Bokrecension: Silence of the Lambs av Thomas Harris

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““No, no, all gone,” Gumb said. “ You''''re too fat as it is” He climbed the basement stairs, whispering”Fatty Bread, Fatty Bread” to his little dog. He gave no sign if he heard the cry, still fairly strong and sane, that echoed up from the black hole: PLEEASE.”

The silence of the lambs is about a FBI student named Clarice Starling. Jack Crawford, the section chief of Behavioral Science, gave her an assignment which would improve her studies at he academy, if she succeeded. Her job was to interview and examine the serial killer and psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, this may seem like an easy assignment, but Hannibal Lecter is special, he is both a psychiatrist and a psychopath at the same time. She where doing this because they wanted Dr Lecter to give them an psychological profile on a serial killer called Buffalo Bill.

Her interview did not go well, but Jack Crawford wanted her to investigate the address she got from Dr. Lecter, so she did. When she where looking in the abandoned garage the address lead to she found a head of a man that she thought had been a client of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The following days that she worked at the case she found more clues, and she started to understand how Dr. Lecter was thinking. They also found a dead girl in a river, which they thought where another victim of Buffalo Bill.

Later, a daughter of the Senator of Tennessee is being kidnapped by Buffalo Bill and this is what everybody talks about. Under the investigation, Hannibal Lecter escapes and kills two police officers, as if that would not be enough they still have not found the kidnapped girl yet, even though they are right behind the serial killer. Agent Starling is the one who takes the battle and fight for both her own and the girls life...

Characters:
Clarice Starling is a FBI top student, who is very ambitious and interested of her future job. She is smart and thinks logical which helps her to find Buffalo Bill. She also had a tragic childhood, her father worked as a police and he died when he was in duty. This has affect her so much so that she wants to be a police officer.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter is very calm, and he likes to study peoples insides and try to understand how they think and why they think as they do. He enjoys eating people and see them suffer, he has not got any conscious at all. I have never, read or met, a man who is so awful and disordered as him.

Jack Crawford is a person who never lets other people get to close, many of his business partners do not got a chance to really get to know him. It may depend on his wife, who is very sick, and he refuse to put her in a hospital because he wants to take care of her himself. But with Clarice Starling it is different, he sees a promising future agent in her, and he also finds her easy to understand and talk to.
“The director got your Lecter report over your signature. You did well.”
This proves that Jack Crawford were not very talkative.

Buffalo Bill is a transsexual man who is collecting girls skin to make clothes to himself. He picks only chubby girl and then starve them for a couple days, just because they got more skin than a thin girl would have. He is brave, he dares to go out in public but at the same time he is smart, he choses his victims well.

Settings:
The book is written in 1988 and it also took place at that time. It takes place in the United States east coast and it is either spring or fall. It rains a lot and it is often dark outside. Is the author trying to set us in the right mood? He sured did. Thomas Harris describes the environment a lot, so much that it almost gets dull sometimes.

He describes every details of every moment which puts the reader right into the scenes, that otherwise could have been quite hard to understand.

Theme:
I think that the author wants us to react and discuss the different issues that he writes about. For example, he question the security at the prisons when he write that Dr. Hannibal Lecter escapes and also kills two police officers.
I think he wants us, in some way, to try to understand how Dr. Hannibal Lecter thinks and works so that we are aware of signals if we ever meet a man like him. The writer Thomas Harris have written several books in this theme, which I suppose he enjoyed. That tells us something about the author, who likes to write about insane people? Maybe he writes out his anger and furiousness so that he gets rid of all of his bad thoughts...? All of his characters is stereotypes, I think. They have big personalities that shows theirs distinguishing qualities. Maybe he done that because he wants us to see deeply inside people and not just see their outsides. And I think that that is important for everybody to do, otherwise it is easy to believe that a person is in some way that he, or she, are not.

It is good that he wants us...