ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I can’t help feeling a bit discontented about the latest novel from Colm Tóibín. I’ve read and enjoyed all of his novels, starting with The South in 1990, and continuing with each new release, the more recent of them reviewed here on this blog.  I loved The Master, (2004) a ‘bionov’ about Henry James —  so why I am disappointed by The Magician, a ‘bionov’ about Thomas Mann? (I just discovered this new word ‘bionov’ from Twitter: it means a fictionalised life, a biographical novel. Will the label catch on?)

The Magician is a fictionalised life of Thomas Mann, whose books I like, and Mann had a tumultuous life as did many who had to flee Nazi Germany, so at the surface level the novel makes interesting reading, though not as engaging as I expected it to be.  The focus on Mann’s repressed homosexuality is a bit overdone, and the prose is a bit ponderous here and there —channelling Mann himself? I don’t know, I can only read Mann in translation… was he ponderous in German? OTOH I really liked the segments portraying the mind of the novelist at work, harvesting and hoarding events and people in his life for his next novel.  I especially savoured this when I’d read those novels myself, that is Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus (see my reviews here) and found myself wanting to read Mann’s other fiction, and the work of Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann’s brother as well. On that level, for a reader like me, the novel succeeds.  How it travels with readers unfamiliar with Thomas Mann’s writing, I can’t guess.

However…

Having read Evelyn Juers’ House of Exile (and under-appreciated it at the time) I knew something of the Mann family, but not much about Thomas Mann’s children who  seem to have been ‘difficult’, to say the least of it, more so in adulthood. (I am assuming biographical accuracy in The Magician, which is not a given in a fictionalised life.*)  They experienced the horror of Nazi Germany displacing civilised life so trauma is to be expected, but they were tiresome, aggressively rude and socially embarrassing even before that. Their parents were remarkably tolerant both then and in later years in America, and not in ways that you might perhaps expect in a bohemian household because the Manns were not at all bohemian, they were bourgeois in their lifestyle and habits.  This strand of the novel made me realise how little Tóibín attends to Katia, Thomas Mann’s wife.  She speaks, sometimes with forbearance that can be deduced, but there’s very little about her feelings or her interior life.  Or even about how she spends her days except when she’s trying to organise their escape from Europe.

I’ve also read a very fine novel about the existential crisis faced by Thomas Mann when he was weighing up whether or not to denounce Nazism.  That book was The Decision by Britta Böhler, translated by Jeanette K Ringold.  As I said in my review:

[Thomas Mann] had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.  His was a powerful voice, and — having left Germany for Switzerland in 1933 when Hitler came to power, he had to decide how best to use his celebrity.

He has written a letter denouncing the regime to the Zurich-German press, that when published would amount to cultural suicide.   It is not just that he cannot ever go back unless things change, it is also that he is tormented by the idea that he shares the same cultural tradition as new regime, and may be tainted by it.  He’s not even sure if he can still enjoy the sublime music of Wagner, now that it’s been appropriated by the Nazis.

Tóibín’s Thomas Mann is diffident to the point of seeming indifferent in many situations where a thoughtful man, as we see in Böhler’s novel, would be tormented by cascading perils, including his own safety and that of family members remaining in Europe as it was rapidly being overrun.  But no, in Tóibín’s novel, nothing disrupts Mann’s morning routine so he continues to disappear into his study to write for four hours until lunchtime.  Well, of course, a writer (even a very wealthy, successful one) should do that, treat his work like a proper job, especially if he has something important to write about.  And, yes, the routine of work can be a welcome distraction or a solace when everything around you is chaos.  But still… in this novel Mann’s restrained response to tragedies that would crush most people seems inauthentic.  Was he really a cold fish who wasn’t distraught about his children and extended family?

Which brings me to why I feel discontented.  I was mildly disappointed by House of Names:

When an author of the stature of Colm Tóibín decides to rewrite an ancient myth, it must be because he feels he has something new to say about it, but I have to confess that I read quite a bit of this book thinking that it was a mere retelling.  Written in beautiful words, but held captive to a plot that could only be reworked in insignificant ways.

And

Tóibín’s Clytemnestra is unconvincing.  A mother who’s been used to lure her daughter to be sacrificed by her own father would surely suffer a torrent of emotions, but Tóibín’s retelling fails to convey them.  His Clytemnestra, telling the story from her perspective, is restrained by his prose.

The Magician, for me, is disappointingly the same.  It features central characters, Thomas Mann and his wife Katia, both of whom lack an authentic emotional range of responses to events. Surely writing a novel rather than a biography gives the novelist the opportunity to imagine a compelling interior life for its central characters? But Tóibín doesn’t do that.  The Magician mimics biography: it might/might not be reliable. It has no footnotes or endnotes, because novels don’t.  Unless we research, we can’t know what’s real or imagined or if/where it departs from the documented facts.  The onus is on the reader to identify if/where Tóibín is being selective for some purpose of his own.

But my discontent is more about why an author of Tóibín’s stature isn’t writing fiction of some contemporary relevance.   I don’t mean that it has to be set in the contemporary era, I mean I would like its theme or preoccupations to be relevant in some contemporary context.  I can’t see the point of rewriting a life as a novel unless there is something new to say — something that matters to us in the 21st century — something which can only be written as fiction, rather than in a biography or a Wikipedia entry.

The Magician does reveal Mann’s suppressed desire for young men and boys.  I assume this aspect of Mann’s life, revealed posthumously in his diaries, is already covered in literary biographies, but not being an expert on Mann, but rather just a reader of his books, I didn’t know about it.  Whatever about that, Tóibín doesn’t IMO do anything illuminating with it.  In a newly released Australian novel called Modern Marriage, by Filip Vukašin, the author engages in a sophisticated way with the harm that derives from repressed sexuality.  He shows how a young gay man marries because of fear of rejection by his conservative family; he shows how that decision impacts disastrously on the wife.  He shows the damage that can be done and felt, even in an apparently open and tolerant society like Australia. Tóibín, OTOH, doesn’t seem to invite the reader to understand anything much about Mann, not empathetically imagining how his repressed sexuality affected his relationships, not adequately exploring how exile affected him or his writing, and offering only a glimpse of how Mann’s detachment made him a poor father. (Tóibín is interested in fathers, as we know from reading Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know.)

The nearest we get to understanding how Mann’s children feel is when he receives a letter from his son Michael.

‘I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side.  It is hard to credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being buried.  I told no one in Cannes that you were in Europe.  They would not have believed me.

‘You are a great man.  Your humanity is widely appreciated and applauded.  I am sure you are enjoying loud praise in Scandinavia.  It hardly bothers you, most likely, that these feelings of adulation are not shared by any of your children.  As I walked away from my brother’s grave, I wished you to now how deeply sad I felt for him.’ (p.394)

But Tóibín declines to imagine how Mann felt when he read this letter:

Thomas placed the letter under a book on his bedside table.  Later, he would read it once more and then he would destroy it.  If Katia and Erika [his daughter] found out that it had been sent and asked him about it, he would say that he had not received it.  (p.394)

Guilt, regret, shame, denial, anger or indifference?  We cannot even get a sense of colour rising to this passionless character’s cheeks…

I’ve been an admirer of Colm Tóibín for a long time, and it was his name that made me want to read this book.  But TBH, having invested time in reading over 400 pages about Thomas Mann without much return on that investment, I think I’d rather have read a biography.

* Re my reference to ‘accuracy’ above: On p.253, there is a reference to Klaus Heuser working for a trading company in ‘Dutch India’ in 1939.   Wikipedia tells me that Dutch India consisted of the settlements and trading posts of the Dutch East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. It is only used as a geographical definition, as there was never a political authority ruling all Dutch India and that Dutch presence on the Indian subcontinent lasted from 1605 to 1825. (Underlining mine.) The Dutch East Indies, OTOH is a geographical entity which was ruled by the Dutch government from 1800 until August 1945, when Indonesian nationalists declared independence which was formally recognised in 1949.  So where exactly was Heuser?  In India, safe enough while under British rule?  Or in what is now Indonesia, soon to be occupied by the Japanese after Pearl Harbour?

The Magican has been reviewed in all the prestige publications but they’re all paywalled.  However, I found these:

• fellow-blogger Theresa at Theresa Smith Writes who loved it: ‘A sweeping and grand tale about a family within the context of a changing world. The politics, the art, the literature and music, the morality; this is more than a novel about the life of Thomas Mann, it is a history of the rise and fall of early 20th century Germany and the imprint this left upon its people, and the wider world’. 
• Bookpage says that this ‘deeply researched, highly accomplished fictional narrative still makes for compelling reading’ and suggests that Mann was ‘a stoic observer of family trauma’ rather than indifferent.
• The Kirkus Review which says it’s ‘an intriguing view of a writer who well deserves another turn on the literary stage’.   
• The Scotsman calls it ‘a very accomplished and enjoyable novel. It reads easily, more easily indeed than Mann’s own novels. But it is so interesting and understanding [sic] that many who read it are likely to be encouraged to return to Mann’s own works or tackle them for the first time.’

Maybe that’s really all that Tóibín wanted to achieve, to encourage a new generation of readers to discover Thomas Mann, and I’m being unreasonable to expect more.

But then, there’s Roman Clodia at Goodreads who felt like I do…

Author: Colm Tóibín
Title: The Magician
Cover design: Chris Bentham
Publisher: Picador (Pan Macmillan) 2021
ISBN: 9781760984113, pbk.,433 pages
Review copy courtesy of Pan Macmillan.