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.