We are clearly meant to sympathize with Thomas Mann, the title character of Colm Tóbín’s novel The Magician. A gay youth trapped in an uptight heterosexual world, he has the makings of a hero, but even as a twenty-something, he may still strike some readers as a pompous, slightly creepy stick-in-the-mud. At the age of thirty, Thomas sadly but dutifully attempts to suppress his sexuality and marries the wealthy, brilliant and loyal Katia, and the book morphs from a Künstlerroman into a roiling family saga.
The couple have six children. The oldest, Erika and Klaus, live a bohemian, celebrity-driven life during those strange years in the late 1920s and early 1930s when Germany was both a beacon of free expression and a seedbed for genocide. Then there’s bookish Golo, neurotic Monika, steady Elisabeth, and musically-inclined Michael. Together with Mann’s brother-in-law, Klaus, and his brother, Heinrich, there are more than enough characters to populate a novel.
Granted, Mann himself remains something of an emotional dud, and as he grows older, his lust for teenage boys feels less like pining for some lost ideal of male beauty and more like the longings of a dirty old man. However, he rarely acts on his desires, and then it’s nothing more than fondling and kissing. Indeed, Mann’s restraint and stodginess are ultimately seen as virtues. As the third-person narrator muses through the mind of Mann during Hitler’s takeover of Germany: “The very culture [Mann] had represented since the [First World] war — bourgeois, cosmopolitan, balanced, unpassionate — was the very one [the Nazis] were determined to destroy. The tone he used in his prose — ponderous, ceremonious, civilized — was the precise opposite of the tone they wielded.” In short, the urbane Mann provides a counterweight to the madness of his countrymen.