With The Reader, Bernhard Schlink had an international bestseller and made a distinguished contribution to the literature of the Holocaust. Dissenting voices maintained that the novel lent an unwarranted degree of sympathy to those involved in the machinations of the Final Solution, but its moral ambiguity was, in fact, part of its strength and fascination. As a professor of law and a practising judge, Schlink clearly has a professional interest in guilt, innocence and the meaning of justice. In Homecoming, he once again investigates the role of such values in 20th-century German history.

The narrator is Peter Debauer, born in 1945 and brought up in Germany by his mother, who tells him that his Swiss father was killed in the war. He spends long summer holidays in Switzerland with his grand-parents, editors of a library of popular fiction called Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment, which they forbid their grandson to read on the grounds that there are better books on the same subjects. They do, however, let him use the blank sides of discarded galley proofs for his schoolwork. One day he turns over a set of galleys, starts reading and becomes absorbed in an incomplete story about a German soldier called Karl who makes his arduous way home from a Russian POW camp only to find his wife living with another man and two children.

Peter’s lifelong obsession with this story is never explained or made particularly convincing. It is as if Schlink has worked backwards, since Peter might well have been obsessed by Karl’s story had he known the relevance it would have in his life; but of course he only discovers this much later. As Schlink’s book progresses, it becomes increasingly implausible, relying too heavily on coincidences and crude plot contrivances. Furthermore, its many twists and turns can mostly be seen coming a long way off, and one is left with the impression of someone doggedly working though a scheme that has been rigidly imposed on the novel. For example, Schlink scarcely bothers to lend a pinch of verisimilitude to his account of Peter discovering the real house to which Karl returns in the story and his subsequent involvement with the woman who lives there. Even more lazily, the device of missing papers handily turning up because they have been used for packing is used not once but twice.

Themes are announced, dissected and repeated, as though Schlink doesn’t trust his readers to be as bright or well read as he evidently is himself. Karl’s story seems to draw upon The Odyssey, the plot of which is helpfully recounted, then – a lot less convincingly – Peter’s own story also finds echoes in Homer’s epic poem. This simply makes one feel Schlink is pushing his luck. Many readers (including this one) will be less familiar with the Swiss author Gottfried Keller’s story about the confidence trickster Wenzel Strapinkski, but its relevance to one of the characters is surely clear enough without the rib-bruising authorial nudge we are given. Other analogies are not only signalled obtrusively, but turn out to be dud. Dithering over whether to move back in with his lover, for example, Peter muses: “A friend of mine had convinced me that a reunified Germany needed a new constitution. Didn’t two people who love each other and intend to live together need a new place to live?” If there were plans for East and West Germany once reunified to move to another land-mass, history has not recorded it.

The book also appears far too calculating. Even though Peter refers to himself (three times) as happy to occupy “history’s waiting room”, all the right boxes are ticked for a contemporary novel about Germany: the Holocaust, and the inescapability of the past, emigration to an academic life in America, the Berlin Wall, reunification.

In the uneven translation, Schlink’s prose rarely rises above the workaday, and sometimes doesn’t even reach that plateau. It is occasionally inelegant (“I took Max to the movies, which I had not given up in the previous weeks, though I had cut down on the time I allotted him”), and occasionally is not quite English: “staring daggers”, “tenacious aggressivity”, “woman suffrage” rather than women’s suffrage, and “toothbrushing” rather than brushing your teeth.

For all its faults, Homecoming is not actually a bad novel, and, in spite of Peter being somewhat colourless, it will hold the attention of anyone prepared to suspend their disbelief. It is, however, unlikely to satisfy anyone who admired The Reader, seeming merely to skate across history’s surface rather than plumb its treacherous depths.

Homecoming by Bernhard Schlink translated by Michael Henry
Heim Weidenfeld £14.99 pp

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