. When Cashin and his colleague Dove notice a bit of casual private-schoolboy bullying as they pass in the street – itself a briefly eloquent counterpoint to the wasted lives of the Aboriginal boys – Dove says ‘Year ten mugging class. Been out on a prac.’

There’s also plenty of action, much of it gruesome, some of it comic. There are remarkable evocations of landscape and cityscape, in which recognisable parts of Australia melt imperceptibly into fictional ones: Temple’s Melbourne is half invented, half real, as though you could turn down an alley off Lygon Street and suddenly find yourself in one of his plots. There are also some spectacular set pieces; the scene in the abandoned theatre is brilliant and chilling, a passage of suspense and horror that’s played out in silence and leaves much of the worst to the reader’s imagination.

The subject matter combines two of the most dark and dangerous undercurrents in contemporary Australian society: the status and treatment of the Aboriginal population, and the emergence of long-buried stories of institutional sexual abuse. Temple writes about these things with enough insight and passion to make the reader ask exactly where the boundary lies between genre fiction and ‘serious’ literary fiction. The Broken Shore is one of those watershed books that make you re-think your ideas about reading.