Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel is an immaculately constructed moral exercise, and almost as good on film and tape.

Published in America in 1997 and picked for Oprah’s Book Club, Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader” is a novel about Germany and the Holocaust. It is about guilt and innocence. It is about youth and maturity. What it is not is a novel about reading. Rather, it is about the joys of being read to. That’s a distinction important enough to merit ending a sentence with a preposition. Reading is active, almost like writing. Being read to is passive, like watching a movie.

This is the reason I’ve always been wary of books on tape — voices provide too much direction, leave too little up to the imagination. However, in light of the subject matter of “The Reader,” I decided to finally give one a try. To be safe, I followed up by reading the physical book, and rounded it all out by watching the just-released film adaptation.

Campbell Scott was my aural (oral?) guide through “The Reader.” His clear, intelligent voice brought to life the novel’s narrator, Michael Berg, a 15 year-old boy living in postwar Germany. After a chance encounter, Michael enters into a torrid affair with a woman twice his age, Hanna Schmitz. Their relationship alternates between passionate sex and, at Hanna’s request, Michael’s recitations of various novels. After a few months of this, Hanna suddenly leaves town.

The next section of the book finds Michael Berg at law school. As part of a seminar, he observes the Nuremberg Trials where, lo and behold, Hanna Schmitz is being questioned. It turns out she’d worked as a guard at a labor camp near Auschwitz. In a somewhat contrived plot twist, Hanna ends up taking the blame for choosing which prisoners would be sent back to Auschwitz to die, and is sentenced to life in prison. Michael never gets over Hanna, nor the way in which he is complicit in her conviction. In the last third of the book, he records a number of his own “books on tape,” and sends them to Hanna in prison. Their eventual reunion is short-lived and bittersweet.

Schlink’s novel performs the kind of academic exercise one might find in an ethics class: create a fictional concentration camp guard that the average person would have difficultly blaming for her role in the Holocaust. Obviously, it would have to be a woman. She’d have to have some kind of physical or mental deficiency that excused her joining up in the first place (see the plot twist mentioned above). She’d have to be surrounded by war criminals far worse than herself. Finally, and most importantly, we’d have to see her through the eyes of a lover.

This trick worked best in the movie, where there was a perpetually teary-eyed Kate Winslet to remind the viewer of Hanna Schmitz’s underlying humanity. The next best thing was the book-on-tape; Campbell Scott performed Hanna with sympathy and conviction.

It came off less well in the physical book, where the European trope of oscillating back and forth between plot development and philosophical musing never allows the reader to forget the novel’s allegorical dimensions. Nor is that meant as criticism. “The Reader” is technically gorgeous, a complex morality play dressed up in scintillating prose. If the concepts occasionally upstage the story, that’s only because the concepts are so compelling.

For example, the concept of “reading” — in prison, Hanna becomes obsessed with survivor literature, yet we are told that no writing can do justice to the horror of the camps. “The Reader” itself is thus given a meta-excuse:

“What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to inquire is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt…”

Yet, while Schlink claims that literature serves no practical purpose in the discourse of the Holocaust, Hanna is eventually called to judgment because of a survivor memoir that mentions her by name.

Similarly, the eroticism of the book’s first section serves a dual purpose. Not only does the age gap between Michael and Hanna eventually present a stark illustration of the difference between being involved in the war and being a party to it, Hanna’s sexual corruption of Michael, painted in scenes of Romantic languor, symbolizes the moral corruption that the older generation of Germans visited on the younger.

So while the physical novel may drag at times, it is still the best way to absorb Schlink’s story. Like movies, books on tape may offer a more complete representation of the author’s original vision, but that completeness is, in itself, dishonest. The film version of “The Reader,” written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, feels like a faithful adaptation, but the reflexivity and plodding philosophizing of the novel get lost. And while a book on tape may seem similar to a paperback, it still gives voice to voiceless words, places a rational mind behind possibly irrational characters, attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

“Do you read a lot?” Michael asks Hanna, visiting her in prison many years after the trial. “A little,” she answers. “Being read to is nicer.”

She would say that.