They've butchered Harris's book

Hannibal the novel was a baroque thriller ... but the film version is more a romantic horror story.

It's a nice point as to whether or not Thomas Harris has ever seen the enormously successful film that was made of his previous book, The Silence of the Lambs. He convinced one interviewer that he had by murmuring politely that it was a great movie, that he admired its director, Jonathan Demme, and they'd been lucky with the cast.

Others, however, are sure he never saw it. His agent, Mort Janklow, and his favoured editor, Carole Baron, both agree on that. "Since the characters came from his own mind, he didn't want to be influenced by the movie," said Baron.

John Douglas, the former chief of the FBI serial crime unit consulted by Harris, remembered that "he was watching a movie when a trailer for Silence came on and he got up and walked right out of the theatre." He could have stayed. The film of The Silence of the Lambs is pretty faithful to the book, as well it might be. As a thriller, the novel is a perfectly constructed piece of machinery. It needs no speeding up. The same cannot be said of Hannibal. Hannibal is not primarily a thriller at all - it's a kind of romantic horror story. Its plot doesn't progress in anything like a straight line. It is driven by an arcane symbolism, featuring snakes and eels, pigeons and boars, that owes more to poetry than to the police procedural.

How could this baroque edifice possibly be filmed? Now we know the answer. By butchery as decisive as that which Hannibal visits on his victims. The film is a brutal simplification of a complex book. As a criticism of the novel, it could hardly be more sweeping. They've filmed the book they wanted Harris to write, not the original and confounding book he did deliver. They might as well have told him he got it wrong.

Some of the changes are minor enough. Just as in The Silence of the Lambs Hannibal's choice of wine to go with liver was popularised from "a big Amarone" to the more familiar Chianti for the movies, so too here, his gift to Clarice is changed from a recondite bottle of Chateau d'Yquem of her birth-date, to a glitzy pair of Gucci sandals. Much has had to go altogether. The subsidiary characters excised include Clarice Starling's friend Ardelia Mapp, her mentor Jack Crawford, and, most drastically, Mason Verger's muscular sister, Margot.

Some of the casting seems inaccurate too. Hannibal, it is repeatedly said in the book, is small and lithe, indeed "imperially slim". These days Anthony Hopkins comes plain emperor-size. Clarice, most importantly, should be exactly 33 years old. Julianne Moore, otherwise admirable, is 38 and no athlete. On the other hand, Mason Verger lies flat in the novel, paralysed and withered. Here he careens around in a wheelchair like many another Hollywood villain.

Some plot tightenings have been efficiently done. In the novel, the opening scenes in Florence are only tangentially linked to developments back in the States. In the film, Clarice gets involved, by phone. She acquires from Barney, Hannibal's former warder, the tapes of her previous interviews with him, which permits a moody re-capping of previous episodes too.

But soon the novel gets left behind, like so much waste matter. Clarice gets Hannibal on a mobile phone as he's about to commit the first murder. In the book, they finally meet again only at the end. Here, he drops in on her one night and next day they set off together on a madcap visit to a museum, communicating yet again by mobile.

The producers have asked that the final 10 minutes not be disclosed. It's not that they haven't had the stomach for the gore. They have. Brains are on the menu and those hogs make pigs of themselves. Nor should one object that the encounter between Lecter and Starling which takes days and perhaps even weeks in the novel should have been compressed to a matter of minutes - putting it on a clock like that ratchets up the tension. But in a failure of nerve the whole weird ending of Hannibal has been fluffed. This is not Thomas Harris's story. He might prefer not to look, again.