Review: Silence

Silence by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I confess, I’d probably have given up on this one if not for Martin Scorsese’s introduction. On the one hand, he gave me a frame for reading this, for which I am grateful, and for the other he invited me to think about what there is in the complicated, understated text that would appeal to him as an artist.

On the surface, I was excited about this. Its plot is more or less parallel to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, one of the most moving novels I have ever read and a deep personal favorite. Also, I have enjoyed a number of powerful Japanese works in recent years – Tale of the Heike was a great reading experience – so I figured the combination was sure-fire.

I am open to the central drama here. Our protagonist, a Portuguese Jesuit priest named Rodrigues, determines to go to Japan to follow up on the apostasy of his mentor, a philosopher-missionary who’s renounced his faith in the face of Japan’s crack-down on Christianity. The Power and the Glory tells more or less the same story, celebrating the experience of a lone priest trying to serve the people in a country where the government has forbidden Catholicism. There, though, Greene makes his tired little Whiskey Priest into a hero, into a man too-weak on his own to carry out the mission but who becomes Christ-like in his faith. Even though he remains nameless, he discovers a love for ugly and deformed of his world, a love great enough that he willingly sacrifices himself.

This story is as subtly different from The Power and the Glory as Goodfellas is from The Godfather, though. Goodfellas depends upon The Godfather – I mean, it opens with “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” It can’t function without a prior story defining the gangster and, in that case, nothing defines the figure better than The Godfather. (That may not be the case within the movie; the fictional Henry Hill is speaking before the release of The Godfather film. It is, I insist, the case with audience expectations, though. We know what Hill means because we’ve seen The Godfather before we’ve seen Goodfellas.)

Part of Scorsese’s brilliance in Goodfellas is that, knowing that gangster/Mafia myth, he both deconstructs and celebrates it. Goodfellas lacks the fundamental beauty of The Godfather. It’s a deliberately choppier film, one that shows us betrayals of “omerta” without anything like the purportedly ethical condemnation that comes with betraying the same code in The Godfather. Hill finds the gangster life is not as deeply elegant and – in it counter-culture way – consistently ethical as he imagined. What he does find, though, is a lifestyle that makes him feel alive. In the end, then, he mourns what he’s lost as much as he finds relief at surviving it.

I can’t say that Silence depends upon knowing The Power and the Glory, but I also can’t separate my own reading of the two – and I suspect I’m not alone, but I think it does depend on knowing that missionary work understood itself as reenacting Christ’s sacrifice. Silence comes a quarter century later – and a quick Wikipedia glance tells me that Endo has been called the Graham Greene of Japan – so I know I’m not alone.

In any case, Rodrigues goes to Japan fully expecting martyrdom. He is certain the Japanese will eventually capture and torture him, and he knows he will endure into a kind of mythology. He will reenact the Christ story, bringing holy grace to the Christians who remain in the land. It’s beautiful and powerful, but the Japanese know the story too. When they do capture him, they refuse to grant him martyrdom. Instead, they cunningly set him up in comfort and then make him listen to the torments of the Christians they’re torturing to get him to apostatize. Those Christians have already renounced Christ themselves, but the Japanese don’t care. They tell the priest such ordinary Christians are only branches on the tree; he’s the root, and it’s only his apostasy that matters.

It’s a brutal torture, and it works, compelling Rodrigues to agree to step on a picture of the Virgin Mary as a sign of his lost faith. His failure marks the failure of the Church’s campaign in Japan, and the number of Christians slowly ebbs. He finds he is not reenacting the story he thought he was. He is as far from Francis Xavier as Henry Hill is from Michael Corleone.

In the end, though, there is a kind of Scorsesian twist in the way Rodrigues, in his despair, nevertheless hears the voice of God. The “Silence” of the title refers to the silence of God, to the fact that God seems absent in the face of suffering. Rodrigues has failed in everything he thought he might accomplish, but he is not entirely in despair. He realizes he has saved the poor Christians who were suffering on his behalf, and he understands that it was in part his pride that brought him to Japan in the first place. He is humbled and disappointed, but he feels the presence of God more fully than at any other time in his life. Like an aging Henry Hill, who’s lost it all as well, he doesn’t regret what he’s done. He’s failed to uphold the power of the faith he thought he represented; he’s inadvertently discovered a deeper, less elegant version of faith in its place.

All that said, I still don’t quite love the novel. Like Goodfellas, it experiments with ruptured form. There, Scorsese famously brings in voice-overs and uses rough cuts to keep us from falling into the gorgeous movie myth that Coppola gave us in The Godfather. It took me a while to appreciate what Scorsese was doing – I’m more drawn to the elegance of The Power and the Glory and The Godfather – but I have come slowly to admire the ways that his ‘uglying up’ the filming process accomplishes an important break with the source material, a break that lets him move forward.

After one reading, though, I find myself frustrated with much of Endo’s assault on conventional narrative. Early on, we get a number of Rodrigues’s letters in which he discusses his faith and lays out the history. It’s fine with me that we hear him speak – and it’s crucial to the novel that we get a sense of his faith in its naïve form – but it’s a little blunt, even a little tedious at times. Such confessional letters don’t strike me as the most efficient form for communicating the faith that will eventually be challenged. I don’t find that much that’s distinctive in his teaching. Just as an example, couldn’t there have been something to give a sense of the distinctiveness of the thought of the mentor he’s seeking?

Then, oddly, the story switches to third-person and later to glimpses of him from the diaries and reports of various Japanese officials. It feels like an inefficient way to get across the denouement of our story. I respect the pulling-away-of-the-camera in the moment – Greene does it with heartbreaking beauty in the [SPOILER] scene just after the priest has been shot – but here, again, it seems ham-handedly done.

It's possible there’s a problem with the translation, that the audiobook reader was off (why get a British man to read a Japanese novel about Portuguese Jesuits for a presumptively American-centered audience?), and that I’m missing something by not being a Catholic. But this is the reading I had.

In any event, I admire the ambition of this, and I think I see it as a powerful response to Greene’s memorable novel. In itself, I enjoyed it less than I hoped, and its effect is less to make me dwell of it than to go back, for at least the twentieth time, to think about all that Greene accomplished himself.


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