Book Review: "The Holy Sinner" by Thomas Mann

One of the great novels of the 20th century is Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar and, if you've been paying attention, I've also written about his book Death in Venice in the 'Why it's a Masterpiece' series. His novel Dr Faustus is, in my opinion, one of the great novels of his time and The Magic Mountain has often inspired other great novels such as Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium (which I also enjoyed and reviewed). How I completely missed The Holy Sinner I will never know but here we are, with another used book costing a very small amount of money. The book is practically falling apart but isn't that all the fun of it?

In Flanders, Duke Grimald, widowed for seventeen years, pressures his daughter Sibylla to marry to form an alliance with a neighboring kingdom. Sibylla, however, is only attracted to her brother, rejecting all suitors. Don't worry, you read that correctly. After the duke dies, Sibylla and her brother enter into a forbidden romantic and sexual relationship, and Sibylla becomes pregnant. So here we have nothing new for Thomas Mann even though it is still disgusting as hell. As with his novel Death in Venice we have a forbidden sexual interest and unlike Death in Venice, we actually have a horrific result of that. I'm not saying I was glad that he was dying at the end of Death in Venice but he pretty much had what was coming to him. In this novel, Sybilla is on both the formulating and receiving end of something so terrible that it feels sometimes as though I was reading Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford. And if you haven't read that, then go away and do so immediately and you'll see what I mean.

Grappling with shame and contemplating suicide, the brother and sister turn to their loyal counselor, Eisengrein. He advises that the brother join the Crusade as penance and that the infant, once born, be set adrift in a sealed barrel. I'm not going to lie to you though - I do feel as though the weird biblical imagery is very on-brand for someone like Thomas Mann, especially since I read Dr Faustus - the whole point is that it is supposed to make you uncomfortable. Initially skeptical, Sibylla and her brother ultimately follow his counsel, believing they have no other option. The brother dies en route to Massilia, and Sibylla sends the newborn into the North Sea, expecting it to perish. Are you getting Oedipus 'oh don't worry, we'll leave him here and he'll die' vibes or is it just me?

The barrel carrying the infant is discovered by two fishermen in the English Channel - and thus we have another biblical reference of fishermen. They transport the child and a tablet from Sibylla to their island home. Gregory, the Abbot of Agonia Dei monastery, reads the tablet, realises the child’s significance, and hires one of the fishermen to raise him, offering a handsome monthly sum. The child is named Gregory, and he grows up under the Abbot’s careful guidance, initially destined for monastic life. I'm not going to lie to you but I could see where this was heading just from this point. The monastic lifestyle is a direct juxtaposition to the fact that this child was the result of incest. But the tablet didn't seem to make that much of a difference to what happened - the question is about whether the raising of the child is to make his history disappear or for penance for the child being basically born into sin.

As the child grows up he travels the world and, through this travelling makes more of a Oedipus and Jocasta tale than he perhaps wanted to. I feel like Thomas Mann is definitely trying to tell us something about the way in which people live their lives via the ending but I won't reveal what that is. Honestly, even though this was not one of his best efforts as a novel, I could definitely see the influences of other stories shining through it. Thomas Mann has constructed a very important frame narrative here, one that seems to be on-par when it comes to religious instruction to 'The Grand Inquisitor'.