The Master [Hardcover]

Focusing on the life of Henry James, Colm Toibin's The Master goes beyond the usual "novelization" of someone's biography. Toibin has done a tremendous amount of research and has obviously read everything James has written, but he has so distilled this information that he actually recreates Henry James. Most remarkably, he does this while using the third person point of view to tell the story, preserving the objective tone but bringing forth characters and events so vibrant with life that Toibin's James is the man we know from his novels, letters, and journals.

When the novel opens in 1895, James's play, Guy Domville, has been booed on its opening night. James, now fifty-two, has hoped for a career as a playwright, believing success on stage will put an end to "his long solitary days" and allow him to spend more time among actors, whom he finds fascinating. Described as "a great stranger...observing the world as a mere watcher from the window," James is a lonely, solitary figure throughout the novel, a man unable to form a committed relationship with anyone, either male or female, sometimes wanting companionship but not closeness, and always needing solitude to work. Through flashbacks, Toibin shows how James's early upbringing may have been partly responsible for his feelings of isolation.

When James begins writing his stories and novels, he draws inspiration from the people he knows best and the events which have affected their lives and his own. His sister Alice is the model for a child in The Turn of the Screw, his cousin Minny Temple is the inspiration for several of his most important female characters-in "Poor Richard," Daisy Miller, and Portrait of a Lady--and his brother Wilky's wounds in the Civil War provide James with details he includes in other stories. Virtually every aspect of James's life works its way into a story, and as he gets inside the psyches of his characters through his fiction, he reveals his own psyche, his sympathies, and his personal conflicts.

Toibin's dual focus on James's life and its embodiment in his fiction give powerful immediacy and verisimilitude to this novel, and one cannot help but feel an emotional connection to James. His connections to great families and writers whose names are well known, and to people willing to accept James completely on his own terms provide Toibin with unlimited source material. It is Toibin's own talents in ordering this information, bringing it to life, and revealing its importance, however, which make this masterful novel so important. Mary Whipple

I don't want to put anyone off unduly, or slight an otherwise fine novel, but I'm hard pressed to know what people will make of this book if they don't know a)much about Henry James's life and b) haven't read much of Henry James's work.

If you bone up on a and b above, then you can 'c' about reading this very fine book. Toibin does a nice job of emulating James's style, but as with some of James's novels, the plot is not exactly the most gripping and I think it only really makes sense if you can fill in the gaps with your own knowledge adnd understanding of the true significance of events that are only sometimes hinted at here.

I reckon if you take the plot of David Lodge's 'Author, Author' (also about Henry James) and beef it up with elements of Toibin's written stlye, then you'd really have a killer novel. As things stand both books are the curate's egg.

First impressions of "The Master" were of how obviously different it was from the writer's other Booker short-listed work, "The Blackwater Lightship", the only other of his novels I have so far read.
Where the previous novel was set in contemporary Ireland, here we are taken back in time to the end of the nineteenth century, and a fictionalised rendering of a period spanning some five years in the life of the American writer Henry James. As the century draws to its close and James advances through his middle years, it is very clearly a time for taking stock, for both retrospection and introspection.
The first important event in the novel is the painful, humiliating failure of James's incursion into writing for the London theatre, "Guy Domville", a failure counterpointed against the resounding triumph of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" - while the opening words of the novel are "Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead..." The tone is thus set for a novel about failure, regret, and frustrated hopes. Thereafter actual events play a secondary role: there is no plot, but rather a series of episodes from James's life, episodes whose essentially inconclusive nature gradually builds up an impression of the emptiness at the heart of that life. Where Wilde is quoted as saying he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, it becomes slowly and painfully apparent that James has so far channeled everything into his work, with the result that a distressing void has opened up in his emotional life. There are repeated discreet but clear references to emotional chemistry with men which might have developed into sexual relationships, but which didn't for reasons which the narrative tantalisingly never makes clear, implying thereby that James himself chose not to ponder such matters, to shut them out and concentrate instead on his next work of art.
The style of Colm Toibin's writing is very different from that of Henry James himself, and yet the same impression gradually seeps through to the reader: the impression of the chaos of human emotions, and their elusiveness when it comes to setting them down in words.
"The Master" is not an easy novel, and yet the reader eventually finds himself feeling both sympathy and pity for a writer who changed the direction of the English novel, but in doing so made sacrifices. Whether they were worth it is one of the questions Toibin's novel leaves unanswered.