Books and Arts -- Book ReviewLiterary lives -- Daylight on the magicThe Magician. By Colm Toibin.Thomas Mann’s last, unfinished novel tells of a confidence trickster named Felix Krull.In “The Magician”, Colm Toibin’s fictionalised portrait of the great German writer, the ageing Mann thinks of himself as a similar “dodger” who “got away with things”.He believes that the skill to “reverse their own story as the wind changed” is a hallmark of humankind.In Mr Toibin’s immersive novel about the author’s life and times, Mann is a consummate actor.His “distant, bookish tone” and “personal stiffness” mask a restless and conflicted soul.Most obviously, this long-married father of six, an upright pillar of German-speaking culture, learns how to cloak his homosexual desires.After brief encounters during his bourgeois upbringing in Lubeck and Munich, Mann’s taste for younger men settles into chaste flirtations, private diaries, or just “the secret energy in a gaze”.In politics, too, Mann knows how to dissemble and compromise.Even when his conservative patriotism has given way to outrage at the Nazis, his courage falters and he prevaricates over taking a public stand.
