Similarly, the relationship between Daniels and Aule actually evolves and unfolds mostly through conversation. We learn that Daniels lost his wife in a tragic fire; that Aule is being hounded because of his relationship with a Japanese American woman.
Lehane uses several well-known set-pieces but, to my mind, succeeds in preventing them from becoming mere trite contrivances. The storm sequence, for example, is stunning and yet it’s been done to death (perhaps from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, King Lear, Macbeth or even before). It’s a full-blown hurricane and Daniels is out there on his own, uprooted trees flying past. When it comes to building atmosphere and tension, it just doesn’t get better. There’s a creepiness in the whole set-up that somehows seems to seep deeper and deeper; you’re hooked and you’re chilled. You know, too, that clues are being flung at you and scattered around — but which is the clue and which the red herring?
This is the ultimate mind-game. There’s enough horror and tension here to satiate the most blood thirsty and yet there’s no gun play, no bullets whanging around and the body count is next to zero. Much of this might have been contrived in other hands, but Lehane deals his cards deftly — dropping just enough to keep the reader off-balance while he sinks his hook in deeper. Even the title is a giveaway you realize only too late: why Shutter Island? Is this the mind’s shutter? Or one in a camera that catches discrete, disjointed images?
The denouement is stunning in itself but, finally, slightly disappointing. Not very many writers in the genre can sustain such a high note of mesmerizing horror and tension. Thomas Harris did it, once, with The Silence of the Lambs and, I thought, with Hannibal, but there are plenty of people who would disagree with that assessment. The difference is that Harris created a single monster and allowed him to sprawl, with the utmost depravity, indulging his every exquisite obscenity, over several books. While also playing mind-games, Harris throws in a more than generous serving of bloodiness, especially in Hannibal which lacks the subtlety of Lambs, almost as if Harris is saying well, look, see how well I can do this, too. Sequence after sequence in Hannibal scales new heights of grotesquery: being eaten alive by wild pigs or boars, raised for just that to the sound of blood curdling screaming; a man who skins his own face under the ‘gentle’ persuasion of the good Dr Lecter Hannibal; the doctor’s dissection (live, of course) in a church or museum of a cop who gets too close; and the truly extraordinary finale that seems to me to redefine obscenity: when Hannibal serves up a gourmet meal of brain, prepared absolutely fresh, except that it’s human brain and he is performing a lobotomy even as he cooks. I believe this is one of the reasons Jodie Foster refused to do the film and even Riddley Scott knocked it off and substituted it with an altogether weaker self-mutilation — a sort of self-sacrificial offering that was supposed to accentuate Hannibal’s finer sensibilities but only succeeded in weakening the entire structure.
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