Bernhard Schlink is the author of the wonderful bestseller, made into an Oscar-winning movie, The Reader. He uses his same talents of characterization, plot, and atmosphere in Self’s Murder to write an engaging, moving, and confounding mystery. And as in The Reader, there is no happy ending, just the further maturation of, in this case, an already old man. Life lessons, especially those on accepting life’s limitations but remaining open to its possibilities, apply at any age.
It was unusual to read a mystery, one of a series, involving a private eye over the age of seventy; the character, Gerhard Self, himself admits that most potential clients “will be more impressed by a younger fellow with a cell phone and a BMW who;’s a former cop turned private investigator than by an old guy driving an old Opel.“ His P.I. practice is winding down and it is with reluctance that he takes on the identity search for the silent partner of a small but successful private bank in the town of Schwetzingen, Germany. The search leads to a much more complicated investigation, one that twists its way back to World War II and the plundering of Jewish property, and also takes Self into territory of the old East Germany, complete with its Stasi past and present uneasiness with western Capitalism. Schlink writes of past and present with sure, quick details that create the landscape necessary for us to understand both the importance of Self’s investigation and the impact on all involved.
Schlink uses that same gift of detailing to make his characters come alive. When Self, after a particularly confusing day, says, “I took out the bottle of Sambuca and the box of coffee beans I kept there, poured myself a drink, and dropped three beans into the glass. I found a package of Sweet Aftons in the filing cabinet and lit both — the Sambuca and the cigarette — and watched the blue flames and blue smoke“, we know exactly how he feels and how he will prepare himself to go forward in his investigation: with every fact considered, with time for reflection, and with determination. Those three sentences render both the man and the moment to photographic and telepathic perfection.
The time and atmosphere in which the mystery takes place is created through small details such as Clinton being inaugurated and Deutsch marks being used, and in scenes such as Self’s unfortunate run-ins with both Neo-Nazis and their opposite, the “Antifa” (anti-fascists), and when Self takes his girlfriend’s son to the Kunsthalle Museum to see Manet’s The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico: that painting focuses not on the victim but on the executioners, who were mere soldiers ordered to shoot the emperor. The question raised is: who is responsible for an atrocity? (The same questions comes up in The Reader).
Self takes much responsibility on himself, for failures to act and for failing when acting. He recognizes the cost of failing, both those self-induced failures and those brought on by the acts of others: “[S]etbacks don’t make you a better person, just a smaller one….Setbacks don’t cost you only what you have invested — every time, they cut away a piece of your belief that you will survive the next trial, the next battle, that you will manage to tackle your life.“ The characters in the book have suffered through some of the hardest battles of the past century, World War II and its aftermath, and the costs are more severe than any of us from the Baby Boomer age can understand. Schlink doesn’t hit his readers over the head with the historical burden resting on his characters; instead there is a melancholy that infuses the book and that also serves as a strong contrast to those moments when the characters fight back, try to regain a sense of power and pride and self-governance that we who have never lived under totalitarian regimes take for granted.
Self has found his way back to self-respect, as much as both his confidence and respect falter during the course of his investigation. He has learned that his past was a part of him getting to where he is now: “If you’re always on the level, you don’t need a soul. We have a soul so we can look at ourselves in the mirror, even when we think we can’t. I don’t like corrupt policeman. But I know some who at one time or another didn’t stick to the book, and who then had a rough time of it but got over it, and precisely because of that became fine policemen. Policemen with a lot of soul.“ And Self is a private-eye with a lot of soul, trying hard to care for those who have come to depend on him, rightly or wrongly, and struggling to accept there are times when he cannot help: “I was tortured by the powerlessness of not being able to do anything anymore, not being able to fix things.”
Self’s Murder is a wonderful read, an engaging mystery with great characters and a twisted plot. But it is more than that, it is a moving exploration of survival, of trying to make good, move on, and accept both the past which cannot be changed, and the present which cannot be mastered.
