The Cook and Book Club is a small Australian based book club combining their love for reading and cooking. Declan, a member of the club, will be recapping his experience each month right here on The Nerd Daily!
BOOK | One person selects a book for everyone to read over the next month
COOK | The book selector hosts a dinner party with a themed meal related to the book
Tonight the Cook & Book Club was hosted by Hannibal Lecter fanboy, Alec. So naturally, the book chosen for this month was Thomas Harris’ 1999 novel, Hannibal—the third instalment in the series featuring the eponymous cannibal and former psychiatrist.
For most of us, The Silence of the Lambs film proved to be a useful reference point going into Hannibal, and we touched on it several times in our conversation. But it was Lecter’s development in the series of novels that captured our imaginations and dominated our discussion for the night.
Dinner
While Alec was at first considering serving us lamb brains for dinner, he decided to be a little kinder with his meal choice, fattening us up with pork chops instead. This culinary reference to Mason Verger’s brutal fate at the hands of hungry, wild pigs opened up our talk of Hannibal this evening.
Unfortunately my personal experience with the book wasn’t the greatest, but this was not due to any fault of Thomas Harris himself. I decided to give the audiobook a shot, but quite soon into the story I lost interest due to Daniel Gerroll’s lacklustre narration failing to capture the story’s intensity. As a result the plot felt dull, and I occasionally found myself tuning out.
After getting this off my chest to the group, Alec decided to balance out my negativity with an expression of his love for Hannibal as a character.
It was unanimous that we all found Hannibal Lecter’s appeal to stem from the odd, creepy balance of being both a disgusting monster and a polite gentleman. He is undoubtedly evil, manipulative, and sadistic. But for some reason, the fact that he only harms the characters we don’t like and respects the ones we do seems to make his actions almost forgivable.
Dessert
Eventually figs and ice cream were served up for dessert, and we finally got around to discussing Ridley Scott’s contentious movie adaptation.
Quite significantly towards the end of the book, Hannibal drugs and brainwashes Clarice into believing that he is her long-dead sister, Mischa. While in this malleable state of mind, Clarice is manipulated into eating the brain of a former colleague, before running off with Lecter and becoming his lover. This is where their story ends—disappearing from authorities, but living as partners in crime.
In the movie though, one tiny change was made that had huge ramifications on how we perceive both Clarice and Hannibal. While we were all here discussing the novel, Alec did not want to leave this contentious topic untouched.
To put it plainly, the brainwashing never happens in the film adaptation. When Clarice joins Hannibal in his devilish endeavors, she is completely in her right mind. It is easy to see then in this version of events how she always had a bit of that dark side in her. Conversely, it is also just as easy to see Hannibal’s absolute confidence that he could draw this out of her without the use of mind-altering drugs.
As Alec elucidated, these modifications to well-established characters caused a considerable amount of controversy when the movie was first released. Hannibal was always going to be a risky book-to-screen adaptation following the critical success that was The Silence of the Lambs, but unfortunately it was a risk that did not pay off.
After hearing from the rest of the book club how much they enjoyed Harris’ Hannibal, I decided that it is one that I would certainly like to revisit in the future—next time in hard copy format, rather than audiobook. Harris has such a knack for creating engaging, morally grey characters, it isn’t difficult to see why Hannibal Lecter has become such a famous literary icon.
