Thomas Mann lived what is perhaps western literature’s oldest story: displacement and yearning for a lost home. Colm Tóibín’s new novel The Magician imagines Mann’s time as a refugee with unflinching precision: the loneliness, the guilt, the bureaucratic nuisance. Taken in by America, the 1929 Nobel Prize-winner and “second most important German alive after Einstein” is warned that he faces being “sent back on the first boat to Czechoslovakia” by a geographically illiterate state official.
In this fictional reimagining, Tóibín is constrained by having to follow the path of biographical fact—which is both rewarding and frustrating for the reader. The Magician deliciously weaves quirks of history together: Mann’s lesbian daughter Erika enters a marriage of convenience with WH Auden; the author has dinner with Gustav Mahler in Munich; Christopher Isherwood is an annoying hanger-on.
Queer figures, including his reprobate son Klaus, reveal just how repressed Mann was about his own (probable) gay desires, hidden behind steely German decorum and a heterosexual marriage. Tóibín is always asking: in a world where your identity is outlawed and your name put on a list, is it brave or cowardly to hide?
Mann’s six children are trickier to handle. Like his precious diaries, they are easily lost or beholden to the wrong people. The Magician gets bogged down with in-laws and the author’s brood of grandchildren and acquaintances: this might reflect reality, but too much time with them makes for fiction it is hard to emotionally connect with.
His brother Heinrich is hard to like and flat on the page. The fact he has children also poses questions about Mann’s true sexuality, which Tóibín never gets to the bottom of: despite homosexuality ebbing and flowing throughout the novel, the end fails to solve the riddle of Mann’s proclivities.
In a novel where so much goes disastrously wrong, the author allows Mann’s unlikely marriage to Katia to go right. She’s erudite and witty, and reveals new sides to a writer at risk of becoming remote to modern readers. In many ways, so does The Magician.
