What are you – Mann or mouse?

Colm Tóibín brilliantly novelised Henry James’s life as ‘The Master’. Now it’s the turn of Thomas Mann

448pp, Viking, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99

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Colm Tóibín is the sort of cosmopolitan whose writerly range makes him seem not so much rootless as capable of taking root anywhere. He has set novels in Argentina in the 1980s (The Story of the Night) and Catalonia after the Civil War (The South), borrowed characters from both Greek tragedy (House of Names) and the New Testament (The Testament of Mary), and yet found it possible to return periodically to his wellspring, his native Enniscorthy (The Blackwater Lightship). His non-fiction displays an unfakeable familiarity with everything from Indian arthouse cinema to the sartorial choices of Popes. His prose is elegant without preciosity, and his stock themes – troubled families, sexual secrecy – large enough not to get repetitious, even with a new novel that will be his 10th.

The form and style of The Magician are, more or less, those of

The Master, his ingenious novel of 2004 on the life and times of Henry James. The Master was a relatively modest affair, restricting itself to the short but productive period in James’s life that produced such works as The Spoils of Poynton and The Turn of the Screw. Like James, his new subject, Thomas Mann – the magician of the title – combined public propriety with private deviance. But The Magician is longer and its canvas more populous.

The American Civil War took place off-stage in The Master, with James shielded by his personality and health from seeing the worst of it. The events of World War Two impinge more directly on the Manns, plunging them into exile and politics as James never was. Indeed, as grist to the fictional mill, the Manns are rather more promising than the Jameses were. So naturally does their dysfunction and habit of concealment fit into Tóibín’s universe that one suspects that if the Manns didn’t already exist, Tóibín would (and could) have invented them.

Tóibín stays close to Thomas’s perspective following him nearly from cradle to grave. He begins with the bourgeois life of the

Manns of Lübeck, on which Mann draws for his precocious and still marvellous debut, Buddenbrooks. He marries the redoubtable Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a secular Jewish family, in a marriage that is solid enough to withstand both Thomas and Katia’s rarely acknowledged awareness of his true sexual nature. Thomas is able, when fortified by “a particular Riesling from Domaine Weinbach”, to father six children. Katia in her turn can “recognize the nature of his desires without any complaint, take note of the figures on whom his eyes most readily rested with good humour”.

The Manns’ marriage would make a perfectly good Tóibín novel by itself, but the birth of the children makes for an embarrassment of novelistic riches. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, inevitably steal the scene whenever they appear. Creatures of 1920s Weimar, they are everything that Thomas is not: open about their sexual natures, flamboyant in their artistic experiments, and, what comes to be nearly as dangerous, their politics. In this, they appear to take after the other Mann sibling, Thomas’s more left-wing elder brother Heinrich, who serves here as a temperamental foil just as William James, Henry’s philosopher brother, did in The Master.

The unhappiest feature of The Magician, and one it shares with The Master, is the decision (Tóibín is too practised a hand for it to be a mere lapse) to have the narrative moved along by plodding sentences indistinguishable from those in a straight biography: “When Hitler came to power in March 1933, Thomas and Katia were in Arosa in Switzerland.” Happily, Tóibín is less artless in his reworkings of material from Mann’s posthumously published diaries, full of accounts of the desires to which he never gave any expression in action.

Mann’s eyes – and less often, but always chastely, his hands – fall on many a strapping youth in these pages. Even at his most unguarded – stripping off for an X-ray at a sanatorium, in his long years of exile from Germany after falling foul of the Nazis – Mann is always drawn to, and consoled by, male beauty, in the swimming baths at Princeton and on the beaches of Santa Monica. Tóibín’s writing in these passages is fully equal to the challenge of showing him as at once vulnerable, human, and a little pathetic.

Tóibín succeeds also in mounting a persuasive and sympathetic account of his politics. Mann was never an activist, awkward around ideologues, and never sure what to say to the many politicians who tried to recruit him to their causes. His denunciations of Hitler during the war cannot be accused of lacking passion, but his own brother and children were disappointed with them. Mann’s interventions were always, to their minds, either too weak or too late.

In Tóibín’s telling, Mann’s reluctance to be an ideologue had its origin in many things: his views about the autonomy of literature, his commitment to a certain idea of Germany, and a prudent assessment of the risks to himself and his family of being more outspoken. But he shows that reluctance also to have come of the deeper patterns of his psychology, his gift for concealment often hard to distinguish from simple cowardice.

A braver Mann, Tóibín suggests, would not have been the same writer. His writerly virtues were bound too deeply with his personal failings. The moral ambiguity that makes Mann so challenging a biographical subject makes him a worthy protagonist for a novel. Like The Master, it represents a triumph for its author.

When fortified by ‘a particular Riesling’, the novelist was able to father six children