The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $35
I suppose expecting a writer to match the impact of The Reader, Bernhard Schlink's extraordinary novel of a few years ago, is asking too much of him. The story of a boy's love affair with a woman who later became a concentration camp guard was deservedly a best-seller around the world because it evoked emotions about the incomprehensible split personality of Germans during World War II.
Since then the German law professor and former judge has moved back into the detective genre with some success. His Self's Deception was the last novel of his I read, an entertaining tale of the adventures of his regular detective, Herr Self.
Schlink has reverted to social commentary with this story of a reunion of one-time supporters of the post-war German terrorist gang, Baader-Meinhof. They were nihilists or anarchists - robbers and killers - rather than revolutionaries with a cause. One of their leaders, Jorg, has been pardoned and released from prison after 24 years, and his sister arranges a weekend gathering of his old associates and sympathisers to welcome him back into the world.
Over the weekend, they sit around a lot and argue about the old issues. Most have moved back into conventional society but some have pushed their political past away without quite resolving their place in it.
Two uninvited guests arrive, one a young would-be terrorist, and the other a relative of Jorg's in disguise.
Frankly, the idea of trying to tease apart the arguments for and against political terrorism doesn't work. The young man, who has come to enlist Jorg into a new campaign, is a ranting bore and most readers will find it difficult to understand why the others did not simply throw him out instead of listening, mostly in sullen silence.
Some of the characters come alive but they are the two or three who take little part in the polemics and have small revelations about themselves. But the endless dialectical discussions are at once too structured to be true and too abstruse to make sense.
Schlink must have known how risky this was, and I'm surprised the considerable novelist in him did not triumph over the political philosopher and encourage him to abandon it.
Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
