The Magician - Colm Toibin

 The only Toibin books I had previously read were Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary.  Both were interesting and definitely well written, but they were very short.  The Magician is substantial, almost 450 pages.   It is a novelisation of the life of Thomas Mann, which also includes his children, especially the two eldest, Erika and Klaus.   I am very interested in Thomas Mann, having found my way to him over the last twelve months or so.   I discovered Klaus as recently as last month.

I am therefore the ideal reader for The Magician.   Toibin is also clearly a huge fan and he has read a lot more Mann than I have.  Even so, it is clear that Toibin has chosen to write the novel in the cool, detached style of his hero.  It works brilliantly.  He has also been careful to avoid the trap into which so many novelists fall when writing novels about other novelists.  Mann used autobiographical elements in some but by no means all of his novels.   What he says about such elements in the books is not necessarily his opinion.   Toibin knows this.

Toibin structures the book by place, emphasising his concept of Mann as a lifelong exile.  This is especially effective at the end, when Mann visits Germany from America and ends up living in Switzerland.   The women in Mann's life, from his wife Katia to his three problematic daughters, his Brazilian mother and his two sisters who both commit suicide, are brilliantly evoked, all very different.   He is, I felt, oddly less successful with brother Heinrich and son Klaus, who I would have thought were grist to the mill of any novelist.  Perhaps he thought that because Thomas clearly didn't understand them, neither should the reader of a book about Thomas.   Nevertheless their deaths are touchingly handled.

One of the blurbs on the cover calls The Magician a masterpiece.   I'm not sure it is possible to write a masterpiece novel about another novelist.   Two of Mann's masterpieces, after all, feature composers rather than writers.  That said, Toibin and The Magician come very close.   It is a wonderful achievement, humane, empathetic, deeply considered.

The Painted Veil - Somerset Maugham

 

In this novel from 1925 Maugham's theme is coming to terms with adulthood and the development of empathy.  Kitty Garstin is a pretty, middleclass girl, favoured by her parents because she's prettier than her younger sister Dorothy.  But plain Dorothy gets engaged first, which Kitty takes as something of a slur on her, so she accepts the first proposal that comes along - from a talented, decent-looking young bacteriologist called Walter Fane.  She barely knows him, doesn't really like him let alone love him, but he does have the advantage of a posting in Hong Kong.

Once in the colony Kitty soon gets bored and plunges into an affair with Charlie Townsend, the Colonial Secretary.  He's an older man, horribly vain and self-centred, but Kitty is infatuated and, at the same time, relishes betraying her dull husband.  Walter finds out and, icy-cold, issues an ultimatum.  Either she comes with him to a cholera-ridden city up-country or he'll divorce her, ruin her reputation and, more importantly, Townsend's prospects of ever becoming governor.  Kitty assumes Townsend will throw up his career and run away with her.  Of course he won't.  He loves his life and is deeply attached to his plain, undemanding wife.

So Kitty goes with Walter, not caring if she lives or dies.  The city really is hell - the dead lie in the streets, the military is trying to organise things, and the only functioning healthcare centre is a French nunnery.  Kitty meets a strange, prematurely bald little man called Waddington, the deputy commissioner in the area.  He is deeply immersed in the community and knows everything about everyone.  He introduces Kitty to the nuns who absolutely revere Walter for his work and effort.  Kitty has no education and no real talent, but she can help out by looking after the abandoned Chinese girls.  Initially they are ugly little monsters to her, but then she recognises their humanity.  She visits Waddington at home and finds out he lives, unmarried, with a Mandarin noblewoman - a double outsider in Southern China - who is utterly devoted to him.  As Kitty discovers the humanity in others, so she finds it within herself.  She realises she is pregnant.  Is it Townsend's or is it Walter's?  Townsend doesn't matter to her any more.  Having seen Walter with babies dying of cholera she knows he will accept the child (she's convinced it will be a girl) and love it.  She aches to tell him - but Walter catches the cholera (he may have been experimenting on himself) and dies.

Kitty has to return to Hong Kong, where she is met by Dorothy Townsend, who is every bit as caring and charitable as everyone says she is.  For a time, at Dorothy's insistence, Kitty lives in the Townsend home.  Charlie tries it on, of course, but gets his come-uppance.  Kitty finally takes control of her life and goes home to London.  Her father, whom she has never really appreciated, has accepted a post in the West Indies.  His wife has died while Kitty was en route home.  Kitty, now properly adult, pledges to go with him.

A delightful book, written in eighty very short chapters yet deeply incisive, with wonderfully rounded, compulsive characters.  I enjoyed The Magician more, because it's my kind of story, but The Painted Veil is a much better book - on a par with The Moon and Sixpence.

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The Magician - Somerset Maugham

 

Despite living until 1965, Maugham was essentially an Edwardian novelist.  This, from 1908, is him dipping a toe into the world of James's Turn of the Screw; in other words, fin du siecle gothic.  Maugham was also a novelist who turned personal experience into fiction.  He had encountered Aleister Crowley, "The Wickedest Man in the World", and despised him.  Crowley is Oliver Haddo, the Magician of the title.  In Parisian bohemia he comes across Margaret and Arthur, Arthur a successful London physician, Margaret his beautiful ward whom he intends to marry as soon as she turns eighteen. Today, this raises eyebrows, and Maugham was clearly aware of it, even in 1908.  He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that their love is romantic and true.  Haddo spitefully takes Margaret from Arthur and marries her.  She briefly returns to Arthur but cannot resist the animal magnetism of Haddo.  Arthur with his friends Suzie and Porhoet determine to rescue her from Haddo's ancestral pile in Staffordshire.

Maugham is a much better novelist than posthumous neglect would indicate.  He wrote The Magician at the height of his powers, midway between Liza of Lambeth and Of Human Bondage.  He has devised a gothic plot and come up with some extremely clever ways of making it credible.  The characters are in a constant state of flux.  Haddo gets fatter and fatter with every appearance; Margaret goes from English rose to debauched jade and finally a pale shadow of her former self; Arthur and Suzie, from the start an obvious match in age and two halves of a whole in terms of personality, slowly get younger and more attractive as they grow closer.  The end, when it came, was genuinely horrific.  A mini masterpiece of the genre, which deserves to better known.