Scorcese's excellent adaptation of Endo's novel Silence

As long as we're into comparing movies with the source material - yesterday I began reading Endo's novel Silence, which is the source for the recent excellent film of same name by Martin Scorcese. I haven't read too deeply yet into the novel, though I did read the translator's lengthy intro., which provided useful background (both film and the faithfully adapted novel are about Portuguese missionary Jesuit priests in Japan in the early 17th century, in search of info about the vanished priest and mentor, Father Ferreira, and in hopes of helping maintain the persecuted Xtian minority on the Japanese islands) and made it clear that both book and film are based on real events and to a degree on actual priests - at least Father Ferreira is historically accurate, though the translator notes that we know little about his life in Japan after his apparent apostasy (Scorcese has quite a bit about Ferreira's later life; will see whether that's drawn from the novel), largely because records of his later life were destroyed in the bombing of Nagasaki. It strikes me that Silence is a particularly difficult book to adapt for screen; it's obvious to any reader that it's an exciting adventure story that touches on a lot of deep and important issues of culture, assimilation, hegemony, faith, history. But the novel is written as a series of letters home from Father Rodrigues (one of the 2 Jesuits in search of their mentor, Fa Ferreira), so Scorcese didn't have the advantage of working w/ a dialog-rich document, such as a Graham Greene or Elmore Leonard novel. Additionally, every scene involves re-creating the look of the 17th century in a remote and isolate setting - another challenge, to which Scorcese rose, as it happens. In one way, the cinema version is always going to be more engaging: We are drawn in visually and musically and we get the full arc of the story within ab out 2 3/4 hours (long, but held my attention throughout); in other ways, the novel is more engaging in that it's told via letters from Fa R., and we can feel that we are reading actual documents from the era, as if we're the historians or perhaps the contemporary Jesuits following the story as it unfolds over time.

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