The secret life of Thomas Mann: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed

In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to provide her with a British passport, wrote: ‘Who’s the most boring German writer? My father-in-law.’ This is clearly not a sentiment shared by Colm Tóibín, who has brought out a fictionalised biography of the Nobel prize-winning novelist.

Unlike The Master, Tóibín’s 2004 novel about Henry James, which confined itself to a four-year period when the protagonist was in his mid-fifties, The Magician covers almost the whole of Mann’s life, from his boyhood in Lübeck, which inspired his first and arguably finest novel, Buddenbrooks, to his death in Zurich at the age of 80.

‘The magician’ was a sobriquet bestowed on Mann by his children, who then spent much of their lives seeking to escape his spell. Outside of the House of Atreus, it would be hard to find a family more touched by tragedy. Both of Mann’s sisters and his despised sister-in-law committed suicide, as did his oldest and youngest sons (the latter after Thomas’s death and beyond the scope of this novel), while one of his sons-in-law drowned during the second world war when the ship taking him to Canada was torpedoed.

With material as rich as this it is no surprise that Tóibín sticks scrupulously to the documented accounts of Mann’s life, expertly weaving together details from his autobiographical writings and his own and others’ letters and diaries. Tóibín’s great achievement is his imagining of Mann’s interior life in all its intellectual achievement and emotional muddle.

The defining event of Mann’s middle years was the rise of Nazism, which forced him into exile, first in Switzerland and then in America.