Chelsea Humphrey's Reviews > The Silence of the Lambs

3.5 STARS

"Be very careful with Hannibal Lector. Dr. Chilton, the head of the mental hospital, will go over the physical procedure you use to deal with him. Don't deviate from it. Do not deviate from it one iota for any reason... We both know you have to back-and-forth a little in interviews, but you tell him no specifics about yourself. You don't want any of your personal facts in his head."



Bet you thought I was never going to write this review, huh? ;) Well, it turns out I just needed a good long pause to toss around my thoughts before attempting to wrangle them on paper. There's a lot of pressure diving into a book that has been deemed a modern classic, and you never know what side of the spectrum you'll fall on once you've experienced such, but I'm pleased that overall, this was a really enjoyable experience for me. While I've seen the movie over the years more times than I can count, somehow it didn't ruin my experience or opinion of the book. Below, there will be quite a few spoilers and discussion pertaining to specific plot points and comparisons from the book-to-film adaptation, so if you haven't read the book or seen the movie and desire to know no specifics, please stop here.



I'm going to start with all the things that I loved. Obviously, the book is way better than the movie, due to the amount of detail and characterization that is lost in translation when you must condense a 400+ page novel into a 2 hour film production. The characters are richly developed, flawed, and their decision making process and solving of the cases in general are quite progressive considering this book was published in the 1980s. The Silence of the Lambs is a wonderful example of how, we can see glimpses of the villain throughout the book, and still garner the compulsive pacing of a whodunnit.



One thing that felt odd to me was reconciling the fact that, for the time this book was published, the story is so progressive in some aspects and terribly disappointing in others. If you've seen the movie, then you probably are aware of how, at best, the movie is borderline transphobic, and this is due to the fact that they left out some crucial scenes from the book. While the movie implies maybe once or twice that Jame Gumb is not really transgender, they don't do a full job of explaining the why or how behind his choices; in fact, the movie leaves out his backstory entirely, as well as a scene that was filmed but cut from the final production portraying the investigation into the transgender clinic. In the book, it is clearly shown how transgender people are a peaceful group, and how our villain is someone who IS NOT transgender, and was rejected for reassignment surgery based on multiple red flags that occurred during the initial application. Also, the doctor that the FBI initially tries to coerce into giving up personal information regarding his patients not only defends his patients, but goes on the offensive to protect the minority group. I really loved how the book handled this SO much better than the movie.

The one thing that REALLY bugged me though, is how you can have a novel written in the '80s that was LGBT forward, but unrealistically fat shaming women from start to finish. I figured I'll be ripped a new one for this and deemed a sensitive snowflake, so I decided to mark specific passages for reference. One particular example is in chapter 34, where Starling is poking around in Catherine's apartment after she's been abducted. On page 242 (in my copy), there's an internal monologue where Clarice is flipping through her closet, and notes that at almost 6 ft tall, Catherine has sets of clothes in 2 sizes-large and "crisis fat". It's stated that the first set are when she is 145lbs and the second at 165lbs. For reference, I have a friend who is 6ft tall and was constantly asked if she was anorexic, and she weighed 185lbs. I understand that point is that Buffalo Bill is kidnapping full figured women to fit his long term outcome, but I had a hard time stomaching that we are told somewhere between 15-20 times throughout the book how OMG THESE GIRLS ARE SO FAT SO FAT SO FAT UGH DISGUSTING DON'T THEY HAVE ANY SELF RESPECT AGAIN SO FAT, and yet, according to the specific height and weight details we're given, they are medically and even socially NOT FAT. We even get a few inner monologues where Catherine knows her full figured body is attractive, but we're immediately reminded afterwards to NOT FORGET SHE'S FAT AND UGH SO GROSS!!!! *deep breath* Alright, I'm done beating that to death.

Lastly, aside from Jack Crawford's character, I felt the movie was mostly cast well, with the best being Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill. Jody Foster as Clarice was a bit of stretch for me, as the Clarice in the book isn't quite the pushover we see on screen, but still not a bad choice. I can wholly see why this is the book most refer to that initiated the mainstream craze for forensic crime scene novels, as it is a really well written procedural, and manages to feel realistic but not lose the page turning quality of suspense that it carries. Overall, I'm so glad I read this one and look forward to circling back around to Red Dragon.