Instead of doing what any decent person would, Michael prefers, over the long years of her sentence (which embrace his failed marriage), to send the prisoner tapes of his readings, though he cannot summon up the decency, if that is what it would be, to visit her. On the eve of her parole, Hanna hangs herself. (In the movie, we see her kick away the pile of books on which she has been standing, a touch of Oscarworthy cinema.) Her "tragic" death (arty shades of nay-saying Antigone!) leaves Michael with feelings of inadequacy and gives him (and his author) the opportunity to muse about the capri-ciousness of history and our unworthiness to judge others, lest we ourselves be judged. You can hear the comfortable slop of white-wash. "No one," I observed when I first wrote about the novel, "could recommend The Reader without having a tin ear for fiction and a blind eye for evil."
How could there be any doubt that so manifest a success as The Reader would be made into a film? Nor is it a surprise that it has been done "tastefully". Calculation was of the essence of the novel; it began with the seduction of "the reader" (Michael) and of the readers, ourselves, by getting him (and, by proxy, us) into bed with Hanna, thus somehow in her debt, before we know anything about her except that she has a big heart and breasts. Like Agag, Schlink walks delicately; in the present case, between pornography and, oh, forthrightness. Hanna is at least somewhat our dream-girl as well as Michael's (notice the choice of an ecumenical name, suitable for foreign rights, neither Gunther nor, say, Hermann nor, oh, Adolf would have played in quite the same way).
Since Hanna asks nothing of Michael save that he read to her, so the author, by the banality of his vocabulary, the sugar of his eroticism and the blandness of his brevities, asks nothing of us in the way of hard work. Although narrowing his compass to one sweet case, which is so artfully (in the most disparaging available sense) contrived that he can leave us with the feeling that justice has not been done when a woman who has been guilty of institutional murder is actually sent to prison, Schlink can also imply that all such cases (of which there were hundreds of thousands) belong to the file labelled, as Catiline might wish, de minimis non curamus et nos et lex. There is, is there not, something vindictive about some chosen people who seek belated (key word) retribution or, to be blunt, revenge? Hanna is the bouc émissaire of the sacrificial cult that Christianity has displaced and disgraced.
