Colm Tóibín’s book is truly a magical read

This week’s Mediahuis/INM Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

I’m a slow reader and I’d also call myself something of a hit and miss reader. By that I mean I go through phases, could read a number books in a few weeks and then read nothing for months. 

Every now and again, on the recommendation of someone, I get lost in a book. And it’s happened me again, though on this occasion I faltered over the first few pages and it took me a while to get into it. I finished all 435 pages of the book just over two weeks ago and it’s still swirling about in my head. I’m genuinely excited about it.

The book is The Magician by Colm Tóibín. It was published in 2021 and a number of people suggested I read it. I had previously read two of his other books The Master and Brooklyn. Great reads but The Magician is number one for me.

 

It’s about the famous German writer Thomas Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. He’s up there with Germany’s great writers. I think it’s fair to call Tóibín’s book an historical novel as it traces the life of Mann from his birth in 1875 in Lübeck to his death in Zürich in 1955. How much of it is fiction I don’t know because I don’t know enough about Mann to answer that.

 

What fascinated me about the book was the simplicity of the language that Tóibín uses to tell the story of this great man.

I can’t explain how he does it but he seems to get inside Mann’s head and tell his story in such a readable fashion. I’m astonished at the detail in the book, the research that Tóibín must have done to write such a novel.

There is nothing simple about Mann’s life. He has six children, married to a wealthy secular Jewish woman and yet there’s always the gossip about him that he is a homosexual. He certainly admires the bodies of handsome young men. But it would be a terrible mistake to get distracted by that.

 

Tóibín explains how Mann realised early that the Nazis were going to bring mayhem and destruction to Germany.  Two of his children in 1933 told him not to return home from France and eventually at the outbreak of war he and his wife moved to the United States.

He passionately believed in freedom in all its forms and realised that the Nazis were thugs and bullies, who had to have scapegoats at whom they could sneer. They were ever so clever in whipping up fear and anger and at the same time able to appeal to populist sentiment. 

Tóibín  strongly hints that Mann was at first hesitant to speak out clearly in public against the Nazis. Reading the book I kept thinking of political parties that have similar tactics today. And that is beyond frightening.

Mann is a complicated person, aren’t we all. Colm Tóibín has that skill in making Mann come alive, indeed, so much so I’m tempted now to get to know more about Thomas Mann. 

I think it’s a great gift of a writer to make the reader so curious as to go off and learn more about the subject matter. That’s also the hallmark of a good teacher.  And when you read it you’ll discover why it’s called The Magician.