This is a very well-written book -- but one which I didn't find to be all that interesting. It's a novel that lightly fictionalises the life of the American-British writer and author Henry James (1843-1916). The 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady is perhaps James' most well-known work; up there also are Daisy Miller (1879) and The Wings of the Dove (1902).
Colm Tóibín published The Master in 2004 to wide acclaim; his more recent work The Magician (my review is on Amazon) gives a similar quasi-biographical account of the life of the German author Thomas Mann.
After some difficulty getting into Tóibín's account of Mann's life, it 'grew on me' and I assessed it as being a good, and also very well-written, novel. Mann is author of the wonderful Buddenbrooks (1901, my review is also here). For me, The Magician started improving and becoming more real at about the time in Mann's life of the rise of the Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In short, I felt the narrative improved as soon as great world events -- and not just Mann's writings -- challenged Mann and made his life more consequential.
In the same way, with Henry James, I had previously (many years ago) read The Portrait of a Lady and found it good -- although more artificial and not as real-world-compelling as Buddenbrooks. Apart from country of origin, the greatest difference between James' life and that of Mann is that Henry James did not live in similarly momentous times. Accordingly, I found Tóibín's life of James simply less interesting than his view of Mann. James was a product of the late-19th-century belle époque; Mann had a much less benign lifetime that spanned two world wars and the Nazis.
Consequently, Tóibín's portrayal of James is of something of a self-absorbed narcissist, untroubled by malign world events. James circulates in gilded society. He does not form deep relationships. He never married. Like Mann, James leans toward same-sex attraction without, it seems, ever consummating any such relationship. James observes; he tends not to get involved. He sees the lives of others -- Hammond, Mona, his own sister Alice, the Wolseleys, and (most significantly) Minny Temple -- notes their life crises and then builds fictional stories based on those crises. The character of Isabel Archer, the hero(ine) of 'The Portrait...' is at least partly based on Minny Temple. James obsesses over the setup and furnishing of his new home in Rye, Suffolk. Damask and porcelain are only matters of obsession when there aren't greater things to worry about.
James' writing, like that of Mann, is wonderful -- although it did become more abstruse and impenetrable in his later life. But his writing, and his life, are of the Gilded Age -- concerned with society, society figures, conventions of marriage and independence, a measure of feminism and the challenges of life for Americans in Europe. Unlike Mann, James doesn't have to deal with Big History and all its unkindness. James' writing and storytelling, for me, therefore also come across as a bit frivolous and obsessed with triviality.
The Master comes in 11 chapters, each of which seems to be a more-or-less independent sub-story within the life of Henry James -- the 1895 failure of his stage-play Guy Domville, Oscar Wilde and his set, Americans in England, Minny Temple, set-up of his home in Rye and onward to the turn of the 19th-20th century.
To be honest, while Tóibín writes well, I just didn't find the life of Henry James all that interesting -- on the contrary somewhat self-absorbed, narcissistic and over-concerned with the inconsequential. There you go.
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