[In the following review, Mundy lauds Schlink's depiction of the German consciousness in The Reader, noting that the novel “reminds us of the ghostly immanence of the Nazi past in every aspect of postwar Germany.”]

“If only it were all so simple!”, Solzhenitsyn once wrote. “If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Bernard Schlink's magnificent chiaroscuro novel The Reader grapples with the legacy of those who carried out the Final Solution to tackle head on Solzhenitsyn's discomforting question.

Told in part as a rite-of-passage tale, in part as courtroom drama, this highly original contribution to the literature of the Holocaust is also a meditation on the precarious architecture of secrecy. It opens with an account of the intoxicating force of erotic love. Michael Berg, aged 15, embarks on a passionate clandestine affair with Hanna, an orderly, fastidious woman in her mid-thirties, much concerned with cleanliness.

At first their alliance develops conventionally: she bathes him, they make love, they sleep. Later, at her request, he reads to her before they have sex. Michael, like many adolescent boys, believes that women inhabit a secret world, that their movements, thoughts and desires are motivated by some remote and enigmatic principle. Thus the lacunae in Hanna's personal history (“Her life,” he declares at one point, “was elsewhere.”) serve only to increase her allure.

To sustain his affair, Michael fashions an expanding web of evasion, petty crime and deception. Then one day, without warning, Hanna disappears. It is some years before Michael sees her again. During his law degree course, his seminar group observe the War Crimes trial of a collection of Auschwitz guards charged with murdering more than 200 Jewish women. Hanna is one of the accused. Throughout her amour with Michael, Hanna had something to hide much larger and more terrible than a pubescent lover.

It is easy to see why The Reader has been a best-seller in Schlink's native Germany. Written with economy and verisimilitude, it reminds us of the ghostly immanence of the Nazi past in every aspect of postwar Germany. It shows how, without warning, the pressurised mental compartments that hold the secret histories of those who served in the war can be blown open to flood daily life with unimaginable horror. “Monsters,” as Michael puts it, “have come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet.”

Schlink lays bare the agony of Germany's postwar generation without diminishing the profanities perpetrated by many of their parents. In the struggle to understand their crimes, the children of the Reich come up sharp against the guilty feeling that, in doing so, they are somehow failing to condemn. But when they do condemn them, as they know they must, there is no room for understanding. The Reader elucidates this dreadful irony without exculpating indifference, cruelty and genocide.