Reading in the dark

The issue of the good versus the important in literature, particularly fiction, has often been raised. War, totalitarianism and the politics of human oppression are major themes. Many of the most famous writers of protest, whose work openly and courageously confronts the political situation of their countries, lack the artistic qualities of their less campaigning peers. A novelist such as South African Nadine Gordimer has seldom been described as a prose stylist but her work will live because of the importance of the story it tells. The same could be said of many writers from the former Eastern Europe as well as their Latin American counterparts.

Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway (Phoenix House, £12.99 in UK), has received extraordinary reviews across Europe. Much of the novel's impact lies in the doomed love affair between a young boy of 15 who becomes involved with an older woman. They meet when she helps him during a bout of illness. As he begins to recover he visits her and she seduces him. It is an extremely stilted narrative; while the translation may be partly responsible for this, more of the fault lies in Schlink's flat, formal writing, the predictability of a thin plot and the cold, remote character of a narrator who never engages our sympathy, or even interest.

As well as the age difference between the couple, there are also distances of class and culture. The son of a philosopher, the boy/ narrator lives a life of privilege, while Hanna, his lover, works on the trams and her home is a grim little flat. Her language is deliberately crude, almost mannish; she always refers to the narrator as "Kid". Schlink's characterisation of her is so flat as to be almost irrelevant. Is she intended to be sexually a mercenary, or merely an opportunist? Her meaning for the boy is definitively sexual. Their relationship is more ritual than reality; he reads to her, they take showers, they make love. There is little conversation - but then, Schlink can't write convincing dialogue. "I never found out what Hanna did when she wasn't working and we weren't together," the narrator says. "When I asked, she turned away my questions. We did not have a world we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have." As we realise from early on, the plot will depend heavily on a revelation which is obvious from early in the novel.

Already emotionally disengaged from his family by the solitude he experienced during his illness, young Michael has also been affected by a bullying elder brother and, most significantly of all, by his father's remote personality which is hardly suited to intense parenting. "Sometimes I had the feeling that all of us in his family were like pets to him. The dog you take for a walk, the cat you play with . . . you can be fond of them, you can even need them to a certain extent, and nonetheless the whole thing - buying pet food, cleaning up the cat box and trips to the vet - is really too much. Your life is elsewhere."

While resenting his father's lack of interest, Michael predictably develops into a similar individual. His attitude towards Hanna shifts between obsession and indifference. About the most skilfully handled aspect of this novel is the way in which Schlink, although never placing Hanna in a dependent or subservient role, conveys her dependence on the boy, who represents for her some sense of continuity. The boy's sexual self-assertion leaves him feeling as if "I'd just said my final goodbyes".

Predictably, the affair begins to wane, as the growing boy spends more time with his peers. "Then I began to betray her" - not through any sexual encounters, but merely by his continuing secrecy. `I didn't acknowledge her. I know that disavowal is an unusual form of betrayal . . . And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal. I no longer remember when I first denied Hanna."

When she unexpectedly stands on the edge of his world, as if about to enter it, he fails to welcome her and she disappears.

As the years pass the boy becomes a law student, and as part of a law seminar attends a trial of former concentration camp guards. Among the accused is Hanna, whom the narrator recognises, and then watches with the detachment of a reporter. "Sometimes Hanna wore a dress with a neckline low enough to reveal the birthmark high on her left shoulder. Then I remembered how I had blown the hair away from that neck and how I had kissed that birthmark and that neck. But the memory was like a retrieved file. I felt nothing."

Its impact may be attributable to the romantic situation of the couple, which in fact is not romantic, but the actual relevance of this laboured, pretentious book lies in its examination of the Holocaust from the point of view of a young German whose generation is at a remove from the events yet still conscious of the guilt. "Sometimes I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took."

Morality, justice and cowardice play their part in the narrative; Michael even consults his father the philosopher in the hope of reaching some level of understanding, or even self-justification. But the attempt is a failure - just as this book fails on most levels. None of the characters is believable, and their dialogue is robotic. It is impossible to believe that anyone could be aware of a crucial fact that could decide the outcome of a case and withhold this evidence, as the narrator does, particularly as he is an onlooker, not an involved party. As a story, The Reader is weak, wooden, full of holes and utterly predictable, since the "secret" is given away so early.

As a study of a moral dilemma, it is only marginally successful, this is due to the thinness of Schlink's characterisation of the illiterate Hanna. Melodrama and righteousness propel the book. If it succeeds at all, it is only through its sporadically interesting ambiguities, and most of all, of course, because of the horrors of the history it is based upon. The Reader may be an important book, but it is not a good novel.