The Magician by Colm Toibin Review

The Magician tells the life story of Thomas Mann, an early-to-mid 20th century German writer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel The Magic Mountain, and who was later revealed to be gay (or at least bisexual), following the unsealing of his diaries in the late 1990s, several decades after his death.

Colm Toibin (himself a gay novelist, which might have informed/drawn him to this project?) has clearly done his research for this novel, and covers the periods of Mann’s major works: Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and Felix Krull. We see Mann discover his sexuality as a teenager and become involved with several men, before meeting his wife Katia, and then his homosexuality seems to be confined to his diaries, though it does feature in his work (most notably in Death in Venice).

Together they had six children: Erika, Klaus (both of whom were also gay but out and not closeted like their dad), Golo, Monika, Elizabeth, and Michael, and lived through both world wars. The Manns did better than most through the post-WW1 inflation years in Germany, thanks to Thomas’ books selling well abroad, but the family fled the country once Hitler rose to power, eventually settling in America until returning to Europe after the war.

I didn’t know much about Thomas Mann before this so everything in The Magician was new to me, and I thought it was all really interesting stuff. Toibin picks the most compelling times in Mann’s life to write about so the narrative is consistently engaging throughout. He’s also wonderfully adept at characterisation, bringing Mann’s family and the times they were alive in convincingly to life, so that you get a strong idea of who they were like as people, as well as what life was like during late 19th century Germany, the Weimar Republic, the war years in America, and Europe in the aftermath of WW2.

The only real criticism I would give the novel is that, ironically, Thomas Mann himself, despite being the subject of the novel, remains somewhat inscrutable even after all of it. As well as Toibin does in writing all of the characters in this novel, I left the novel not really knowing what to make of Thomas. When his son Michael speaks to him as an adult, there’s palpable bitterness and hatred from the son to his father, which was surprising because Toibin didn’t really show us any scenes where Thomas was a bad father that would explain Michael’s animosity towards his dad.

Yes, it is mentioned in passing by Katia that Thomas is a distant father who doesn’t really play with his children (though he does do magic tricks at the dinner table for them when they’re young - hence the title), so I guess that explains why Michael (really all of Thomas’ children) didn’t like their dad? It’s odd because you don’t get the sense, until the scenes when the children are grown up, that Thomas failed them in any serious way, and I think that’s due to Toibin not writing anything to indicate that.

So why omit scenes that would let us know Thomas better? Perhaps Toibin thought that by making Mann distant, he would be true to the person and that this was the best representation of his character. It’s not to say that there is no insight into his inner life - there is, particularly with his enduring fascination with young men - but I was expecting Toibin to delve deeper into Mann than stay more or less surface level. You expect to come away from a novel about a person having a fuller understanding of who they were than not, and he could’ve done that with fiction, rather than stay so steadfastly within the boundaries of nonfiction. It feels like a wasted opportunity.

The overall effect is a bit like Toibin almost wrote a nonfiction biography here. The novel aspects make it seem like those documentaries which include occasional dramatised scenes featuring actors because no footage exists. It’s not a huge complaint but it’s worth mentioning anyway.

Overall, I really enjoyed the novel. Thomas Mann led an interesting life during tumultuous times and Toibin takes us through it with smooth prose and engaging storytelling, full of illuminating details. Colm Toibin’s The Magician is well worth checking out for anyone interested in the writer and/or well-written and accessible historical/biographical novels.