[In the following review, Thomas praises Schlink's examination of German history in The Reader.]

Holocaust literature is an overburdened realm. The moral freight that accompanies even the slightest efforts in this genre can sit heavily with reviewers and readers alike and has resulted in the honouring of some rather lightweight novels purely on the basis of their subject matter. I hate to bring it up again but (gulp) The Hand that Signed the Paper is a case in point. Despite the initial fracas, time and a bit of perspective have shown that the book was a largely insignificant work of fiction.

I must admit that I thought something similar was happening with Bernhard Schlink's The Reader after I read the first section. It had been recommended to me in the highest terms and was stamped with a whole swag of reviewers' endorsements, such as one which called it an “extraordinary novel” and one which suggested it would reveal to readers “the nature of atonement”. High praise indeed and more than I thought this slim German novel deserved—so far.

It was certainly elegantly put together, with a sparse, understated style that seemed to hold back more than it displayed. The story concerned a young boy in love with a much older woman, and very gently and eloquently detailed his erotic coming of age. It was fine, controlled writing, quite beautiful but hardly the moral tour-de-force I had been led to expect. What was I missing?

What I was missing was the second half of the novel, which delivers the awaited emotional and philosophical punch with the force of a hammer. Or perhaps a scalpel is a better symbol, for the novel's cut—when it comes—is sharp, precise and restrained.

It is difficult to detail the ensuing complexities without stealing some of the novel's narrative thunder. Suffice to say, the young boy's lover is brought before a Nazi war crime trial which in turn becomes the vehicle for an exploration of Germany's past, the feelings of guilt experienced by the following generation and the necessary squaring up between the old and the young. The fact that Schlink chose to dramatise this through the relationship between a young man and an older woman, rather than the more expected father-son dichotomy, is a sign of his reluctance to toe any conventional narrative line. It also forces a stronger sense of collusion between the young narrator and his lover, who is at the same time his moral and social enemy. Just as he is coming to grasp his future direction, becoming a man, he is trapped by this most intimate alliance with a world he is choosing to reject. He is forced to find both love and condemnation for this past from which he cannot distance himself and, eventually, make peace with it. Had Schlink instead set the son up against the father, he would have had a harder time convincing the reader of the need to wrestle towards reconciliation. People find it much easier to believe in a son abandoning a father's values and moving on, than a man dumping a woman whom he chose and loved freely.

It is a neat picture of how a Germany not long out of war was forced to turn and denounce its recent past, entangled as it still was in old relationships and old alliances. The resulting atmosphere was not one of passion or repentance, according to the narrator of The Reader, but dissociation:

During the weeks of the trial, I felt nothing: my feelings were numbed. Sometimes I poked at them and imagined Hanna doing what she was accused of doing as clearly as I could, and also doing what the hair on her neck and her birthmark on her shoulder recalled to my mind. It was like a hand pinching an arm numbed by an injection.

The trial is complicated by further evidence of Hanna's deficiencies that calls on the narrator to decide between the value of objective truth and the more complicated truths we set up for ourselves to make life bearable. The Reader's exploration of this struggle is never obvious or clear-cut. It is, instead, remarkably human and frail.

Much of the second section revolves around the courtroom but The Reader is as much a courtroom drama as Homer's Odyssey is a travelogue. It infuses the events with an intelligence and a power which far surpass their superficial meaning, and makes readers look inside themselves to see how much evil and how much forgiveness might lurk there. Apart from the German issues it is also raising larger human issues about how people can hurt other people. The conclusion one character offers to the narrator is disturbing:

No, I'm not talking about orders and obedience. An executioner is not under orders. He's doing his work, he doesn't hate the people he executes, he's not taking revenge on them, he's not killing them because they're in his way or threatening or attacking him. They're a matter of such indifference to him that he can kill them as easily as not.

Indifference—perhaps the greatest evil of them all. In The Reader, it is indifference that the narrator seeks to come to terms with more than anything else. He struggles all his life to emerge from this ennui that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place and then went on to smother his whole generation. It is only by facing up to the past, and redeeming what he can from it, that he is able finally to feel anything at all.

The Reader deserves its high praise. It has raised and tried to answer questions which have dogged human beings since long before the Holocaust reared its ugly head and which, I suspect, will continue to snap at our heels for many millennia to come.