Kathy Hamilton 
Homecoming is a curious puzzle of a book. Part of the reason there’s been such a silence here at The Female Scriblerian is because it’s taken me so long to read this book! The thing is- it wasn’t boring, it was very interesting, nor was it overly complicated with long drawn out passages. In fact, I don’t know what it was, I just couldn’t read it quickly, and that’s really unusual for me. I’d read a few chapters, then put it down for days…I enjoyed reading it when I was reading it but when I put it down sometimes days would go by before I picked it up again. That irresistible pull to keep reading it until I finished was a bit, well, absent. Like I said…curious.
The concept of the book was fascinating; it follows the life of Peter Debauer from his childhood in post-war Germany until, almost, the present day. For me, the aftermath of an event is very intriguing, whenever there’s an apocalyptic type film I always find myself imagining the aftermath, trying to work out how people pull themselves together again after a cataclysmic event and try to regain a sense of normality again. WWII is, in many ways, just the story of cataclysmic event I’m talking about. I always feel like there’s a lack of literature about the German perspective on WWII, however. Understandably this is probably because it’s quite hard to know how to approach and properly deal with such a sensitive subject. There are books which deal with the obvious evils, and also books that deal with the resistance, and books like the ‘The Book thief’ that try to uncover an heroic element. There are few books in English, however, that explore the everyday German experience of the war. It’s not a sense of denial so much as…avoidance perhaps, which ties in very neatly with this book’s themes. Schlink deals with this well by giving very little opinion about the actions of the Nazi’s, Peter is born at the end of the war and has very little engagement with it, except as an abstract concept; a shadowy figure that hangs over his country. Some of Schlink’s best passages deal with Peter’s feelings on the actions of his people. His struggles with the concept of heroism, for example:
“Bravery was a lesser virtue than fairness, the love of truth, but it was a virtue
all the same, and even a man like Hanke was, in my eyes, better brave than
cowardly…My answer to his first question should have been: ‘Yes bravery
is good, but bravery is not enough.’ It was too late for that now.”
This book is full of philosophical nuggets like this one and other golden moments, and at times when I was reading I found myself mentally debating with Schlink and having to think about the profundity of his statements. I was excited to recognise familiar philosophical outlooks and had the book contained only these moments I may not have found it so curiously hard to categorise. But I think both this book’s curse and redeemer is Peter himself.
The book is told through Peter’s voice and from the very beginning there was something about him that annoyed me. It took me almost until the last page to work out that it is because Peter avoids everything, especially confrontation. I am the world’s biggest procrastinator but even I found myself with little sympathy for Peter because he didn’t finish, or follow through, with anything. This brings me back to my point above about avoidance. Peter is almost afraid of the weight of his own opinion, he crumbles under any kind of expectation, and her certainly doesn’t want to have to find uncomfortable answers. It’s Peter’s avoidance and lack of confrontation, perhaps that allows Schlink to expose more about how the German nation has developed after WWII than if he made grand sweeping statements and transformed Peter into a ‘Hollywood Hero’. As a result this is a very subtle, slow-burning book that made me angry because I expected to breeze through it. There are no BIG surprises and it ends as quietly as it begins, but having finished I really think it’s the kind of book that stays with you. It may be clichéd to say that, but it’s worth any frustration you may feel to get to the end and have that ‘I’m glad it read it’ feeling.
Have you read this book, or any of Schlink’s other novels? What did you think?
