Backlisted - Silence by Shūsaku Endō

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Silence (1966) is Shūsaku Endō’s masterpiece, a novel set in 17th Japan, following two Portuguese Jesuits posted there to search for their former teacher, who is feared to have abandoned his faith. Joining John and Andy to discuss this intense and powerful exploration of religious belief and its limits is the novelist Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent, Melmoth and, most recently, Essex Girls. Also in this episode John enjoys The Appointment, a mordantly funny debut novel by literary agent, Katharina Volckmer and Andy wallows in the profound comedic achievement that is From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)9'30 - The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer16'06 - Alan Partridge Podcast 21'18 Silence by Shūsaku Endō* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I accept that bet. And I am here as witness. But he can't ever be asked to pay up because never again means until the end of my time, what I'm generally... That's why I'm happy to accept this wager. Whichever comes first, yeah. Or the end of Twitter, which might come first.

Oh, man. Yeah, let's hope. Yeah, that would be 2020's final twist, wouldn't it? It would. I have been amused today that people have been looking at, you know, steroids tend to make you quite hypermanic. And Trump's tweets have gone, they have shifted up a couple of levels. They're all in caps now, every single one of them.

Really? Sarah, you don't need to know. That's something you really don't need to know. But he does seem to have turned into his own bot. He's just spamming out. He literally, he's trolling himself now. This is so

nice. We're so pleased that you could do this. Sarah, where are you? I am in my study in Norwich. Ah, Norwich. We may talk about Norwich shortly. I don't want to give too much away. You're living in exile from Essex.

Are you like Joyce writing about Dublin from Trieste? Someone asked me about this recently, and I genuinely feel best equipped to write about Essex, which I'm doing again when I'm not there yeah um you know things remembered from a distance have a kind of enchantment and an intensity that that aren't there when you're sort of standing outside Poundland in Chelmsford I love Poundland but it doesn't make me want to sit and write long novels so yeah it's definitely it seems to be a thing though I think people do seem to be able to write more intimately about places if they're not actually in the middle of it. It's an interesting idea.

Have you been confined to East Anglia for the last six months or have you gone anywhere? gone anywhere? No, I have taken the quite Calvinist approach of obeying the letter of the law and not one syllable further. So when we were required to lock down, I locked down absolutely and without complaint. And the moment we were allowed somebody in, we had dinner guests. And the moment I was allowed to do anything else, I did it. And so I have been to, down to Essex, I've been over to London, been various places, Peak District, Nottingham. I'm quite reckless. No, no, you've obeyed both the letter and the spirit of the law. Indeed, yeah.

Unlike certain other people, not gathered around this virtual table, but nevertheless. What I love is that the American, reading American newspapers like the New York Times, they can't get their head around the British attitude to, but the British, you know, renowned for their law-abiding rule following all seem to be, and they said that then there's another saying, yeah,

but the British don't really do that when they're, you know, when they feel that they've lost trust in their commanding officer. They are mutinous. Yeah. It's really, I suppose that's quite a lot of that in your book, isn't there, about the opinionated. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Don't tell us what to do.

Once you've lost faith and lost trust in the ruling classes um and it's debatable whether anyone should have an ounce of trust in the ruling classes from the off but once it's completely gone then you know anarchy is the only way to uh to have any kind of personal liberty and it's really interesting isn't it that i think people really did obey the lockdown yes they did the debacle which we will not dignify with our attention and um yeah mutiny followed this would be the this Yes, they did. spots. Let's start. Let's go. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in a louse-infested hut in the mountains of 17th century Japan. The rain is beating down as we wait for night to fall and the poor peasants from the village below to arrive, bearing meagre rations offered in return for us hearing their confessions

and absolving them of their sins. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. Joining us today, at long last, is returning guest, revenant Sarah Perry. Revenant. Welcome back, Sarah Perry. Thank you for having me back. Sarah first appeared on Backlisted episode 43 back in the year 2017, in which she talked very movingly about Edmund Gosse's Victorian memoir, Father and Son. And I'm just going to interrupt the script here and go, of all the books in Batlisted,

amongst the handful that I almost certainly would never have read but which have totally stayed with me since I read them, Father and Son is right up there. So thank you again for getting us to read that. Absolutely. And I think it was one of the podcasts that, I mean, it's still one. I don't go back and listen to many of them, but it's one I have gone back to because I think you captured something there. There was just something that happened in that podcast that doesn't always happen. We got to a sort

of, yeah, we got to some sort of level of truth, which was really... Yeah, I recall it as being a sort of combination of a therapy session and three people on board ship. It was just getting increasingly hysterical. It was amazing. You cried when we played you the recording of Edmund Gosse. So wait till you hear what's coming up in today's show. Sarah is the author of the novels After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent and Melmoth.

Her most recent book is Essex Girls for Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere, a defence and celebration of the Essex Girls stereotype described by The Guardian as, quotes, a polemic that makes room for both Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau. She was born in Essex and now lives in Norwich, where she is working on her fourth novel. And I would like to say that I saw you talking about this, your new book, with my dear friend and former Waterstones colleague 30 years ago, Sid Moore. Hi, Sid, if you're listening to this, who when I saw that you were you've written this book, I thought, oh, my God, Sid is just going to love this book. Right. Yeah. She's like the patron saint of Essex girls I just adore her and um I wrote about her for an essay for the Guardian that came out at the weekend and it was just such a privilege and a pleasure to bring her and Elsa James and

um a school friend of mine who's a an Asian woman doctor um I felt kind of deeply moved by being able to raise them not that they need my help, but yeah, it was great. We'll put a link to that. That's a wonderful piece in The Guardian. We'll put a link to it on the website. The book that Sarah has chosen for us to discuss is Silence by Shusaku Endo, first published in Japanese as Chimoku in 1966, and in the UK in 1969 by Peter Owen in a translation by William Johnston. It won Japan's most prestigious award for original fiction, the Tanizaki Prize in 1966, is generally considered to be Endo's masterpiece and has been adapted for stage and screen several times, most recently by Martin Scorsese in 2016. But before I ask you what you've been reading john i would very politely like to point

out a slight error it wasn't published by peter owen until 2003 that's how recent it is it was first translated into english in japan by william johnston in japan and published in 1969. And then the first British Commonwealth edition was in 1976 by a specialist Japanese European publisher. And it doesn't make it into a trade edition that you could buy in bookshops until – in British bookshops until about 2003. That's interesting because I couldn't find a Peter Owen copyright page to check it, but that's what my hunch was. Quite a lot of places on the internet say Peter Owen 1969, but that makes a lot more sense. I just think it's so interesting about how a book that is

one of the great classics of Japanese literature of the 20th century can crawl its way into British bookshops over the course of nearly 40 years. That's how long it takes for it to... I suppose there was a Picador edition that ties in with the film, but basically it's 50 years to go from pretty much first translation through to mass market edition. But we'll come on to that in a sec. Let me ask you first, John, what have you been reading this week?

I have been reading a debut novel called The Appointment by Katerina Volkma. Katerina is a literary agent at RCW, Rogers, Coleridge and White. And the book is dedicated to the memory of David Miller the great literary agent anthologist, writer, novelist literary agent of the highest taste in memory of David Miller in whose chair I wrote this novel

so I really, really loved it this is fairly outrageous audacious, transgressive it's basically a confessional in one voice you never get to know the woman's name but she's having an appointment in a medical environment with Dr Seligman who is Jewish with his head buried between her legs I'm not going to tell you what what it's pertaining to because it's an important part of the of the story that you you find out as it's an important part of the story that you find out as it's revealed. It is hilariously funny.

She obviously is a massive Thomas Bernhard fan. The prose is immaculate. She captures you, buttonholes you from the very first page and doesn't let you go. It's 30,000 words, so it's quite short. She is a German living in London, and she's a German who is unhappy in the body that she's been born into. She reflects through the book on relationships, her relationships with her parents,

her relationships as a German with the Nazi past. The book starts with a very funny account of her therapy with a guy called Jason, where she decides to entertain Jason. She makes up sexual fantasies about Hitler. So it doesn't pull its punches. One of the things she's fantasizing about is a sex robot being invented by a Japanese guy that she's kind of tempted to invest in with some of her money. And she says, the book All the Way, is Dr. Zelligman is referred to with

his head between her legs, actually peering and taking photographs and doing stuff. But she's talking to him. She obviously trusts him and likes him. I'm worried that it will pervert my mind, Dr. Zelligman, that given my heritage, it will trigger the monster inside me. And gradually, I'll start thinking that Martin, that's the name she's given to the sex robot, that Martin is real, and that I can treat real people like him, that I will forget what a human being is and try to fuck people against their will or worse. But then, this new slavery, and all those new devices and gadgets that are all constantly at our disposal, like delirious lapdogs, there's an irony that previous forms of slavery were lacking. Unlike with more traditional forms of slavery, where people are reduced to their

bodies with the overall aim of making them extinct in the process of torturing them to death and destroying all proof that they ever existed, the kind of slavery that makes us all so rich, these new electronic slaves are burying us alive. Have you noticed, Dr. Zelligman, or maybe you're lucky enough to be too old for this kind of modernity, how all these new slaves are burying us alive. Have you noticed, Dr. Zelligman, or maybe you're lucky enough to be too old for this kind of modernity, how all these new slaves are designed to keep us in the house? How they deprive us of all human contact by bringing us our food and our shopping and our orgasms whilst drowning what's left of our brains in endless TV programmes? How they will fuck up and feed us until we forget how to spell our own name, until we forget that we're not the picture we see of ourselves on a screen,

until what's left of our useless bit of personality is isolated by comfort and silence. And we're actually forced to talk about ourselves. Things always get so awkward because there's really very little to talk about. Do you also sometimes have to go to some form of work drinks, Dr Seligman? The kind of thing where it's not clear whether people smell of piss or coffee, where they make conversation until everybody is so bored that they're ready to roll down a hill in a barrel full of nails. When I still had a job, my only way out of these situations has always been to lie and pretend I came from Berlin, and to then stop listening when people would start rattling off their relentlessly predictable

anecdotes. It's what being German in London is mostly about, pretending that you're from Berlin and that you've read Max fucking Sebald. It works every time. But then I don't really understand the purpose of all this modern way of travelling, Dr Seligman. Don't you agree that it's a tragic delusion to think that anyone has ever learned anything from their three months in Amsterdam or Hanoi? If anything, it usually makes them more of a twat because people always think that they have suddenly

acquired a fashionable form of otherness that entitles them to the assumption that something worth mentioning happened in their lives. That is if by some magic trick they have become different, but different in a good way. I have much more respect for people who go on the same banal holiday on some Mediterranean beach every year instead of turning their holiday into a statement. I'm sure you're making very sensible holiday choices, and I can picture you exchanging your glasses for one of those timeless pairs of shades, Dr Seligman, taking your wife for dinner like you used to all those years ago. You're not like those people who suddenly grow a beard and travel the globe riding a stuffed cat, going to local bars and eating street food, and then come and explain these other cultures to you. These people just upset me, Dr Seligman. They're like American

films about the Holocaust. They turn everything into a cliche until you feel like you're being fucked by Ronald McDonald and you wish there was an electric fence somewhere nearby. I don't even know when everything became so ridiculous that I often struggle to leave the house because I see no way back to how we could become real people again. You're probably right in thinking that this is something I could have spoken to Jason, her therapist, about, that this could have been seen as part of my anger. But I didn't threaten my colleague because of his holiday to Mexico, and I even accepted that little souvenir of a glittery multicoloured skull with grace. I even smiled when he told me about those white beaches and all the mezcal he drank, And I didn't point out that in order to get to all those places, he'd probably passed

several mass graves of violently disappeared people, mostly women. I'm not that kind of person. And that was even before Jason told me that I have to learn to be happy for others and that by not judging others, I could be more generous towards myself and that I could train my mind not to react to those triggers anymore. But I felt that if I did that, there wouldn't be much left of me and that I would just become mellow and gradually disappear. So I just continued to lie to him. Well, I'm getting hints of Thomas Bernhardt. Definitely Thomas Bernhardt. I thought that was tremendous.

I thought that was tremendous. I thought that was tremendous. It's better than you think it has any right to be for a first book. And she's got that great sort of flexible, very funny tone. Some very, very funny passages. Okay, so that's The Appointment by Katharina Volkmar, and that's published by Fitzcarraldo. Yes, an avid reader press in the States for our American listeners. But Andy, what have you been reading this week?

Well, I've actually been reading a book, a massive book that I'm not going to talk about because I'm not ready to talk about it yet. So what I've done instead is I've decided for two reasons to talk about a thing I've been listening to. The first reason is by one of my favorite authors. And the second reason is that although we've already talked about it on Locklisted, it seems so relevant to what we're doing and also to our guest here today that I am effectively falling on my sword so that we can hear Sarah's view of the thing we're about to hear a clip from. Nikki, could you share with us what I've been listening to this week? Yes, I can. I've done a lot, but I've never done a podcast. It's something I've talked about with my team for some time.

I had been resistant to podcasting. Of course I had, like most people. I assumed people who hosted podcasts were pale, tech-obsessed social lepers who couldn't get a platform on any meaningful broadcaster, so started spouting their bloated opinions into their USB microphones to flatter their groaning self of sense importance. But then I was made an offer by the guys at Audible, who are now my best friends. So it'll be a combination of off-the-cuff and things

I've written down the night before to read out loud, such as the portion I'm reading now. And I became so excited by the idea that I stopped feeling miffed about people harming my brand or scurrilous lies. And I just started to think positively about what this podcast could be. And if I could damage my enemies along the way, great. I thought this could be something quite special. And so, over the course of the next 18 episodes, I want you to sit down, relax, and look inside me. And I want you to look right inside, into my life and my house. No guests, no stunts, no discernible shape or form.

Just me at home doing what I do. No discernible shape or form. Okay, so if anybody doesn't know that was the writer and broadcaster alan partridge and his new project is a podcast called alan partridge from the oast house and we'll try not to do too many impressions or versions of the voice because we're not as good as it as steve coogan uh the for the two alan partridges, the two of the best audiobooks ever made because, as we've said, we talked about them on this podcast before because what you're listening to is Steve doing a performance as Alan Partridge reading his own audiobook rather than just reading the audiobook.

The books themselves are really funny. Here's this thing, Sarah Perry, that they've made that is six and a half six and three quarter hours long every single bit of which is at the absolute top of the shop quality standard for me this is such a brilliantly performed, but also written... Completely agree....that Steve Coogan and the Gibbons brothers, the writing in this thing is incredibly good, consistent and of an unbelievably high standard. Sarah Perry, do you agree? Yeah, it's all right.

No. So I've now listened to it six and a half times. So I've now listened to it six and a half times. And my most listened to audio books are now Nomad, I, Partridge and From the Oast House. Yes. In that order, in fact. I think, and I'm saying this in total seriousness,

that it is sublime. And what I mean is it's transcendent. It is so much better than it needs to be in every single respect, every sip he takes from a cup of options, every time he tries to hurtle himself over a style on a country walk and sort of swallows his words as he goes, but then picks himself up and carries on. Everything is just exquisite and i i genuinely think and bear in mind i have not one but two phds and one of them i actually

studied for so this does count i genuinely believe it is the single greatest character arc in fiction of the 20th and 21st century. How on earth they managed to pull off the development of an entire consciousness from a kind of callous twat with just buried inside him just a little bit of humanity and then to eke out very, very slowly over literal decades that the growth of this person. And so by the end of From the oast style house as it should technically be um because you know technically speaking it's not an oast house

because it's a new build which is why it has v-lux blinds uh in the roof and so by the end of from the oast house he's rescued a magpie and i know at least three people who have just stood sobbing in the kitchen as he's talking to mor, this little fledgling magpie that he's rescued. I just can't praise it enough. I really can't. I can't find the language really to explain to people who don't understand what it is that they're seeing. Yeah, that's exactly right.

I mean, I'm totally with you on this. That's one of the one of the frustrations of it is they're work they're working i mean i i was about to say they're working in a medium that traditionally doesn't get respect of the kind you're talking about um i mean you respect it and i respect it but i think lots of people listening to this you know when for me if the writing is working and the performance is working that's as good as reading a book or listening to a book and in this case i totally agree with you i think the arc is the arc is totally fascinating to me how the gibbons brothers managed to make

nearly 30 years of bits fit together is a constant source of wonder to me. Like there's a brilliant gag in passing. Andrew Mayle pointed this out to me. There's a brilliant gag in passing from The Oast House where they refer to Alan's hair not being right at about the time they made the film. So that's obviously an in joke about about creative arguments that took place with the previous uh production team and the current production team about why alan would suddenly have a mullet in 2015 but never since do you want to hear my theory about this which is that a lot

of people criticize alfa papa which i've only seen five times, so obviously I'm not as much of a fan as I am of the audiobooks. People criticise that book, the film, as setting slightly outside what we think of as being Alan. But I fully believe that that film is intended to be Alan's presentation of himself in an action film. There are so many running gags all the way through the audio books about things like, you know, his ideas for Swallow, is it?

And, you know, all his ideas for... What's the one that's a fireman whose wife died in a fire? And so he's always pitching these ideas for films. So it's like a meta... That film is a meta-narrative of the moment in which we get to see Alan as he sees himself yeah and i i will write a phd on that if someone comes in because i believe it so passionately where do you think people should start if they have never

listened read watched any alan partridge i think that they should start with knowing me knowing you so not the radio and not the ones where he he had sort of bit parts as a sports reporter but with the knowing me knowing you tv series where he's sort of fully formed but i really think in order to understand what they have achieved the only way really to grasp it is to follow it in order from then. Go all the way through. Because it is like living alongside a fellow human being, a fellow real fully formed human soul with all his frailties that you see change. Also, they do a brilliant thing, don't they, where the pain of his divorce, which at the time it was happening in the mid to mid to late 90s he didn't talk about much

now it's 2020 it comes through but you know because he can recall he's willing to talk about it a bit more it's utterly brilliant obviously coogan really loves this is one of the things i think in the podcast is so great what you're hearing is like the bit in the podcast where alan goes out for a run and tries to continue broadcasting what you're hearing is alan do it but you're also hearing steve coogan and the gibbons brothers going wouldn't it be great if we tried to do this i wonder what would happen if we did it so it's just the most brilliant thing so it's nice of you to be so lukewarm about it anyway, Sarah. That's... You know me.おいさぁ、ほい、ちょっけほい、パパー

むげのながにびそこ いしがくりえるこらさんさえ ピュー、とぅらは、パパパパー なにがまはくるこぶじがわきべえにしやがっては ずうてはかいがなき、とぅらは、パパパパー I put that in especially for John Mitchinson. Do you know why, John? Go on. There was a clue in the song when he went...

WHISTLE BLOWS That is the 17th century traditional Japanese song of a shepherd. Ah, a whistling song. Great. An actual shepherd song, clearly not recorded back then, more recently, but still quite a long time ago from the sound of it. That's brilliant. So this is our way of introducing this novel, Silence, which is set in the 17th century in Japan. We should just say from a backlisted point of view, this continues the accidental backlisted spiritual progress, which has been ongoing in episodes this year.

We did an episode on the varieties of religious experience by William James. And we brought Salinger into that. And we talked about Salinger's spiritual journey. And then we did Laudet. We did the poems of the 14th century Kashmiri poet. And here we are now addressing issues of Catholicism and faith in 17th century Japan, thanks to Sarah Perry. We'll pick this up again after some marvellously witty

and interesting adverts. You are welcome. It's been very intense, this progress, as you can imagine. Yes, it's a sort of strange, mystical lockdown can imagine yes it's sort of strange mystical lockdown course john had you read this book before no i mean it's one of those books i my dad is a for some odd reason well not an odd reason he's a great writer but he's a big fan he'd my dad was spent some time in japan and he loved endo so i'd always i would always been around and i was meant to read it you know in the way that you do uh but never had so it's a fantastic opportunity to do so i did see the film

when it came out so i knew something about it the scorsese film and it came out in 2016 the novel is is leaner and i think much more powerful ultimately than the film so no i hadn't i hadn't read anything by endo before i'm just going to read the blurb on the back of the the paperback so that people know the time and place that we're talking about silence is shizaku endo's most highly acclaimed novel it is the story of an idealistic Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Sebastian Rodriguez, who in the 1640s set sail for Japan, determined to help the brutally oppressed Japanese Christians, and to discover the truth about his former mentor, who is rumoured to have rejected glorious martyrdom and apostatised. But once faced with the reality of religious persecution rodriguez is himself forced to make an impossible choice whether to abandon his flock or his god i mean i think that's a pretty good

blurb and then there are a series of incredible quotes from people like david mitchell and john updyke and we'll talk a bit about that as well later on. So, Sarah, I know this is one of your favourite novels because we've talked about it before. Yeah. When did you read it for the first time? It would have been about seven years ago, I think just before my first book came out. And I sort of navigate life hoping to be struck by lightning

in various ways and I tend to go through phases of desperately seeking a book that will challenge or enliven or enchant or break me in some way and months pass and that you know they're fine books are fine aren't they and I went to Foyles in London and was scanning the shelves. And this, I'm just holding up my edition for you to see. It's an old American one from when you couldn't get, there was no British publication of it. And it has a very striking cover. It's plain white and it has Japanese sort of calligraphy on the front

with a red stamp of Christ on the cross. And I'd never before seen a conflation of Japanese manuscript and Christian imagery before. And me being me, that kind of leapt out at me. I'd never heard of it, never heard of Endo. This was long before the film. And I took it home and read it in a day and increasingly felt a kind of desolation descend on me, having been somebody who did have a very profound faith and hasn't lost it entirely, but certainly is in a very different place.

And there are two places in this book towards the end. I won't say what they are. One involves overhearing snoring and another involves a plea for God to speak. And very rarely in life and in books, you actually feel a fracture. And I just burst into tears in the truest sense of bursting. And I've read it again since, and the same thing happened as if there's a fault line. And then I read it today, lying in my study, and exactly the same thing happened again. It's just extraordinary, almost too painful for me to think about. But I really think one of the finest novels of the 20th century and probably the finest Christian novel of the 20th century, actually.

Let's go straight to it. Is that because of personal identification or because of the craft of it or a mixture of the two a mixture of the two so less interestingly the craft is fascinating so when you when i was able to read it this time round with an eye slightly more to technique um because i was prepared to snap in half like i was like i did last time it's comprised comprised of letters that Rodriguez writes home, third person present tense narrative and third person past tense narrative. And endo slips between these techniques to affect you in different ways. So there will be a paragraph, for example, when the priest is imprisoned and there is a very intense description of the atmosphere and the insects and the food, and that's all present tense. So you are there.

Then he will slip into third person so that you are then sitting back and receiving a story. And then right at the beginning, it's a series of epistolary. It's a series of letters. It's incredibly clever. But if i didn't have the personal identification that i did it's it wouldn't have landed in the way that it did i don't think yeah okay i i'm gonna mention graham green immediately because i'm not a catholic i have some faith uh but it's pretty wishy-washy. And I had read The Power and the Glory. I haven't read it for many years, but I've read it several times. And I found reading Silence a very weird experience,

not because I think either book is a copy of the other book, but because the similarities between the two books and the way the two authors approach the same subject in ways that when I was, you know, 18 or 20 or whatever, when I was reading a lot of Graham Greene, I liked that Greene's approach to the subject, the priest, you know, struggling with his faith while in a strange land under pressure,

that in Gre Green's narrative, the storytelling is quite closed. You know, it's in the way Green wrote, that he's interested in narrative and he's interested in setting up ideas, but he tends to know what he thinks and what he wants to communicate to the reader. And that was to my taste when I was a younger person. Reading Silence, which covers some of the same territory, I thought I'm so pleased I'm reading this now

because the way Endo, the craft of it, is so much more open than you would find in Graham Greene. I don't just mean in terms of the ending, which we'll gently approach later on without giving anything away, but just how much space there is left for you, the reader, to deal with the issues that characters don't even represent. Characters change their mind as the book continues, right? I don't know how you felt about that john

you know this is such a different book to the power and the glory to which it's compared here very often but in fact it's so different in approach i mean it's interesting that endo was a very uh big fan of greens it was a mutual and he apparently would always read not the power and the glory but the end of the affair before he wrote a novel he'd reread that so you do feel that there's there's some there's some of that kind of greenian dna in in his storytelling what i think makes this book different is his capacity for ambiguity but this is a much more ambiguous book than you would imagine it is. And part of that you can feel is driven by the fact that Endo was more or less forcibly converted by his mother as a child to Christianity.

And then after that, he travels. He has a pretty rough war where he works in a munitions factory. And then he travels to Europe and becomes very ill and gets tuberculosis. So he had an ambiguous relationship with Catholicism. The book is really all about the relationship between can you transplant a Western religion into what's regularly referred to as the swamp, the mud swamp of Japan, and can it survive and flourish? Maybe what a different writer would have done would have been simply to have told the story. I mean, if you want adventure, there's plenty of amazing adventure. If you want horrifying scenes of torture and if you want Dostoevskian dialogue between people debating the nature of faith, this book has all of that. And yet it's not a long novel. So technically speaking, this is a historical novel and was a big bestseller in Japan.

I mean, really big bestseller when it was published in the 1960s. It's like three quarters of a million copies in hardback. It's a huge thing. Yeah, and won the sort of Japanese Booker, you know, the Tanizaki Prize. But did you read it as a historical novel? No. No, I didn't either. No, absolutely not.

My responses to your responses are deeply inflected by the fact that I am coming to this book as someone who loved Christ as both a person and as God for 28, 30 years without question, without change, and who gradually receded from that or felt it recede from her. So to me, although it is absolutely about culture and about transplanting a religion into, as he does repeatedly call it, a swamp, it differs from Graham Greene in the sense that with Greene's approach to Catholicism, one always has this sense that he's interested in it, that he has a kind of anthropological interest in what these people are like.

That's true, yeah. Bendo is not interested in it. He is torn apart, I think, because I don't think he could have written this without it. He is torn apart by the knowledge of what a numinous and astounding and extraordinary thing faith is and how terrible it is to know it and not have it and that's not historical that that's kind of eternal and as you know we all know the best historical fiction isn't about the past it's it's about the present and there are there are parts of this book which are could it's inconceivable that it could have come from a

consciousness that did not love the person of Christ, because that's what this book is about. Can you fall out of love with a loved one and then spit on their countenance for your own sake or for the sake of others? Sarah, could I just ask you to clarify on that? When you say spit on the countenance, I want to ask you, because people who haven't read the book won't know what you mean there. So at the heart of this book is Rodrigo's has gone in search of a great Jesuit priest called Ferreira, and it has been said that he has apostatised, and what that means is that he has abandoned God. And to anybody brought up in the Christian faith, they will receive that word with kind of dread.

It's such a terrible thing to have lost God, to be excommunicated, not from church, but from God, from faith. And so he tries to find Ferreira. And at the time, the authorities in Japan, having been very receptive to the Christian faith, are rooting it out. And what they do is something very cunning. They have an image of Christ on a kind of bronze coin set in a plank of wood. And in a process called the Fumi, if someone who professes to be a Christian will trample on the face of Christ and perhaps even spit on it, they're spared torture. And furthermore, their loved ones

are spared torture. And of course, rationally, it's an absolute no-brainer. Stand on a bronze coin, you know, save yourself from the pit, which is a form of torture that's described in the book. But I understand very dimly, but I do understand how you might prefer to burn or to drown or to die in torment over the course of a fortnight rather than step on the face of Christ. And this book, I've lent this book to people who just can't understand it because it seems monstrous that you would even debate. And so, yeah, it's really,

I've never seen religious feeling conveyed in fiction so accurately. In the light of what you were just saying, Sarah, this is a clip from the 2016 film adaptation of Silence, which Martin Scorsese made. And you're going to hear a clip of Andrew Garfield as Father Rodriguez, who has been captured in Japan. Rodriguez, who has been captured in Japan. And for the first time, we meet a character whom we only know as the interpreter, who is going to be the person who he spends much of his time when he's being interrogated and psychologically tortured, understanding what is going on and what might be demanded of him.

And this is the first time they meet. And in a sense, it reprises some of the things you've just been talking about. We wanted to be fair. And we do have a better grasp of your language than you do of ours. Father Cabral never managed much more than Arigataya. All the time he lived here, he taught, but would not learn. He despised our language, our food, our customs. We have our own religion, Padre.

Pity you did not notice it. No, no. We just think a different way. True. You believe our Buddhas are only men, just human beings. Even a Buddha dies, like all men he is not you ignorant Padre only a Christian would see Buddha simply as man our Buddha is a being which man can become something greater than himself if he can overcome all his illusions but you cling to your illusions and call them faith

no you don't understand if any man follows god's commandments then he can live a peaceful and joyous i do understand padre it is perfectly simple have you heard that word Korobu. Have you heard that word? Korobu. It means fall down, surrender, give up the faith, apostatise, as you say. I find that very powerful to listen to, actually. The performance by Tadnobu Asano as the interpreter, is really great and really in keeping with how it's presented in the book, this constant switching between charm and disdain. Yeah, Inoue, the interrogator as well, Issey Ogata's performance is incredible, I think, in that film and just sort of menace and kind of geniality.

Sarah, why is the book called Silence? Yeah. It is speaking to the moments throughout the book where Rodriguez pleads with God to speak and to show him the way forward. I actually have bookmarked a fragment of paper that says The Silence, anticipating this very question. So he is wrestling right at the end, facing martyrdom,

having witnessed the most abysmal, abysmal suffering. I mean, the book is actually quite hard to read from the point of view of the torture that's depicted there. The voice of Ferreira, together with the groaning of the Christians, burst mercilessly in, and Rodriguez is thinking this, his free and direct speech. Stop, stop. Lord, it is now that you should break the silence.

You must not remain silent. Prove that you are justice, that you are goodness, that you are love. You must say something to show the world that you are the august one. A great shadow passed over his soul like that of the wings of a bird flying over the mast of a ship. But this is a logical problem as well, isn't it?

Yes. Because he says you must prove, in which case it's no longer faith. And the reason why I ask you why is it called silence, the silence of God, but arguably, Rodriguez solves the logical problem by remaining silent. That silence becomes the thing that he is. Yeah. And this is what we don't know.

Is he reduced to silence? Yeah. Or does he choose silence? Yeah. Right. We're not giving away an ending too badly, Nikki, so you don't have to edit this bit Yeah. Right. So we're not giving away an ending too badly, Nikki. So you don't have to edit this bit out. Yeah.

Right. That, that what, what, to what extent is he choosing for himself? So I have a confession to make, which is this. I've read this book three times.

And by the time I come to the last six or seven pages, I am unfailingly so distressed that I almost skim the end and I still couldn't tell you exactly what happens. I have an image in my mind and there are some words that he says that I can't say because it relates to silence and that spoils it. It is one of the very few books that I lived to an extent that my memory of it is unreliable. I felt that the film, the Scorsese film, was remarkably faithful to the novel until the last 30 seconds. Completely agree.

Because Scorsese couldn't leave it open in the way that Endo does, right? And I agree with you, Sarah. It's actually quite difficult to decode what's actually happened near the end of the book, but that's deliberate, right? That's saying to you, the reader, this is space for you to walk around in. You don't need me to dot the I's and cross the t's here i in van i'm not going to look it's a very good film in so many ways in in in the texture and the some of the performances i think are incredible but there's a forward momentum in the book

nobody could suggest that there are long goes in this book and they're definitely along goes in the film i'm puzzled and annoyed by the ending of the film because I think it just like, it's sort of, like you say, I mean, it was Scorsese's decision apparently, but it resolves the ambiguity, and the ambiguity is... Is the heart of the book. The ambiguity is the heart of the book. I would say the ambiguity, you know,

the opposite of faith isn't certainty. Ambiguity is faith. Faith is always contested. If you're certain, that isn't faith. I've got John Updike's review from the New Yorker here from 1979. I'll just read you a very short bit because it kind of dovetails to what we're talking about and then see what you think.

Updike's very interested in the image of the death of that priest, his head bobbing in the sea. And it recurs, Updike says in Endo's novel, When I Whistle. There's another scene with that. The idea that you see from a distance

a human being that you cannot touch, but you can see is there one minute to whatever extent and is not there two minutes later. And this is what Updike says about silence. shaping his incidents towards an extremity of christian temptation in a situation of true hopelessness endo has conceived a narrative more orthodox in texture and thought than most novels by 20th century christians he talks a bit about the power and the glory. And then he says, but the Japanese author brings to his Pascalian themes and even to his descriptions of torture and execution, a tact as inexorable and hypnotic as his steady, grey, murderous sea. Alpdyke is not the force that he once was but that seems to me really good writing you know that's really great critical writing

the sense of water the sea the rain the drizzle not just in silence actually in Foreign Studies the novel that precedes it such an obvious symbol in foreign studies, the novel that precedes it. Such an obvious symbol in terms of its ubiquity,

but used so subtly and in so many different ways. Silence is that enormous grey sea, right, Sarah? It's indifference, the indifference of this thing lapping and lapping yeah yeah I completely agree and I'm really struck by Updike's use of the word tact yes yeah because there is a reference to a form of torture which was there at the time where people would be suspended by their ankles over a pit with two small cuts behind their ears to allow a very small release of letting of blood so that it would take a long time to die and this isn't really described particularly in the novel itself and the horror of that is revealed with reference to overhearing somebody's snore.

And I have never seen true physical and psychological horror delivered with such a shock because you're lulled along tactfully, not realising what's happening. And when the light breaks and you realise what's happening, it's worse than, you know, any number of visceral horror films. It really is. So tact is an exquisite way of putting it, actually. It's that wonderful way he is, Rodriguez is talking to Ferreira and Ferreira has apostatised and is studying astronomy

and trying to be useful. He says, at least I've found a use in this country. And he's given his great example of the swamp and the sapling dying. But then he goes that little bit further. He says, if the Japanese had come to believe in the God we taught, he's saying that you should be proud that there were 400,000. At one point, there were 400,000 and they built churches and cathedrals. Francis Xavier thought that Japan was going to be the best place in the Orient for Christianity to take root. He said, yeah, that was something to

be proud of, Rodriguez says to him. And Ferreira says, proud, yes, if the Japanese had come to believe in the God we taught. But in the churches we built through this country, the Japanese were not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine. If you call that God, Ferreira lowered his eyes and moved his lips as though something had occurred to him. No, that is not God. It is like a butterfly caught in a spider's web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly. It's lost its true reality and has become a skeleton. In Japan, our God is just like that butterfly caught in the spider's web.

Only the exterior form of God remains, but it has already become a skeleton. It's just that kind of wisdom in Ferreira. He's been through all this. It's very, very painful to read, isn't it? Because Rodriguez needs to believe. He has cast himself in this sort of Christ-like role all the way through the book um and like I say it's difficult because the the profundity comes in the end in the movement within Rodriguez himself that actually he when he and the clue to that is silence the

clue to that is is is it's um it's it's it's such an interesting it's such an interesting novel. We should say as well, it's such an interesting thing that this novel is sort of marginal here. Don't you think, Sarah, in the West? You know, this is a, you know, Endo is a big, is one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. I mean, we've talked about this and you've talked about it, Sarah, in explicitly religious terms because of your connection with the book

or the connection you felt with the book and your personal circumstances. But actually, you don't need to be Christian or have a faith to understand that the book is dealing with what? With the communion between yourself and the sense of something bigger than yourself. Yeah. You do not need to be a Christian to appreciate this book any more than you need to be an axe murderer to understand crime and punishment, you know. It's the framework within which universalities are being inspected, right? So you have crime and punishment speaks to everybody for its examination of culpability and wretchedness and redemption and forgiveness and all of that stuff in whatever theological or non-theological framework you choose

to operate in and silence speaks to all of our tendencies to operate within some kind of realm that we've set for ourselves that may be totally atheistic but everybody has their moral framework what happens when something comes along and tears that know, how do you kind of hold yourself in? But I suspect that it hasn't been as popular in the UK because we're very, very squeamish these days about what appears to be very Christian writing and are failing to understand that it's universal. Can I ask you, we said that the novel is about the silence of God.

One of the silences is the silence of God. How did you find reading this in 2020? You know, this is a year where arguably God has been silent. I'm not asking you to stick up for God here. I'm not asking you to stick up for God here. I'm just, it made me think, reading it now made me think about, well, how do we deal with these major events which we're being subjected to? Well, there's two things that occur to me.

One of them is this. If God is silent now, he has always been silent. And if he has not been silent, then he is not silent now. 2020 is not a unique year. It's difficult for us, but there was 1939 to 1945. There was 1918 when the Spanish flu broke out, when an entire generation had been slaughtered in the trenches. You know, this is the convulsing of an animal that has been convulsing for hundreds of thousands of years. And I don't see that God would elect to be silent over a coronavirus when he, you know, and had not been.

So either he has always been silent and is silent now, or he is not silent now. But I don't think he's silent now. I'm going to behave like a vicar. I'm really sorry. In the New Testament, there is the story of a tower that fell, the Tower of Siloam that fell. So someone was building a tower and it collapsed and it killed many, many people. It was a devastating loss.

And Christ's followers came to him and he said, what did those people do to deserve a tower falling on them? And he said, nothing, nothing people do to deserve a tower falling on them? And he said, nothing, nothing at all. It simply happened. What you need to do is think to yourself, and I paraphrase here, what you need to do is have a word and think a tower might fall on me at any point. And therefore, how do I live? How do I love? How do I have faith? And I think if there is no silence, if God is speaking and you can insert whatever you like into the square brackets around God, that's the thing. Not that we're being punished because that's not how it works, but that life is very finite, very precious. Death is always just around the corner. And therefore how do we live how should we be

so um certainly 2020 didn't knock my poor battered face any more than it had already been comprehensively kicked that's a good answer okay you've answered the mean question i asked but reading the book did the book feel different to you this time around? No, it didn't. No. Because it's transcendent. It's transcending the kind of particularities of life and getting right to the heart of the matter. You know, I could have read it two years ago, three years ago when there was no pandemic, but I was suffering infinitely more than I am now. Or I could have read it a few years before that when my faith was still with me. So I don't know if I'm selfish.

Yeah, there was no kind of COVID inflection. It's interesting that Carol Phillips, the writer and novelist, is a huge Endo fan. Harold Phillips, the writer and novelist, is a huge Endo fan. And he says that Endo celebrates the puzzling grey area and reminds us that the old loyalties and certainties are in our modern world subject to fluidity and transformation, irrespective of what the authorities above us, religious or otherwise, might have us believe. And that seems to me to be that it's incidentally a historical novel because you come to the same thing all and all again, the individual versus the institution. The silence in the end, it's nurturing, isn't it? The silence isn't the emptiness, the absence of God.

It's what Julian of Norwich felt in her cell. It's a deeply spiritual state. You know, it's a deeply spiritual, you know, state. You know what, John? I was thinking about that while you were talking. I don't know. That's sort of the best thing I can say about the novel. I don't know. Good.

I feel like you're taken on a tour of things that really matter. And then you're left yeah and you did and you decide you now you decide these people live these these things they didn't exist but they're they're they're they're torments existed and continue to exist and reader, now you make up your mind. You know, that's, again, I hate this phrase, but fiction, right? I mean, I think that's what makes it not just a good novel, but a great novel. I think it is a great novel. Yeah. And I think it's, and I completely agree that you don't need

to have any formal religious faith to find it deeply compelling. And also, I mean, just it's painful. It's one of the most painful books I've ever read. And I think that's because he tells the story, whatever his autobiographical, what's driving him. He is trying to connect to archetypal stories. It is a huge archetypal story. it and it's like i say he does it in 260 pages i just want to mention before we go uh that i was looking around for

um stuff today and i found an advert by waterstones booksellers from 1988 which i reckon was written by their then marketing person John Mitchinson and it's for the Waterstones Guide to Books second edition and I want to ask you John that notable white elephant if 32 years later these words sound familiar the headline is how to have a bookshop in the palm of your hand the blurb says we're proud of our booksellers. They're always on hand to give you any advice you may need. Unfortunately, they can't always be there

when you're struck by those nagging questions, like, why is Shizako Endo often described as the Japanese Graham Greene? Did you write that 32 years ago? It rings very vague bells. I mean, I certainly signed it off. What I find so interesting is that is the thing that Waterstones in 1988, 32 years ago, would have used as the sort of people they wanted

to come into their bookshops would ask that question. It's one of Tim Waterstone's favourite novels. That I can tell you. I mean, in that way, I felt I'd read it because he was always banging on about it. And he was right. He was right to have been banging on about it. I think it was on the core stock, you know.

There were some books that we always used to check to see if they were in stock. There was that, there was North Atlantic Seafood by Alan Davidson was the one I always used to make sure that we had in stock. Anyway, I've got to put my foot firmly on the Fumi now and bring our discussion to a reluctant close. A huge thank you to Sarah for guiding us through

the archetypal extraordinariness of this great novel, to Nicky Burts for recovering our voices from the enduring silence and making us sound more or less coherent, and to Unbound for sending us out on the original mission. You can download all 121 previous episodes of Backlisted, plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, backlisted.fm. And we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook

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That temple of devotional listening, looking, reading and watching, where Andy, Nick and I gather to entertain ourselves and we hope you too. Lot listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. So here are some of them now. John, why don't you go first? I will. Ziziko, Tobias McCorkle, Haltahi Kingi, Claire Rogers, Belinda Eade, Malin Anderson, Emily Sleep, Tom Nisley. Thanks, Tom.

Stuart Dix, Johanna, Joe Darling, Nick Riddle. Thanks, Nick. Daniel Barrick, Jason Hewitt. hewitt uh gordon green kathy woodward lizzie ostrom chris burton matthew spencer andrea riley andy green kylie not that one it's spelt differently kevin white simon smith michael budakowski jan domini lottie who winkton kate pam wetnell, Kevin Longree, Mindy Collins. Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you, everybody. All listeners owe you a debt of gratitude for helping sponsor us do this. And Sarah Perry, thank you very much. Well, thank you.

I'm sorry that wasn't a barrel of laughs like last time. You didn't cry, though. We cried. No, no. We cried. We had a bit of partridge earlier. Yeah, that's true. There was joy to start with. No, that was fantastic. Thank you so, so much. It's a wonderful,

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