The adaptation is always going to suffer in comparison to a book like that. It's not like you can just rotate the story through 360-degrees of the audio-video dimension and have it pop out at you.
Lots of more modern fiction, written by people who think of stories first in the cinematic sense even as they are writing them, you can almost derive the film from the book. Say, Jurassic Park, for example. The departures from the novel were incidental, and the film could've been made even more faithful to the text but for the desires of the producers.
In my opinion the departures from the Jurassic Park novel were not just incidental.
I enjoyed very much the Jurassic Park visual effects, but I despised the script as one of the most disappointing adaptations of novels, because it completely failed to convey the message of the book.
The central idea of the book was that there are things so complex, i.e. chaotic systems, that regardless how good you are and how great are your efforts to control them, unpredictable failure is unavoidable.
I did not see anything of that in the movie, where the failure of the park was just the consequence of stupid mistakes made by a bunch of morons, not the consequence of objective laws, as in the book.
Perhaps incidental is the wrong word; my point being that Spielberg absolutely could've made the script more faithful to the book without having to invent characters, dialog or settings not in the text.
Lots of more modern fiction, written by people who think of stories first in the cinematic sense even as they are writing them, you can almost derive the film from the book. Say, Jurassic Park, for example. The departures from the novel were incidental, and the film could've been made even more faithful to the text but for the desires of the producers.