It turns out that Crawford has quietly planted the seeds of Starling's rescue, which entails letting Mason Verger know that Starling has received a letter from Lecter. Verger is a deformed but still living victim of Lecter, Lecter being the real hero of this novel because he only kills other serial killers and naughty cops. Lecter, when he was still a respected shrink and his evil doings unknown, was sent Verger, who was a young child molester. With the use of drugs including LSD, Lecter put Verger in a state of complete slavery to the point that he obeyed Lecter's order to cut off his own face with a shard of mirror and feed it to two dogs. He also cut off and ate his own nose. By the way, this all happened well in the past and the screenwriter won't have to bother to show it; the horror of it will simply be recounted to Starling. Anyway, Verger, the heir of a corrupt meat packer, now lies, deformed and paralyzed, in a special unit on his family's estate. He has no lower jaw. He has but one eye, without a lid and which is kept moistened by a monocle contraption. The skin of his face is gone. He has assistants who round up poor kids, whom he scares and mind controls into crying, their tears sopped up so that he can drink them as martinis later.

What he does have is a thirst for revenge, and the bulk of the plot entails his efforts to track down Lecter so that he can kidnap the man and watch as two genetically bred killer hogs eat him alive over several days. Anyway, Crawford gets Starling assigned to his behavioral unit, and tells her about Verger. It's good to meet him again (and awful that Harris makes him die of a heart attack in a throwaway reference near the end). There is a well wrought, interesting tension between the two.

By the way, around this time, Harris lets loose with a terrible attack on the internet. he writes, "In cyberspace at least, interest in Dr Lecter remained very much alive. The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number. Impostors plagued the chat rooms and in the phosphorescent swamp of the Web's dark side, police photographs of his outrages were bootlegged to collectors of hideous arcana. There were second in popularity only to the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li." I don't happen to know who Fou-Tchou-Li is, and a quick peek on the internet revealed nothing to me, but I find it curious that Harris, who barters in outrage, should find the internet distasteful. That's Savanarola calling De Sade black.

Now, on page 50, we finally get The Journey. Demme and Talley made great use of jogging paths, labyrinthine hallways, asylum corridors, and maze-like basements, among other sites, to represent Starling's transitional passages to enlightenment and to symbolize the insanity of the psychopath. Here, Starling drives out to the Verger farm in north Maryland. This is another maze scene. First she meets Verger's lesbian sister Margot, who gallops up on a horse garbed in the "manly" fashion of jodhpurs and riding boots. Every time she appears, Harris is careful to remind us how her jodhpered thighs swush together. Mainstream novelist though he is, Harris is not without psychological insight. In the Crawford scene Starling muses to her boss that "It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you." Here, as Margot takes Starling through the maze of structures that take them deeper to the meeting with Verger, Harris notes that there "is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt."  That's good. Margot assumes that Starling will be freaked out by Verger, and is ready to be amused.

o, finally Starling meets Verger. This will be a key scene in the film, and must be played with all the juice that the first Lecter-Starling meeting had. How to suggest the horror of Verger's body without driving away all the women audience members or prevent kids from getting in to see it at all? That will be the challenge, and the easy solution is to follow the Val Lewton standard of mere suggestion, of quick flashes and so on (the scene does take place in a darkened room). In her dialogue here, Starling sounds like herself from the movie (though Harris has supposedly never seen any of the movies made from his three previous books). When Verger tells her about the conspicuous eel in the corner, he asks her, "It's common name is the Brutal Moray, would you like to see why?," she answers "No," quickly, and the effect comes off the page amusingly, and you can see how Foster will play it well.

This is the scene wherein Verger tells Starling how Lecter manipulated him into self-mutilation. It should play well, especially with good musical accompaniment, and Foster listening with suppressed horror -- at both Verger, whom we are made to feel deserved his punishment, and Lecter. As we know from soap operas, villains all too often become the heroes, and this is the first hint that Lecter is a force of cruel justice, the real object of Harris's affection.

It turns out that Lecter was born with an extra finger that he had to have removed and the next section of the book is a wild goose chase with Starling looking for medical records that prove that an x-ray in Verger's possession is of Lecter. The point of this is not clear, since Verger already knows what he needs to know -- but it does dictate that Starling revisit the dungeon at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where Chilton teased Lecter (a connecting scene with with Chilton's surviving nurse girlfriend should be dropped for economy). This attempt to recreate the tension of the first film should be irrelevant, as we have the same thing in the meeting with Verger. In any case, Starling goes to the now abandoned hospital, and we have a scene reminiscent --nay, replicating -- the one in the first in which she goes to a storage unit and gives the guardian a number to call if she doesn't come back soon. Here, she browbeats a guard into staying past his relief time. She then snoops around in the basement, where she finds file cabinets in Lecter's old cell, and the medical evidence she needs. She also encounters Sammie, the madman who replaced Miggs in his cell, after Lecter talked Miggs into killing himself after throwing his sperm in Starling's face. Next she tracks down Barney (originally played by Frankie Faison), the guard who supervised Lecter. It turns out that Barney has been silently selling his Lecteriana on the market. He has an x-ray she needs. It's all irrelevant, and just an excuse to slip in Barney, who later shows up as Verger's nurse, and has some quasi-sexual encounters with Margot.

This section putters out with some mind numbing detail and then we get to the next major passage, which is set in Florence. Here Lecter has resurfaced as Dr Fell, curator of something called the Palazzo Capponi. We also meet Rinaldo Pazzi, an investigator who failed to bring down Il Mostro, a lovers' lane serial killer ("The Italian sense of irony was strong in Pazzi"). When he stumbles onto the presence of Lecter, he decides to "sell" him to Verger, who has flyers up all over Europe offering a rich reward for information. Lecter, with his incredible acuity, senses that the Quantico trained cop has made the connection, and lays a trap for him. This sequence culminates in a replica of Lecter's escape from the law in Memphis in Silence, and Pazzi is disembolwed and flung down to the street from a great height. This sequence is Martin Cruz Smith country, much too long and boring, and too long to go without Starling, Crawford, or, really, even a good death. A potential adaptor will find this the hardest portion to work into the script in that it is essentially a whole new story on its own, separate from the main story. A wise way to condense it, if it is even necessary, would be to make Pazzi's mission a success — he does lead Verger to Lecter (and Lecter can be shown under the end credits following the newly rich Pazzi down the alleys of Jamaica).

OK, so where we're trying to get to is the grand confrontation between Verger and Lecter. As it happens, after escaping and killing Pazzi, Lecter decides to sneak back in to America. (There is a supposedly funny scene on an airplane between Lecter and a kid who takes his paté, that will require some acute casting, writing and directing to succeed). Now three people are hunting each other: Verger hunting Lecter, Lecter stalking Starling, and Starling tracking down Lecter via his expensive tastes in cars and wine. Just as she is about to narrow her focus, Lecter is nabbed sneaking around her car.

Starling figures out who did the kidnapping, and gets out to the Verger farm in time to see Lecter suspended in the air, having his feet gnawed off by two enormous hogs.

potential screenwriter will have to deal with a lot of subplots in this portion of the book. For one thing, Margot is plotting against her brother; and Barney has come to work for Verger, where he seems to fall in love with the buff sis. Eventually she makes him a gift of the famous Lecter tooth mask, and that should be a moment in the film when some members of the audience, their minds controlled by Harris and the director, should break out in cheers of recognition, exclamations that will be disturbing to the rest of the audience. Also, Krendler, using info supplied by Verger, gets Starling placed on administrative leave.

Anyway, now we are at the farm. There's a shoot out that is slightly cinematic. Verger fails again. Margot, who wants to be the heir to the Verger estate and raise a child with her lesbian lover, decides to feed her half composed brother to his pet eel -- another scene that could bear suggestion rather than explicitness, or get junked altogether. All the scenes with Verger and Margot feel very childish if not cartoonish, and could be reduced and in some cases simply dropped.

Lecter or the hogs get everyone else. Meanwhile, Starling, who was knocked out with the sedative missile of an air rifle, is finally in Lecter's clutches. He spends the rest of the book drugging and hypnotizing her in an effort to mind control her into falling in love with him, a love he hasn't had since his sister died (Harris's acute grasp of psychology fails him in his efforts to give us an "explanation" for the evil of Lecter).

This is probably the most "controversial" passage of the book and may be unfilmable. Also, it betrays the character of Starling, making her Lecter's compliant love slave (although Foster as played this kind of role before, in Dennis Hopper's weird handcuff and underwear movie, Backtrack). As a gift to Clarice, guess who's coming to dinner? Lecter kidnaps Krendler and wheels in his duct-tapped body. We soon learn that, though Krendler is alive, Lecter has sawed off the top of his cranium , and Lecter takes the lid off his head with a flourish, like a waiter delivering the baked alaska, and with a long spoon scoops up bits of Krendler's frontal lobe to pan fry for Starling's delight. Eventually, Krendler's mind runs down and dies, like Hal 2000. Clarice gives Lecter her tit to suckle.

In the epilogue, the now wealthy Barney sees Lecter and Clarice at the opera in Buenos Aires and flees. Starling is still drugged and hypnotized, and still Lecter's love slave. Harris tries for a little Nabokovian modernism by writing, "We'll withdraw now, while they are dancing on the terrace -- the wise Barney has already left town and we must follow his example. For either of them to discover us would be fatal."

If Harris wanted to sabotage a film adaptation of his book, he couldn't have thought of a better method. This ending will be a major challenge to the book's adapters. But given all the people who either won't do the film, or own a piece oe chances are that it will be an abysmal disappointment to all.

For more info on Silence and some links to Jodie Foster, visit either the Thomas Harris web site or the Lecter fan club.