On The Heights

I set about reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in the wrong way. I made an initial assumption that since the text was so obviously allegorical it needed to be read as such and I didn't take the surface level of realism too seriously. I suppose I failed to invest in the characters, feeling distanced even from Hans Castorp and not feeling any depth of human interest in anyone else at the sanatorium. For example, Castorp's cousin, although featuring heavily in the early chapters, remained just the cousin, a sort of contrast to the protagonist and little more.

It says much for the power of the text that I was still drawn into its world, especially in terms of an imaginative identification with the experience of being a patient and surrendering to the routines of the sanatorium. Indeed, that aspect of the novel seemed almost hyper-real to me, uncomfortably so at times. So I was never less than engaged in my reading, but in a way that seemed dream-like. Until I realised that the extraordinary detail provided by Mann had made me accept the reality this world and I was reading a novel in the realist tradition of Trollope or Dickens - especially Dickens, since Mann worked the same magic of delineating characters who were grotesques yet convincingly real social beings.

This became clear to me in reading the second part of the novel, after the Walpugis-Night episode involving the beguiling Frau Chauchat, a wonderful femme fatale, yet much more than that. I suppose it was when I realised just how moved I was by the death of Joachim, the cousin whom I had so foolishly disregarded, that the human depth of the text became obvious. And at that point I became aware of just how extraordinary Mann's achievement was: like Joyce (yet in a completely different manner) exploiting all the strengths of literary realism yet balancing these against - or, rather, manifesting through them - a formidable symbolic poetry.

In his essay on The Making of The Magic Mountain the writer invites the reader to read his novel twice to get a deeper enjoyment from the second reading. He ruefully terms this a very arrogant request, but it doesn't seem at all that way to me, especially since Mann places enjoyment front and centre. And it occurs to me that on concluding the novel that's what I was chiefly aware of - the sheer enjoyment of reading something so fascinating, a work that is never in any way predictable, that seems to follow no obvious form, yet in retrospect seems beautifully constructed. A novel that makes its own rules.