ON PALM Sunday 1942, Allied forces bombed the city of Lübeck with 400 tonnes of explosives. More than half of the city’s buildings were destroyed or damaged. St Mary’s remained standing, but its bells fell and embedded themselves in the church floor, partly melted. They remain there to this day as a peace memorial.

There is something haunting about those bells when thinking about one of Lübeck’s most famous citizens, the writer Thomas Mann (1875-1955). One can’t help but sense that his own music was also partly underground, as it were, a victim of his times, and that his “ponderous, ceremonious, civilised” literary tone, along with his oblique writing about desire for men, all contribute to his readers’ feeling that he remains frustratingly out of reach. At the same time, this state of affairs is a compelling project for some probing by such a writer as Colm Tóibín, whose novel of 2004, The Master, investigated the inner workings of that other enigmatically conflicted novelist Henry James.

The result is a fictionalised biography in which imagination breathes in an atmosphere of facts. Such a literary form can irritate lovers of both biography and fiction for being a hybrid, and it is true that you wonder whether, though laudably ambitious, any significant breakthrough has been achieved by the fusion here.

Tóibín focuses on Thomas as a family member, and it was quite a family: his two sisters committed suicide, as did one of his sons, and the two eldest of his six children were as reckless with their money and drugs as they were with their bisexuality. His daughter Erika married W. H. Auden. The writer who wanted to retreat behind his study door lived in circumstances that kept the door wide open, leaving him uncomfortably exposed.

The backdrop to the 60 years of family drama covered by the book is the decline and fall of Germany and the effect that this has on the emotions and beliefs of its people. It is, therefore, a work concerned with intimacy and immensity, of daily habits and epic movements, and of how they conjoin, especially in Thomas.

Although admiring Tóibín’s skill and research, I was less convinced of his investigative depth into the interior life and silent torments of his subject. God’s question in Eden still hovers: “Mann, where art thou?”

Canon Mark Oakley is Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge.

The Magician
Colm Tóibín
Viking £18.99
(978-0-241-00461-6)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09