Twenty years is a long time to wait — and every one of them was counted off impatiently by admirers of Thomas Harris, who left readers in limbo with a lack of closure for his 1999 novel Hannibal. FBI agent Clarice Starling was last seen in a bizarre sexual relationship with the monstrous but cultivated Hannibal Lecter, reduced to being the virtual sex slave of the cannibalistic serial killer via a mixture of drugs and hypnosis.
The controversial prequel Hannibal Rising in 2006 didn’t address Clarice’s unsettled fate, and when it was announced that Harris was to break his silence with a new novel, readers hoped that a satisfying finis would be supplied to the Lecter/Starling saga that began with The Silence of the Lambs in 1988 (itself a sequel to 1981’s Red Dragon). And now we have Cari Mora, which (to everyone’s surprise) does not feature his signature characters but an entirely new dramatis personae, including the capable heroine of the title, a war-damaged young woman. Cari is living in Miami under a tenuous Temporary Protected Status as a caretaker for a mansion in which various malign individuals have an obsessive interest.
Clarice Starling she isn’t — the latter began as an FBI novice, but Cari proves to be adept at violence when she comes up against some very nasty people, one of whom is a murderous psychopath. But is Hans-Peter Schneider a worthy successor to the mesmeric Hannibal Lecter?
One thing that will be immediately apparent to readers of the new book is a radical change of style — Harris clearly felt the need to recharge his literary batteries by adopting an unadorned mode of writing in the Hemingway vein. What we learn about the characters largely comes through what they do — and certainly this brief novel (just over 300 pages in a large font) has no shortage of physical action. Eschewing the complex character building of his earlier work, Harris delivers a narrative that is absolutely cut to the bone, and while Cari is a distinctive heroine, we are not invited to care about her to the extent that we became involved with Clarice Starling.
Millions of dollars in cartel gold has been secreted underneath the Miami Beach mansion where Cari is caretaker. Of the various criminals trying to track down the booty, the unspeakable Han-Peter Schneider is the one who has got closest, cutting a bloody swathe through his rivals (and sacrificing his own men, one of whom is bitten in two by something with sharp teeth while on an underwater foray). And as Cari becomes involved in the increasingly violent attempts to break open an enigmatic container under the house, more and more people are variously dispatched in gruesome fashion — mostly by Schneider.
The latter is a camper, less nuanced villain than Lecter, but just as vile. In one memorably horrific scene, he takes a shower while watching with relish as his liquid cremation machine reduces the body of one of his victims to pulp. Lecter (with his love of Renaissance art and haute cuisine) is a hard act to follow, and although Schneider is more than credible as a threat, one is left with the feeling that Harris is conserving his energy with Cari Mora – this is not as ambitious as any of the books in the author’s earlier sequence. And, Mr Harris, we really do need to know if Clarice ever escapes (as we hope she does) from the clutches of Lecter.
Cari Mora By Thomas Harris Heinemann, £20, 308 pages
