Everything about Hannibal Rising totally explained
Hannibal Rising is a novel written by
Thomas Harris, the fourth in a series featuring his most famous character,
Hannibal Lecter. The novel, a
prequel to Harris' Lecter novels, chronicles the iconic
serial killer's childhood and early adulthood. The novel was released on
December 5,
2006 with an initial printing of at least 1.5 million copies and had a mixed response, many thinking that the book reduced Lecter to a simple psychological case. A
CD version has also been released, with Harris reading the text.
Plot summary
Lecter is eight years old when at the beginning of the novel (1941), living in Lecter Castle in
Lithuania, when
Operation Barbarossa,
Hitler's invasion of the
Soviet Union turns the
Baltic region into a part of the bloodiest
front line of
World War II. Lecter, his sister
Mischa, and his parents escape to the family's hunting lodge in the woods to elude the advancing German troops. After three years, the
Nazis are finally driven out of the countries now occupied by the Soviet Union. During their retreat, however, they destroy a
Soviet tank that had stopped at the Lecter family's lodge looking for water. The explosion kills everyone but Lecter and Mischa. They survive in the cottage until six former Lithuanian militiamen, led by a Nazi collaborator named
Vladis Grutas, storm and loot it. Finding no other food, they kill and
cannibalize a young boy they've captured and held, chained, in the barn, and then Lecter's young sister Mischa to the despair and agony of young Hannibal who has to watch her being dragged, screaming his name, suspended in the air by her arms. Lecter is beaten with a log as he hears an axe end the life of Mischa. He blacks out and is later found wandering and
mute by a Soviet tank crew that takes him back to Lecter Castle, which is now a Soviet orphanage.
Lecter is removed from the orphanage by his uncle, a noted painter, and he goes to live with him in France. The happiness of their lives together is cut short with his uncle's sudden death. Most of the estate is taken for
death duties.
Lecter goes to live in reduced circumstances with his aunt and they develop a special relationship. While in France, Lecter flourishes as a medical student. He commits his first murder as a teenager, killing a local butcher who insulted his aunt. He is suspected of the butcher's murder by Inspector Popil, a French detective who also lost his family to the war. Thanks in part to his aunt's intervention, however, Lecter escapes responsibility for the crime.
Lecter divides his time between medical school in France and hunting those who killed and cannibalized his sister. One by one, he crosses paths with Grutas' men, killing them all in the most inventively gruesome ways possible. Eventually, Popil arrests Lecter, but Lecter is freed when popular support for his dispatch of
war criminals combines with a lack of hard evidence. The novel ends with Lecter going to America to begin his residency at
Johns Hopkins Hospital in
Baltimore, Maryland.
Characters in Hannibal Rising
The story's origins
The February 22, 2007 issue of
Entertainment Weekly features a quote that suggests that the only reason Thomas Harris wrote the story was out of the fear that a Lecter prequel/origin story would inevitably be written without his involvement.
Hannibal Rising film producer Dino De Laurentiis said "I say to Thomas, 'If you don't do [theprequel], I'll do it with someone else...I don't want to lose this franchise. And the audience wants it...' He said, 'No. I'm sorry.' And I said, 'I will do it with somebody else.' And then he said, 'Let me think about it. I'll come up with an idea.'"
Other titles
Other working titles for the book were "The Blooding of Hannibal Lecter," "Hannibal 4," "Hannibal IV," "The Lecter Variations," "The Lecter Variation: The Story of Young Hannibal Lecter," "Young Hannibal," "The Adventures of Young Hannibal" and "Behind the Mask" (which was used in an audio translation prior to the print version's release).
Connections and contradictions
Hannibal Lecter's documented and actual birthdate and his age when his sister died are not consistent. The novel Hannibal firmly states in a flashback that he was six years old when his sister died; in Hannibal Rising, his age is changed to 11 for unknown reasons. The novel attributes this to Lecter falsifying documents to confuse authorities, though the passages in Hannibal setting these events at age 6 appear in Lecter's own thoughts.
No mention is made of Lecter's bizarre condition on his left hand called mid-ray duplication dactyly, or a fully functional sixth finger (duplicated middle finger).
In Red Dragon protagonist Will Graham says that, as a child, Lecter displayed sadism toward animals. In Rising, however, Lecter exhibits a degree of compassion to a group of swans and his family's horse and no mention is made of any cruelty towards animals.
In Hannibal, Lecter dreams of seeing Mischa's baby teeth in a reeking stool pit after the deserters' men kill her. In Rising, he's similar visions, but when he later visits Mischa's remains before giving her a dignified burial, he notes that all her teeth are intact.
The film depicts young Hannibal jumping the Berlin Wall 8 years before it was built.Further Information
Get more info on 'Hannibal Rising'.
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