In The Master, award-winning author Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, the famous American novelist who left his country to live in Europe among privileged artists and writers. With stunningly resonant prose and emotional intensity, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart.

A wonderful book, especially for people who are as fascinated with Henry James the man as much as they are his stories. A touching novel about this complex, lonely and brilliant man. ( )

Five years in the life of Henry James, the late '90's, beginning with the production and abysmal failure of his play, Guy Domville. These are the years of What Maisie Knew, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age.

It is a dangerous thing to write a novel which is a psychological portrait of Henry James, the great master of the psychological novel. Tóibín succeeds wonderfully, avoiding the temptation to imitate James' style. (There is quite an amusing passage when Henry's elder brother, William, tries to tell him what he should write about and how. "Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean."

He has also shunned any sort of plot, preferring instead to simply give us a picture of James through his own thoughts, memories and actions. It is a complex picture, and ultimately a sad one.

James was an observer of life, more than a participant in its passions, yet Tóibín shows us the undercurrents. His James is not the repressed New Englander so often described, but more a man who, while having emotions, and recognizing them, cannot allow himself to be vulnerable to them. As a result, he may appear cold and unfeeling,. Indeed, when he is accused by his old friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, of failing to take their friend, Minny Temple, to Italy, an act which might have mitigated the TB that killed her, he has to hunt up her old letters to see if she really did ask him to do that.

Anyone familiar with James' work will recognize those moments and ideas which will eventually be transmuted into various stories and novels. (It is, in fact, rather fun to say to oneself, "Aha! Turn of the Screw! ") Tóibín frequently alludes to the way in which all is grist to the writer's mill. It is not only James, of course. Describing James' trip to Venice after the suicide of his friend, the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, he writes: "This, he thought, was her last novel. They all played their assigned roles. He watched as the American women stood in her bedroom afraid to approach the window to the small balcony from which she had jumped. Constance would have been able to conjure up their stricken faces and would have known, too, that Henry James would have studied the women, observing them with cold sympathy. She would have smiled to herself at his ability to keep his own feeling a a great distance from himself, careful to say nothing. Thus the scene taking place in this room, each breath they took, the very expresssions on their faces, each word they left said and unsaid, all of it belonged to Constance. It was pictured by her with wry interest during the time when she knew she would die, Henry believed. They were her characters; she had written the script for them. And she knew that Henry would recognize her art in these scenes. His very recognition was part of her dream. No matter where he looked or what he thought, he felt the sharpness of her plans and a sort of sad laughter at how easy it was to manipulate her sister and her niece and how delicious to direct the actions of her friend the novelist who, it seemed, had wished to be free of her. "

Oscar Wilde is introduced as a counter-point to James, the man who indulged his passions juxtaposed with the man who refused them. As Wilde's triumphant dramatic career turns to ashes, James observes it in a detached, yet sympathetic, manner. Tóibín does not shirk the issue of James' sexuality (which, whatever his inclinations, he seems not to have indulged), and there is much homoeroticism here. James clearly recognizes his feelings (of a night spent platonically sharing a bed with Holmes, he " wondered if he would ever again be so intensely alive"). But he cannot give in to them.

Tóibín's James is a man who prefers to look on, sympathetically, ironically, indulgently, analytically, but alone and in control. At the end, his brother and his family having left after a visit, James returns home. "Lamb House was his again. He moved around it relishing the silence and the emptiness. He welcomed the Scot, who was waiting for him to begin a day's work, but he needed more time alone first. He walked up and down the stairs, going into the rooms as though they, too, in how they yielded to him, belonged to an unrecoverable past, and would join the room with the tasseled tablecloths and the screens and the shadowed corners, and all the other rooms from whose windows he had observed the world, so that they could be remembered and captured and held."

A slightly expanded version of this review is posted on my blog:
http://jlshall.blogspot.com/2009/05/r...

Colm Toibin's The Master is a fascinating blend of fact and invention, offering a poignant image of Henry James and just how many sacrifices he made to become a great writer. James never married, never resolved his sexual identity; he had problems with intimacy and close friendships throughout his life. As Toibin has said, James missed out on a lot of things in life because he spent so much time working. And although the work itself gave him great satisfaction, and not doing it would have made him unhappy, there's little doubt that his private life and personal relationships suffered because of the work.

Rather than trying to portray James's complete life story in a straightforward narrative, Toibin has chosen to show us several dramatic episodes in that life – eleven episodes, set between January 1895 and October 1899: from the disastrous reception of James's stage play Guy Domville, to the acquisition of his beloved Lamb House in Rye. During this period, although many of his greatest works were completed or yet to be written, he produced The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, and The Awkward Age. And for me, one of the most interesting aspects of The Master was the way in which Toibin allows us to watch James receiving the inspiration for these works, and then doing the research and writing. I suppose there's no way of being certain that this is how the great man did what he did, but it's a terrifically absorbing speculation. ( )

I admit that I found this book easy to read, and that it held my interest. It is I take it biographically correct, and adds much to the 'record' by telling Henry James' thoughts and feelings. It starts in Januaary 1895, as James effort to be a playwright is failing, and concludes in October 1899, but there are many flashbacks and one gets a pretty full account of much of James' life from birth up to 1899--though of course disjointed, and flashbacky. But after reading the book I felt it really did not tell much and I was disappoinrted that the book did not proceed to tell of James' life after 1899..Stylistically, one is reminded of James' own writing, . But it is all rather 'precious' and makes a big deal of James' latent (usually, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., excepted) homosexuality. On balance, I found the book disappointing, considering how much it was hyped when it came out. ( )