This is my first time rereading Silence since it was originally published back in 1989. I snagged a copy from the library and never got around buying a copy of my own. It became so ubiquitous and was so influential that I somehow never got around to it, even though I know I recommended it to lots of people at the time. Then the film came out and the whole thing went stratospheric. I didn't even see the film when it was on general release: I watched it on ferry back from France. Anyway. I was annoyed at Silence because of the way it turned the police procedural into almost fetishistic forensic investigation for sexycool serial killers Me, I preferred the approach in Peter Straub's Koko, released around the same time, also about a hunt for a serial killer but with nary an autopsy or fibre analysis. Though Koko was successful in its own terms, it was Silence that set its stamp on popular culture, and I was unreasonably annoyed about that.

Weird then to discover how little forensics there is in the book itself. There's one post-mortem examination, the antithesis of every pop-video fast-cut CSI montage. It deals with the body and those who examine it with humanity and respect, and the psychological profiling is fairly basic and dismissed with contempt by good old Doctor Lecter. Even his own insights turn out retrospectively to have been the result of direct knowledge of the killer rather than second-hand analysis.

What we have then, is an amazing game of cat-and-mouse between Starling and Lector. The film has inescapably stamped its imprint all over the book, but that's okay. The book and the film complement each other quite well. So Starling is Foster and Lector is Hopkins and, not insignificantly, Scott Glenn is Jack Crawford. Certainly you couldn't ask for a better cast to voice the characters in your head, and the book has a greater depth that the film can't match.

The book is also incredibly well written, rare enough in massively popular bestsellers. It's a rare author who can handle switching POVs and moving in and out of the present tense so smoothly, giving voice to the anger and pain of the victims and the agents and the crazy evil of the killer with equal assurance. Lector's escape at the book's mid-point is one of the most riveting sequences in all of suspense fiction, and the narrative dexterity when he wrong-foots the reader a few chapters later is subtle and sophisticated. Jeffrey Deaver appears to have made a career out of replicating endless variations of that sequence and that trick, so you can appreciate Harris' restraint all the more.

I suppose it's understandable that Harris turned the sequel, Hannibal into a sort of gorgeous, camp gothic romance rather than try to replicate Silence. Whatever you might think of that, this itself remains a masterpiece of the thriller genre, and though you might expect endless imitators to have diluted its effectiveness, the fact is none of them really got to the heart of what makes it work. Read it, watch the film and enjoy it all over again.