Peter Debauer, the narrator of Bernhard Schlink's new novel, has grandparents who show him a warmth and tenderness that he experiences in few other relationships. They are Swiss, and Peter's father is said to have died in Germany towards the end of the Second World War.

The grandparents work on a series of books called Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment. Among the galley proofs, Peter discovers sections of a novel about a German soldier who “escaped from a Russian PoW camp and braved a number of dangers on the way home”, only to find that his wife has given him up for dead, and has a new life and children by another man.

This haunts the boy, and leads to a lifelong preoccupation with the idea of homecoming. The legend of Odysseus becomes a touchstone as Peter searches for the truth about his father. Schlink creates a parallel with the “odyssey” of the German people during the long decades that led to the homecoming of reunification.

The novel bulges with themes and allusions to the point where its somewhat bland characters stagger under the load. It also fails to ask certain questions, while demanding answers to others. The grandfather “remained true to the Germans. He was always moved by the fate of Germans abroad, perhaps because he thought they were as homesick as he so often had been.”

This idea of German homesickness is elided with the image of the German PoW making his way home from the camp, towards betrayal. The boy ponders every emotional resonance of this story - what is not explored is what the German soldiers were doing in the Soviet Union in the first place.

Three pages are given over to a bizarre discussion of “chivalry” in relation to the treatment of the inhabitants of Leningrad during its siege by the Germans. Peter, now a highly educated adult, observes that “all I knew about the siege was that it had been particularly hard on the population and that it had failed in the end...” Again and again, there is evidence of determined ignorance, and selective sensitivity to suffering.

There is a similar pattern of selectivity in The Reader, Schlink's bestseller about a German boy falling in love with a woman who turns out to have been a concentration camp guard. When brought to trial years after the war, Hanna is asked to account for her actions. She has refused to free hundreds of women prisoners locked in a church which catches fire after being hit by a bomb. She has knowingly selected sick and weak prisoners to be sent to the Auschwitz gas chambers. When confronted with this, Hanna asks the judge, quite seriously: “I... I mean... so what would you have done?”

The novel presents this as a dilemma for the judge, and, by implication, for all who have to deal with the horror of the Holocaust. Would we have acted so very differently? Are we not all, somehow, “responsible”? And if all are responsible, no one can really be called to account. For some, this is not an unwelcome conclusion.

But Hanna's question is false. She has made a succession of choices - a fairly important one was to become a concentration camp guard in the first place - and these have brought her, inevitably, towards this final decision to collude in mass murder. Any attempt to implicate others in a supposed “universal guilt” for her acts is profoundly meretricious. Yet Schlink's novel appears to support and even to feel a sentimental solidarity with Hanna's question.

Homecoming is a wearier, more uneasy and more fragmented novel. Peter's father is a nightmarishly chameleon figure, whose multiple identities - Nazi polemicist, charismatic commune leader, internationally renowned US law professor - are united by a cold thread that “makes ruthlessness an ethical principle”.

The father refuses to know his son, but the son is trapped by a huge unanswerable longing to be part of his father's past as well as his present. He is adrift in his own history, frustrated and defiantly angry, unable to confront the paternal monster who is now “an elderly gentleman who had apparently found a way to forget his past”.

The Reader was a carefully crafted book; Homecoming is not so confident about the conclusions it would like its readers to reach. Its characters are less self-pitying and more aware of the ways in which their lives have been stunted by omissions and by lies. However, Schlink gives the impression of thrashing around inside his material, rather than knowing how to shape it into a memorable novel.

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink

translated by Michael Henry Heim

Weidenfeld, £14.99; 260pp

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