THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 93
“Well, there is one more procedure I’ve always wanted to try.”• •
relative truths—the strange and won-
derful world views of the individual char-
acters. Kehlmann’s publishers call his
novel a work of “magic realism and ad-
venture,” which is not wrong; a talking
donkey and a dying dragon make their
appearances. But magic realism is also
simply a great fidelity to the perspectives
of its characters. The miraculous, in Ga-
briel García Márquez, is, more often than
not, a character’s vision of the supernat-
ural, the veracity of which hangs in the
communal air. In “One Hundred Years
of Solitude,” the mythical-sounding “most
beautiful woman who had ever been
seen,” whom Aureliano Segundo treks
across “the hallucinating plateau” to find,
is the most beautiful woman he has ever
seen; “the hallucinating plateau” is the
place where he suffered hallucinations.
Such fantasy is also a dangerous form
of liberty; in the hyper-devout, seven-
teenth-century world of “Tyll,” the po-
litical and religious authorities insist on
imposing their absolute truths on every-
one else’s relative truths. Kehlmann is
drawn to the spectacle of this doctrinal
fervor. Claus cheerfully blends magic and
religion, but so do his Jesuit tormentors,
without knowing it. Brandishing the
weapons of faith and reason, serene in
their rectitude, they root out what they
demonize as ignorant, blasphemous su-
perstition and magic. But how is the dis-
tinction to be drawn? Claus, like his
fellow-villagers, believes that dead un-
baptized babies become hostile spirits.
Is this so different from believing, as
many Christians then believed, that un-
baptized babies go to Hell? Dr. Kircher
believes that “the servants of Satan leave
their bodies behind, and their spirits fly
out to distant lands.” As European Chris-
tians of that era often did, he assumes
that the world will end soon. (He gives
it a hundred years.)
A considerable scholar, Kircher is
learning how to read Egyptian hiero-
glyphics. When we encounter him later
in the book, now an eminent professor
at the Collegium Romanum, he is search-
ing for a dragon, in order, he says, to ex-
tract its blood, from which he intends to
concoct a cure for the plague. Kircher
has solved the mystery of hieroglyphics
to his own satisfaction, and it’s both a
nice joke and further evidence of Kehl-
mann’s novelistic discretion that his great
“discovery” is presented without com-
mentary, from Kircher’s faulty viewpoint:
Only because he had learned to trust entirely
the Holy Spirit had he been able to accomplish
his greatest work, the deciphering of the hiero-
glyphics. With the old tablet of signs that Car-
dinal Bembo had once bought he had gotten to
the bottom of the mystery.... If one combined
a wolf and a snake, it had to mean danger, but
if there was a dotted wave under it, then God
intervened and protected those who deserved
his protection, and these three signs side by side
meant mercy, and Kircher had fallen to his knees
and thanked heaven for such inspiration.
The subtlety here lies not just in the ram-
pantly erroneous Christianizing of a
pre-Christian world but in the way these
two religious languages, a supposedly
pagan Egyptian religion and the certain-
ties of European Christianity, are forced
to judge each other, insisting as they do
on their shared magic.T
hus Kehlmann’s decision to set his
novel in a time of religious conflict
gradually reveals its rationale. The Thirty
Years’ War was a seismic reordering of
European power produced by the ear-
lier upheavals of the Reformation. The
Holy Roman Empire comprised largely
Protestant northern states and largely
Catholic southern states. When Ferdi-
nand II, the devoutly Catholic emperor,
attempted to impose religious unifor-
mity, the fragile coalition broke apart,
and the policing of piety became brutal.
García Márquez’s magic realism flour-ishes and expands within the relaxed folk
Catholicism of Macondo; in the world
of “Tyll,” narrow-minded religious and
civil authorities seek to control the very
definition of the magical.
Through this riven world, bristling
with boundaries both political and ideo-
logical, dances our slippery survivalist,
our great expansionist, Tyll—amoral, re-
bellious, untrustworthy, and exciting.
(“Every traveling entertainer was a little
bit devil and a little bit animal and a lit-
tle bit harmless too.”) Amid rival super-
stitions, Tyll is magic itself; amid rival re-
ligious orthodoxies, Tyll is nothing and
everything, a figure as reckless as the Devil
and as selfless as Christ, more holy fool
than Shakespearean Fool. At the end of
Kehlmann’s novel, Tyll’s former employer,
Elizabeth, the Winter Queen (the exiled
daughter of the English King James I),
catches up with him, and offers him an
easy retirement. Tyll is old. So come back
with me to England to a warm bed and
daily soup, she says. Doesn’t that sound
good? Not to Tyll. You know what’s bet-
ter than dying in one’s bed? he asks. “Not
dying, little Liz. That is much better.”
And so he exits the novel, to live again
somewhere else, solidly realized and ut-
terly evanescent, like the embodiment
of fiction itself. For what does he want?
Only to perform, to persuade, and to sur-
vive forever—ambitions doubtless famil-
iar to his brilliant maker.