The Master: A Novel

This book is not nearly as good as anything written by Henry James himself. It is a novel about Henry James covering this mature years in London and Rye. This NOVEL--what does the author mean!?-- main characters are based on real people and named for the people they are based on, but because it is called a novel I suppose one cannot complain if you don't like it or some portrayal of the characters.
Henry James crawls achingly through the book mostly as a depressive personality. I don't believe it. Near the end there a scene where Henry's brother, William, tells him he has been in contact with their dead mother. Toibin has Henry respond, "...Is my mother at rest?" Now would you respond to your brother and refer to your mother as if your brother had not the same mother?

I only attempted to read this book because my book club picked it. I couldn't get through it! For starters I'm not a big fan of historical novels...which this is. It deals with author Henry James and his lives and loves (mostly for men) and how his books came into being. It is well-written and moves but I was completely bored. I gave up at page 100 because I realize I hated the book and didn't give a damn about the man or his works. If you love James' books you might enjoy this. If not beware!

too many books to remember which is which. it was either the master or mothers & sons that had all the different stories , whichever had the multiple stories was NOT FOR ME but after three of his books I only thought the one with the young immigrant girl in Brooklyn was alright . I'd say i'm not a fan

The Master is a captivating imagined portrayal of Henry James' interior life presented through disparate episodes, experiences and relationships.

It is an amazing and engaging fictional interpretation of HJ through experiences with his mother and especially his father, and with his brother William and his sister Alice.

HJ's experienced but unfulfilled homosexual longings are a continual refrain, that includes unfulfilled homo-erotic experiences with Oliver Wendell Holmes, the man-servant, Hammond, the sculptor, Hendrik Anderson, and references back to longings in Paris to the unknown Paul Jakowski.

His close, yet unfulfilled relationships with women, including his cousin, Minnie Temple, and his deeply admired friend, Constance Fennimore Woolson are also portrayed...

It is true to say that there is not much action in this imagined biography. Nonetheless, The Master is an intriguing and enjoyable interpretation of a great writer who, in real life, could never ultimately surrender or fully and happily connect to anyone. It leaves one with the feeling that HJ was not only a prisoner to himself, but also the prison keeper of himself.

Ultimately,then, a beautifully written and engaging tale of a tragic soul.

This is one of the most beautifully written contemporary novels I have read in a long time, that is if I were merely concentrating on the sentence structure and the phrases used by the author rather than the story he was attempting to tell. I was really looking forward to reading this novel, given the praise from professional and amateur reviewers I read before purchasing it. Unfortunately, the elaborate prose lacks substance, and despite my best efforts to enjoy this prize-winning novel, I found it nearly impossible to become engrossed. I generally enjoy novels that are beautifully descriptive and don't feel the need to have a succinct ending, but despite my best efforts, and my appreciation for Henry James novels, I could not bring myself to truly enjoy this one.

Colm Toibin’s novel The Master is one of hauntings. It is so because it discusses the seeds for Henry James’s “ghost” stories, notably The Turn of the Screw, and because James’s brother William, the American psychologist, was a spiritualist who claimed to have contacted their dead mother. But mostly the novel is haunted by Toíbín’s tender presentation of the novelist Henry James as a man himself haunted not only by the people he’s known but also by the possibilities life presents: “He wanted to sleep, to enter a lovely blackness, a dark, but not too dark, resting place, unhaunted, unpeopled, with no flickering presences.”
That “flickering” represents the novel’s construction, for though it outwardly moves from October 1895 and the disastrous opening of James’s first play in London, to October 1899 and the visit of brother William, its chapters revolve around characters or musings. And, of course, around the wealth of emotions and ideas fermented in James’s mind by that character or musing. For like many writers, James was an unabashed thief. He used his dying sister Alice in two novels. He used a father-daughter couple he frequently visited for Portrait of a Lady. And he used himself.
A fine example of the novel’s so-fine flickering comes with the chapter set in April of 1898 when Henry receives a photograph depicting the Boston unveiling of a bronze statue of Colonel Shaw. Shaw was the white man who led a basically black regiment during the Civil War. Henry’s younger brother Wilky served in the regiment and was severely wounded, and Henry’s older brother William spoke at the statue’s unveiling. The chapter seemingly vacillates to describe how Henry’s father’s wooden leg resulted from an act of heroism. And then it moves to depict Henry’s questioning of his future: preacher or lawyer? But the Civil War interrupts, and we find Henry and William boarding at Harvard University. A fellow boarder named Francis Child, who collects folk ballads and teaches at Harvard, boasts virulent abolitionist tendencies and seems “on the verge of stating that those who remained at home, including his fellow diners . . . were cowards. . . .” Indeed, in this chapter Henry questions his own motivation for not enlisting. He sees the horrors of war intensified when Wilky returns home severely wounded. Wilky gives seed to Henry’s first published story about the imagined return of a wounded veteran and the “earthy smell” of an army issue blanket. Note this single chapter’s rich movement from idealism as presented by Professor Child to realism—both shameful and prideful—as presented by the James brothers. The chapter ends with the publication of Henry’s first story, a story raiding “his own memories.”
Every chapter in the novel thus subtly weaves characters and themes, always to return to the haunted James, a haunting he manages to tranform into literature. Again, despite its straightforward timeline, this is not so much a novel of plot as one of emotion and discovery.
I’ve held off mentioning that this novel was a finalist for the Lambda Award for Gay Men’s Fiction, since that pigeonholing does the book a disservice. T. S. Eliot commented that Henry James “had a mind so fine that no idea ever crossed it.” Eliot did not intend insult; he meant that James’s fiction understood human complexity and never simplified matters into ‘A therefore C.’ So too, while Toíbín’s portrait of James is indeed concerned with homosexuality in Victorian England, that concern is overshadowed by other concerns. Only two chapters confront the homosexual issue directly. A third discusses Oscar Wilde, who was flagrantly carrying on with a young man throughout proper London. But what we read more is James’s appraisal of Wilde’s pandering to the public in his drama and his inability to spell sodomite when he sued the Marquess of Queensbury for calling him one. “Spelling, I imagine, was not ever his strong point,” James tells a friend. The chapter especially covers James’s imaginings about Wilde’s two abandoned sons as their father is sentenced to prison, to echo James’s own father, an overbearing mix of drunkard, idealist, and Puritan. Similarly, in an ending chapter we meet the sculptor Hendrik Andersen. Will this sensuous young man, who plans a “world city . . . where princes and potentates . . . could gather,” break through romantically to James? No. In fact, what James takes from Andersen is the seed for one of his most enduring stories, “The Beast in the Jungle,” about a man who consumes so much time imagining himself fulfilling a great, vague destiny that both life and love pass him by.
So. . . the entire novel considered, I propose nominating it for The Spinoza Award, should such an award ever appear. Spinoza, to remind you, was the Jewish philosopher who claimed that everything and everyone serve as an aspect of God, who of course is neither male nor female. So . . . the Spinoza Award since the novel treks into a miniature god’s mind for whom nothing human is foreign. Consider the novel’s last vision of James: “He walked up and down the stairs, going into rooms as though they, too, in how they yielded to him, belonged to an unrecoverable past . . . and would join . . . all the other rooms from whose windows he had observed the world so that they could be captured and held.”

The term "Jamesian" has been used to refer to anything related to William James, philosopher/psychologist, or to things related to his brother, author Henry James. I would have liked Toibin to have explored more fully the relationship between these two brilliant men, but instead he focused on Henry James and his other relationships. He depicts James as a conflicted homosexual who attracts women as well, one of whom may have committed suicide over him. Toibin writes in a Jamesian style here--stilted and formal. In fact, I think the book would have been more effective if it had been written in first person. However, the third person narrative has one distinct advantage: it further imitates James's style by using real people--in this case, Henry James himself--as inspiration for fiction. Several of James's friends recognized themselves in his novels and were more likely to feel flattered than offended, even if their doppelganger was an unsavory character. To me, though, this period in James's life, between the huge failure of his play Guy Domville and the publishing of his novels The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, is quite boring. Toibin does describe the events that James may have seized for the plots of his later novels, but nothing much at all happened in this time period, except that he bought an old house in Rye, where his drunken staff members embarrassed him in front of his occasional guests. In fact, the major events, particularly the deaths of friends and family, did not occur during this time period and are presented as retrospective ruminations, triggered by various accusations and implications. Henry James seemed to have a lot of friends and was supposed to have been very good company, but his reticence with regard to his relationships, both male and female, made him seem standoffish, self-centered, and quite dull.

The Master evokes the life and spirit of Henry James as he travels throughout America, England, Ireland, France and Italy. The reader is able to experience the places and meet the people that would become the inspirations for Jame's own novels, such as Daisy Miller and The Portrait of a Lady. The Master depicts many aspects of the US and Europe that I found intriguing, such as the view of the Civil War through the eyes of a New Englander. We also learn much about societal norms at the time, including how James and others purportedly dealt with his latent homosexuality. Though the pace was a little slow, the Master proved an interesting insight into a classic, if somewhat, unconventional novelist.

Colm Toibin's The Master is flat out extraordinary. A marvelous, fictional meditation on the real people in Henry James' life, who are so important they surface as fictional characters in his novels or impact the course of his career. Much as been made in these reviews about James' homosexuality, a fact acknowledged but hardly "explored" by the author. Repression seems to be the Masters real sexual identity, and Toibin seems content to note the tragedy of an extraordinary talent so tied to convention he dared not defy it. Oscar Wilde did and was destroyed in a white hot conflagration. Henry seems to be both smoldering and suffocating, dying slowly from smoke inhalation.

Even more interesting were the ghosts of important women in James' life who haunt him always. His selfish usage of cousin Minny Temple, Constance Fennimore Woolson and sister Alice is portrayed as both selfish and acceptable, which I think it was. It might have been quite awful to be his friend, but quite stupendous to find yourself as the heroine of Portrait of a Lady, or Wings Of The Dove. Poor Alice James--to smart and to shrill for her time--probably would not have found her portraits so satisfying. Henry's awkward relationship with brother William rings hilariously true--two brilliant men, so sharp and insightful, completely incapable of real intimate connection with each other.

The writing is both beautiful and nuanced. Each of the chapters could stand as a short story of great beauty and insight. Linked together they create a masterpiece about The Master. Superb!

In The Master, Colm Toibin offers the reader a style and content quite different from his other novels. In a sense, the book is an act of homage to Henry James, a recognition of a creative debt, perhaps, owed by Colm Toibin to the great American writer. On another level, like Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, it is an attempt to enter an iconic writer's own creativity to highlight its insecurity and doubt. Current writers know full well that their offerings are rightly subject to critical analysis and comparison, with some critics apparently taking delight in automatically belittling contemporary efforts. But when we read a book that has achieved `classic' status, we often forget that in its own time it was treated no more reverently than current new issues. In The Master Colm Toibin manages to penetrate the creativity of Henry James, bringing his character to life via the creative process that seems to be at his very core.

Thus The Master is part biography, part family history, part observation of late nineteenth century society in England, America and in expatriate enclaves in Europe. It remains a novel, however, and its main character a fiction, despite the historical reality of both the setting and the achievement. And this becomes one of the book's strengths.

The story is a series of reflections from the past married with often apparently mundane family or personal events. Chapters are dated, beginning in 1895 and ending in 1899, but there is no linearity of plot, no story, as such, apart from the development of the writer as he responds to reflections on his family, life and relationships.

At the start, a play of his has just failed. Oscar Wilde's trial is in the news, commented upon alongside reports of London society and its opinions. It is here that Henry James laments the death of his sister, before soon describing his brother's participation in the American Civil War, a war that he, himself, declined to fight.

A suicide, that of a fellow writer, Constance Fennimore Woolson, has a profound effect on him. She was in Venice, a city that James then visits to assist her relatives with the necessary details. As ever, he is less than effective. In a later encounter with a sculptor called Andersen, James again comes close to standing idly by as events run past him.

The author is always on the outside, it seems, an apparently uninvolved, disinterested observer, always apart from experience he could potentially share. He prefers to retain this role, the observer, the listener, making as few comments as possible. He sees life as a mystery, with only sentences capable of beauty.

Ultimately, Henry James is cast as a selfish absorber of other's experience, the raw material he stores to regurgitate later as plot and content. He lives his own rather self-centered life through the recording and later embroidery of other's experience, others' emotion. His psyche is a writer's notebook, with human contacts neatly entered and filed for later literary use, his own emotions not revealed, or perhaps suppressed, his presence predatory. The Master is a remarkable achievement, a book whose writing mimics Henry James's own literal but complex style, itself a discipline.

To paraphrase Fitzgerald, great artists are different from you and me; they have more drive. Charlie Parker played only the high notes of chords in melodic line to build an expressive storyline. John Coltrane composed by first blowing scales. "Basics man", he'd say, "start with the basics; the song will come out." Surely, Da Vinci and Michelangelo would agree. So would Henry James, known in his day as the Master. In this eponymous book---what to call it?--- historical-novel-biography by Toibin, the basics that drive James the artist, are laid bare. For him writing is a form of primitive hunting. Driven to find new characters, new mind-games, new egos, new ways of looking at people and their motives, everyone he encounters, no matter how briefly, become prey to Jamesian transmogrifications. Watch out dear lady, you with that insouciant walk, that misplaced wisp; mind that pursed lip young man; Madam, that vapid look won't do but that that blue dress with ruffled lapel could land you on page 85 of a drawing room novel. Spill your tea buddy, and Bam! You just might end up as a scary character in a ghost story. If you're a fan of James, you'll love learning where many his of ideas and characters originated. Toibin has done all the research. But if you expect a work with a compelling story, you know, like one that Bird or Henry James might conjure, The Master is not it. Alas, more Phillip Glass than Ornette Coleman, Toibin's The Master is all rhythm and not enough plot.

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

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 enjoyed parts of The Master a lot. Other parts were very run of the mill period fiction.

I believe that Toibin's research and work were significant and he crafted an accurate depiction of Henry James. At the start of the novel, James' sexuality though repressed plays a large part. This theme all but disappears through the heart of the book and reemerges at the end. I found the response of others and the suspicion of James' sexuality to be very well done. I honestly tired a bit of James' infatuations. I had no issues with them but they were simply repetitive.

Despite his likely sexuality, James' most interesting relationship is with Constance Fenimore Woolson. She clearly loves James and he loves her on certain levels but pulls back. Their relationship was, for me, the most intriguing part of the novel.

The brief section on the U.S. Civil War was strong though it didn't flow well with the rest of the book.

In the end, my biggest issue, is that Henry James comes across as a self absorbed jerk and it's difficult to sympathize with him.

All in all, I really enjoyed parts of the book but large sections were dull. I'm really on the fence about recommending it.

Toibin's prose reads like poetry; there's a gentle rhythm to everything, and each word is painstakingly chosen. It manages to imitate Henry James' distinctive style whilst still keeping characteristics of Toibin.

"The Master" manages to be melancholy but never depressing. I'm not sure how it manages that other than through great skill. Toibin's Henry James is fascinating and multifaceted. He's complex, and it's interesting to view the world through his mind. The characters are realistic and well thought out; they appear to have purpose outside of the story. The book was obviously well researched as well. Toibin spent a lot of time preparing.

However, it is sometimes difficult to remember which character is being discussed. There are a lot of them and most of them have similar names. Also, there's not really a plot. It's just a middle-aged writer revisiting his past; there's no conflict other than that between Henry's loneliness and his desire for solitude. It's written beautifully, but if the reader wants a book that will draw them in and carry them along, this isn't it.

Toibin also believes that James was gay. It didn't detract from the book for me. However, a few members of my class were taken aback by this and felt they couldn't trust the rest of the narrative as a result.

The book can be challenging to read as well. Because Toibin is imitating James' style, the reader has to concentrate. "The Master" isn't a breezy, easy read by any means. If you enjoy that and good writing without minding that there isn't much of a plot, then you'll enjoy this book.

Henry James made his reputation as a sophisticated observer of 19th-century society. His books, such as PORTRAIT OF A LADY and THE TURN OF THE SCREW, provide detailed psychological studies of his characters and their motivations. In THE MASTER, the observer is himself observed. Colm Tóibín turns Henry James into a leading character in this spectacular achievement of literary fiction.
When writing about historical figures, the writer must choose which events will best illuminate his chosen subject. Colm Tóibín shows us Henry James at moments of intense emotional stress, experienced or remembered during the last years of the nineteenth century. One such incident is his wounded brother's return from the Civil War, a conflict Henry James passively allowed his parents to protect him from. He must ask himself why he declined to fight, while unable to help absorbing his family's distress. Henry James can't stop seeing, can't stop feeling and understanding, which makes intimacy with other people impossible for him.
When he draws near to a street in Venice where a close friend and fellow novelist committed suicide, he murmurs, "I have come as close as I could, as near as I dared." This is at once a refusal to visit the scene of her death and an admission of his acute awareness that his friend expected more of him and he disappointed her. These multiple layers of meaning are common throughout the book and add greatly to its sense of depth and complexity. Is Henry James the Master because he is able to channel the upsetting incidents of his life into his work, or because of his aloofness? Terrible things happen to other people; Henry James is rarely directly involved. He watches and remembers.
It's hard to escape a sense of competition between the writer and his subject. Colm Tóibín is also an accomplished novelist and his powers of psychological observation are no less highly refined. His portrayal of Henry James's acute discomfort during Oscar Wilde's trial is particularly well done, as is his description of Henry James's drunken butler as "a cross between a ghost and someone who has seen a ghost." The story develops internally for the most part; it takes a writer of extraordinary skill to infuse Henry James, a very private man, a thinker and a worrier, with the same narrative impetus found in more dynamic characters.
THE MASTER will never be mistaken for light reading; like Henry James's own novels, it is dense and complex and worth every word. Colm Tóibín has given us a great gift: he has empowered us to see, to feel and to understand, along with one of the world's best.
--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn

"The Master", Colm Toibin's luminous portrait of Henry James, the great American novelist, should in my opinion have walked away with last year's Booker but for reasons best known to the judging committee didn't. Maybe its subject was considered too literary and therefore lacking in commercial potential. Whatever.

It is nevertheless Toibin's best novel to-date and a richly imagined work of fiction that eschews the linear narrative of biography in favour of a selective approach that filters out most of life's noisy irrelevance for a distillate that becomes pure paint for an airbrushed portrait in the hands of author. Exquisitely literate, tasteful and restrained, Toibin's gorgeous prose is typical of a style in the classical tradition now rarely used among contemporary writers of today.

The novel opens on an ominous note as we witness a confidence shattered Henry James recoiling from the blows of poor critical reception accorded to his play ("Guy Domville") at the West End, London. Compared to the wild success enjoyed by the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, James felt like a failure not realizing his own talent laid elsewhere. From there on, the journey that Toibin takes us on as we follow James' sojourn through the grand parlours of Europe and backwards and forwards in time reaching back to James' childhood past is one that reveals to devastating effect the paralyzing repression endured by the great novelist in his own interior life. James' natural reticience, his lack of courage in facing up to his own nature, condemns him to playing third party spectator as he watches the parade of life march by. Though his heart beats faster in close physical proximity to members of his own sex, he never ever finds true expression of his own sexuality, so to conclude that James was essentially homosexual may be to overstate the truth. His relationships with the opposite sex are either platonic or sexually unenthusiastic, so the conclusion the reader reaches may yet be the same. Ironically, it is his tragically symbiotic relationship with the emotionally catatonic Constance Fenimore Woolson that is among the poignant and best written in the novel.

Compared to his brilliant but convention minded older brother William whose worldly achievements never ever surprised, Henry's luminous talent proved the deeper and ultimately shone the brighter. Equally, the relentless torment suffered by his mentally corseted sister Alice and his cousin Minnie Temple only exposed the cruelities of social rigidities and intellectual restrictions imposed on women of the time, a fact doubly reinforced by the oh-so-knowing acts of wickedness and cynicism by the monstrous Lady Wolesley. Quite clearly, the swell in the tide of intellectual freedom hadn't yet reached its fullness, so it's not surprising that Henry James, already seized with self doubt, should find a ready channel for his repressed feelings in the stories and characters he created in his novels. In other words, he lived life only vicariously through the lives of imagined persons who sprung from the pages of his books. But oh what revelations these turned out to be ! It may pay readers already familiar with "Portrait Of A Lady", "Turn Of The Screws", "Washington Square", "The Aspern Papers", "The Wings Of A Dove", etc to re-read them for a fuller appreciation of James' inner thoughts and yearnings.

"The Master" is a great novel. It is enduring literature of the finest quality and should be read as widely as possible. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I've always been fascinated by Henry James, from his endless sentences and his emotionally constipated characters to his famous family and sexual ambiguity. Despite the tortuous prose, each paragraph of his stories and novels contains unsounded depths of meaning and restraint. You keep wanting his characters to come out of whichever closet imprisons them, but you also feel that life lived within sad boundaries can be graceful, beautiful, and the best possible compromise with forces too great for ordinary defiance or rebellion. Streams of puritanical exceptionalism and continental cynicism create a turbid river in James's novels, and the reader is often borne along with characters who are powerless to fight the current. For all his coolness and distance, James always seems implicated in his work, present even in the act of effacing himself. This has led many of us to biographers and critics like Edel, Lewis, Novick, Menand, and Bell in search of the real Henry, Alice, William, and Henry, Sr. I've never been disappointed by Jamesiana, perhaps because one always comes back to those fascinating sentences and intriguing lacunae, but I've always found myself preferring the original to the study.

Until Colm Toibin came along. Because The Master is a novel, the author enters the heart by means of feeling instead of psychology. We cringe, withdraw, soothe, bristle, and hurt along with the protagonist. We experience those forces that box, coax, and channel the master's emotions into works of art, which stand luminously apart from him yet also seem written in his very blood. I read two James short stories while reading The Master, but they didn't supplant the enchantment and fascination of Toibin's novel, which stands as a worthy companion to James's oeuvre, taking its place with those eternal works of mystery, sorrow, and art. The prose is polished, beautiful, and a little less convoluted than even early James. One finishes the book with a deep appreciation for the way in which art like James's requires sacrifice. The pleasures of reading and writing are rendered with love and dignity, but one is always made aware that they come at great personal cost. I don't know what it cost Toibin to produce such a masterful work, but this reader is very grateful for it.

Most novels about the life of an author (or other artist) fall into the "Lust for Life" trap: they focus on the more sensational aspects of the author's life; and they portray artistic creation as a temporary madness, during which the author is taken out of him/herself into the exalted state in which a work of art is produced. James, by contrast, dealt in nuance and restraint, small gestures with enormous meaning, and unexpressed desires leading to endless regret. I felt that Toibin captured James' voice perfectly, both in his own writing style and in what he chooses to tell (and not tell) about the author. James was exquisitely sensitive and kind, but both his New England upbringing and his homosexuality (which, if expressed, could have had serious consequences, as the chapter about Wilde makes clear) combined to turn his warmer impulses inward. His personal life may appear to have been a series of (mostly) dead ends, but that's the tragedy that he turned into art. (And, having always thought of James as an effete man-about-town who happened to be a good novelist, I was surprised to learn how extremely hard-working a writer he was, generating a constant stream of essays, reviews, and stories.) The conversion of life into literature happens, not because of a visitation by the Muse, but by the continual gathering of small impressions and linking them together to form a coherent, compelling whole. James, an inveterate journal-and-notebook-keeper, gave his biographers a lot of material to work with, but this novel is far and away THE most convincing depiction of the creative process that I've ever read. A master as seen by a master.

This well written book on Henry James does a super job of linking events in the life of James with his novels and short stories without making overt connections, everything is implicit, much like the work of the master writer himself.

There are five themes explored in the book that are worthy of exploration.

First, James' sexual orientation and behavior remains a mystery and Toibin certainly delicately and carefully explores this area. James befriended wealthy, intelligent women and thus it is no surprise that they sensed that Henry James was attracted to men and yet was unable to act upon that attraction. Lady Wolseley, wife of the military governor of Ireland, trys to match-make with James and a handsome, bright, sensitive army officer, yet James never makes the right move.

Second, James thoughtfully translated and transformed the people in his life into the characters in his novels. His bright terminally ill sister Alice inspires "Daisy Miller". His witty verbal intelligent cousin Minny Temple inspires Isabel Archer in "Portrait of a Lady".

Third, the sections on the Civil War wounded and the military career and wounding of Wiley James were beautifully written and fully capture not only James' unwillingness to engage life but his guilt at not engage it.

Fourth, Henry was a second child, following behind his brilliant brother, William, the father of American Psychology. William offers interesting dialogue regarding his findings from "The Varieties of Religious Experience". Yet it is the relationship between the brothers, the competition and the challenges to each other's sensibility that Toibin captures very well.

Fifth, some of the most moving parts of the book relate the friendship of Henry to Constance Fenimore Woolson, a novelist who commits suicide in Venice in despair over the never deeloping relationship between Henry and Constance. These painful events eventually show up in "The Beast in the Jungle", one of the greatest short stories ever written. This story is the account of a life never lived, a missed life, a tragedy of non-occurance. Henry recognized that he and Constance were of such matching temprements that they would have made wonderful companions, yet his 'secret' keeps him from moving toward the bright, sensitive, women who would have loved him despite his 'secret'.

So what does one think about Henry James after reading this novel? He was the outsider, the observer, the one who withdrew from confrontation, from relationships, from sexual gratification, and some may think that this lead to his genius and wonderful gifts to world literature. I am not of this school. If James has given us some of the finest novels in the English language from the perspective of the observer, the non-participant, then how much more could he have given us if he had fully lived his life? As the book so clearly states, it is a mistake not to fully live your life.

Colm Tóibín's impeccably researched but fictionalized biography ostensibly confines itself to five years of Henry James' life - 1895-99, in which he abandoned his theatrical ambitions and returned with gusto to his true calling, the novel - but it actually ranges freely over its subject's entire history. James enthusiasts will be delighted with the direct and elliptical references to the master's work: Tóibín traces the origins of key scenes, characters and entire plots from several of the novels, and cheekily deploys lines from them in the construction of his own. Ultimately, though, this isn't a pretentious stunt or even merely an homage. It's the finely drawn portrait of a man who was the master of his chosen art, and also the master of his own emotional life to the point of self-crippling. Tóibín takes the view that James' ambiguous sexuality was deeply and deliberately closeted, and the effect of this self-control was far more destructive than James may have anticipated: suppressing his genuine sexual and emotional responses not only compromised his own happiness, it alienated him from even his closest friends to the extent that he could no longer engage appropriately with their needs nor perceive the sometimes fatal consequences of his own (in)action. This revelation makes James just as interesting a man as he is a novelist - maybe more so. Readers, like me, who keenly appreciate James' contribution to the art of the novel but find the novels themselves a little tedious, may find themselves growing fonder of both the man and his work when the origins of both are explored so cleverly. One could argue that a novel probing its protagonist's abject inability to connect will inevitably feel a little dry. However, I do feel that James' primary contribution to technique - the third-person indirect narrative voice - might have been used a little more effectively to examine what he kept so masterfully hidden. Still, that's a minor quibble with what is a fascinating, compassionate and beautifully crafted work.

Of Henry James, some wag remarked that he chewed more than he bit off. Most James readers will know what this means -- the intricate digestion (and redigestion) of psychological insights about human interaction. This novel attempts to recreate something of what went into making such an extraordinary author. Toibin, who is among the major gay novelists now writing, and also one of the very few with a refined sense for the literary tradition of the modern gay novel, is thoroughly at home with the fin-de-siecle atmosphere of James' world; even Toibin's prose is shaped to reflect the elegance of that age. The story that Toibin tells is not exactly tragic, but it is very sad: an author whose highly developed powers of observation are plainly a compensation for his inability to commit to personal relationships (as in the flashbacks to his sister Alice and to the rather more threatening Constance Woolson).

There are many great moments in this book, but one that I shall always cherish is his encounter, toward the end of the book, with the formidable Baroness von Rabe, who remarks, of an earlier encounter with James: "We all liked you, and I suppose you liked us as well, but you were too busy gathering material to like anyone too much. You were charming, of course, but you were like a young banker collecting our savings. Or a priest listening to our sins. ... And I think that is what you are still doing. I don't think you have retired."

This novel is essential for its recreation of the living novelist.

In his magnificent novel "The Master", Colm T?ib?n managed to bring us the man behind the genius -- in this case American writer Henry James. The narrative focus in a period about a year and a half that the author was set in Europe, and working on some of his most sophisticated novels, such as "The Wings of the Dove" and "The Golden Bowl".

"The Master" deals with the thin line between what is real and what was inspiration to produce fiction. Back and forth, the narrative portrays James's past and present, his childhood in American, the death of his sister, friends that were important to his life among other things. Somehow everything ends up being inspiration for the master creating his novels and short stories.

At the same time, T?ib?n is able to produce a Henry James that is extremely human, dealing with success, failure, frustrated love and things like these. The novel begins with the infamous opening night of the writer's play that was a huge flop. Depressed, James questions his work and the art itself.

Just like the whole novel that is a meditation about art and its power. T?ib?n's prose follows James's style, which makes the novel acquire its own rhythm. Fans of the classic writer will be pleased not only to see him as a convincing character, but also because the may feel they are reading one of his best novels. At the same time, T?ib?n managed to create his own literary voice, which is very powerful and resonant. It is not his aim to uncover his character's life, and he doesn't attempt to do so -- what he does is to illuminate some dark corners of the human soul and the result is devastating.

This book has gotten many detailed rave reviews, and I'll rave about it also, but I'd like to make this a more practical and useful review. I loved the book, but Henry James is one of my favorite authors. I've read several of his novels as well as seen the films and PBS versions. The American is one of my all time favorites. Colm Toibin brings James to life and takes you into his time. I really felt a part of the James family when they were going through the Civil War. He gave me a vivid feeling of the ghastly poverty in 19th century Ireland and the behavior of the English as an occupying army. He takes you from Newport to Boston to Paris to London to Dublin and proves that with good research and ability, an author can write convincingly about a time he never lived in and countries not his own.

However, I feel not everybody will find this book as appealing as I did and I'd like to try to save those people some time and money. First, this book is written in the 19th century style, with a slow-moving story, more description and less dialogue and graphic action. After all, life was slower-paced in those days. If you prefer contemporary literature, with a fast-moving plot, you may not care for this book. People who are not familiar with Henry James or haven't read his books may not be interested. The exception is people who are always meaning to read his books, but haven't gotten around to it. This book will be a good introduction for those readers and they can decide which of his novels they want to start with. Finally, there are people that don't like James's writing and I can't see them wanting to read this book. The Master really boils down to each reader's personal taste. I'd recommend it in a heartbeat, but it's a good idea to give some thought to what you like to read.

This quietly elegant biographical novel about Henry James opens in 1895, when James is in despair over a disastrous and humiliating career move; his theatrical production, "Guy Domville" has debuted to catcalls and jeers in front of a crowd filled with his friends and fellow writers. The novel ends four years later, after he has published one of his most popular stories, "The Turn of the Screw," and just before James finished two of his best and most successful novels, "The Ambassadors" and "The Wings of the Dove."

Yet Toibin, wisely, doesn't limit his novel's domain to the last four years of the nineteenth century--a tranquil period of transition that James largely spent at his newly acquired pastoral estate, Lamb House. Instead, many of the chapters serve as a launch for flashbacks to earlier periods of James's life: his brothers' enlistment in the Union Army during the Civil War, the death of his sister Alice, and, most effectively, his friendship with the doomed Constance Fenimore Woolson. Along the way Toibin suggests people and events that served, obviously or subtly, as inspiration for James's fiction.

Toibin also explores the aspect of James that has received the most scrutiny in recent decades: his confused and repressed sexuality. A number of set pieces and suggestive episodes portray an artist who is alternately troubled and paranoid and melancholic: his reaction to Oscar Wilde's scandalous trial, an ambiguous relationship with Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., an invitation to write a tribute to the aesthete John Addington Symonds. Yet, in the end, he triumphs over adversity, and this is nowhere more powerfully portrayed than in the account of a tense and combative visit by his brother William, who always treated Henry as an undisciplined and flighty younger brother.

As faithful as it is to James's biography, Toibin's work is, above all, a work of fiction: there are some purely speculative episodes and, of course, James remains an enigmatic figure. In addition, a number of events, such as James's perversely funny experience with his alcoholic servants, occurred well into the 1900s and are collapsed into earlier years for dramatic purposes. Some readers have complained that, even as fiction, "The Master" is not that compelling if you are not acquainted with James's massive oeuvre. Although I'm familiar with James's career and his influence, I've read only three or four of his shorter works (and none of them very recently)--yet I found that the novel had the opposite effect: I now want to read much more of his fiction, particularly the novels and stories he wrote during this period and afterwards. And, in this respect, I think, Toibin's effort succeeds not only as a memorable re-creation of a memorable writer but also as moving appreciation of his literary achievement.

A pleasant fictionalised biography of the novelist Henry James in which the author concentrates not so much on dates and events but on James's relationship with his family and friends. Actually Colm Toibin deliberately chose to write about a specific period of James's life, namely from January 1895 to October 1899 with a few flashbacks to tell about his youth in America before he settled in England.

We learn about the failure of his theatre play Guy Domville while Oscar Wilde was enjoying a raging success with an Ideal Husband, his subsequent departure to Ireland, the death of his wife Alice. Then he followed Wilde's imprisonment and the exile of his wife and children which impressed James very much. Often Colm Toibin describes how ideas for a new novel or short story matured in James's mind and how they were related to his daily encounters and impressions. James could write and read at leisure after the purchase of Lamb House in Rye where he enjoyed his solitude between the visits of his friends, his brother William, his sister in law Alice and Peggy, his niece. But it was after meeting the young and impetuous sculptor Hendrik Andersen in Rome that James realised that he himself was ageing slowly because he saw that Andersen was too young to know how memory and regret mingle, how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost.

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

o The Master is Colm Toibin's fictional account of five years in the life of author Henry James when he progressed from obscurity to an author of renown. The novel starts with the opening (and immediate closing) of James' play Guy Domville. The author then retreats to Ireland to hide his humiliation. The Master charters Henry james path back to the limelight. The book is a deeply poignant and meditative study on a classic author who saw much success in his own age. Toibin, while chronicling James' time, trials and tribulations, shows how the events that shaped his life inspired his writing. In `The Master', Toibin pays glowing tribute to his own spiritual master in the art of writing. The Master is a serious piece of literary erudition that is a work of an author coming of age. This is Toibin's best work so far, and one of the most enjoyable serious books of the year.

"The Master" is a graceful and understated treatment of the life of Henry James. I find myself wanting to use words like "quiet" and "gentle" to describe both the story and Colm Toibin's prose style. The book has almost no plot that could be described as such, preferring instead to meander back and forth through the episodes of Henry James's life, sometimes relating events as they occur, sometimes lingering over memories of the past. It can be slightly difficult to tease out all the different strands of storyline and to remember what is past and what is present, but I found that it didn't much matter; I was content to let it all wash over me.

As I read the book I developed quite a fondness for Henry James, or for Henry James as Toibin has imagined him, at any rate. Toibin does an excellent job of conveying his taciturnity and restraint, his intense awareness of manners and class, his overriding need for solitude. I was impressed with the way Henry's repression and intensity of emotion were communicated; it was so effective that a scene as potentially boring as Henry lying in bed listening to the floorboards creak as his guest moves about his house was as full of exquisite tension for me as it was for him. I also thought that Toibin was particularly good at dramatizing Henry's need to avoid being tied down, the way that need was related to his need to write, and the consequences that his actions in service of that need had for the people closest to him. Reading about the fates of Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson, it would be easy to think of Henry as cold and self-serving, yet for some reason I remained sympathetic.

The prose is lovely, the characters are well-drawn, and the book features some very astute observations about the writing life and the creative process. "The Master" is a very worthwhile read, even for someone with no particular interest in Henry James.

The Master is Colm Toibin's Booker finalist about four years in the life of American ex-patriate novelist Henry James leading up to the turn of the 20th century.

Much has been made about the queering of Henry James....my people now claim James as "one of us." Toibin's novel, however, does not necessarily advance that reading. Clearly James is a lover of men, yet he can never bring himself to form full relationships with them. One of the interesting ways that Toibin explores this is to juxtapose James's crushes on men with the gossip surrounding Oscar Wilde in fin de siecle London, including his trials and subsequent imprisonment. In Toibin's estimation, James would have taken to heart the punishment that befell Wilde, which would therefore have discouraged any foray he would have made with other men.

Toibin also explores James's relationships with women. A recurring theme in the novel (and, apparently in James's life), were his relationships with infirm, independent young women who met untimely fates. James's attraction to these women is never really explained. It suggests that he is attracted to their independent spirits, which he lacks, but empathizes with their illness...perhaps reminiscent of his own illness with respect to his unwillingness to engage in romantic relationships.

The Master is not biography - it is a novelization of the life a real life person. Toibin has been widely remarked to channel James in his style. In my view, he has crafted a novel of sublime subtelty, circling around the interior life of an artist without ever touching down in the secret places the artist can't admit to himself.

The first half of the novel was more enjoyable than the latter half. Toibin deserves a lot of credit for his attempt to imagined the life of the great author Henry James, but I think the story fell short and leaves a lot to be desired.

Part of the problem when creating a fictional life for a true life character is the lack of depth in the surrounding characters. It is clear that the Toibin has done much research into the life of Henry James but the people around him lacked character. Not muuch is revealed about the important people in Henry's life, such as the great thinker William James, the author Constance Fenmore, or his beloved mother. These characters drift in and out, and all we are left are Henry's thoughts on their passings and goings. The overall story and feel would be much tighter if we know more about Henry's friends and famaily, so as to discover for ourselves the reasoning behind Henry's motivations and emotions when he encountered them.

This novel has been compared to Michael Cunningham's The Hours. Unlike The Hours, this novel lacked a plot; the readers are mostly left with the lifestyle and emotions of Henry James as he wandered in Europe and planned for his next story. When The Master concluded, it felt incomplete as the ending could also be taken as the beginning of the next phase of Henry James' life. It does, however, makes you wonder if Toibin has plans for a sequel.

This summer, I'm rereading Colm Toibin's historical novel about the great story-teller, Henry James. I'm a fan of this author and was enthralled, confused and a shade let-down when I first read THE MASTER a few years ago. And, yet, the novel has stayed in my mind, and I chose to come back to it. Such an interior story. We see James as he might have seen himself ... might have. This time, I'm fascinated with the picture drawn of his sister, Alice James, a woman caught in the web of suppression within the James family dynamics and burdened by the larger suppression of women in historical time. Yes, this is a book worth my time re-reading. And, I think, more satisfying and more revealing in this second reading.

I picked up this book without having read a single Henry James novel. I was a little nervous that because I wouldn't understand any of the references to his work that I wouldn't be able to enjoy the book, but this was not the case. The Master is an easy read, extremely interesting culturally and historically... very enjoyable, I will definitely read as much Toibin as I can from here on out.

This novel doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but is more of a collection of subplots that focus on inspirations that may have contributed greatly many of James's works. Such as the case, it is lacking in a distinct overall plot (which I tend to rely on), and I think I would have enjoyed the book even more had I extensively read James. However, the characters are brilliant and the anecdotes of his life are moving and memorable. For me, it was very easy to relate to the identity struggles that James faced in his life. Toibin makes him very real and personal and his interactions with some of the biggest writers of the time also help to humanize other great writers.

After reading this book, I was immediately motivated to devour as much 19th century British literature as possible (with an emphasis on works by Henry James) and I think it is clear that Colm Toibin is a brilliant writer.

Toibin certainly knows the facts of Henry James' life; he knows his writing and he himself writes in a clear homage to the master's style, often achieving a beauty which owes nothing to imitation. But what he really attempts in this novel is to look inside the inner life of an author who was so good at portraying the inner lives of others. I was especially impressed by the sensitivity with which James' unconsummated homosexuality is treated. As the book progresses, these instances are seen as but part of a larger pattern of friendships and subsequent withdrawals. This pattern certainly owes something to James' character, but it also reflects the necessary isolation of the writer who must always view life from the verge, so to speak, it being impossible to simultaneously dissect emotional relationships while entering into them fully.

Taken cumulatively this is all very impressive, but the marriage of biography and novel is not always successful. In particular, successive chapters seem at the time like disconnected episodes, with no necessary order other than the succession of events in the five-year span which Toibin uses as the anchor for a tissue of memories covering virtually the whole of the writer's life. So not a book whose plot keeps you reading, but one whose insights and incidental joys repay you well for your persistence.

Page Terror Reviews: pageterror.wordpress.com

Dear Reader,

It is summer. This means that although I am no longer freezing in my unheated apartment, I am once more living in the New York heat without an air conditioner. However, what is most important at the moment is that the coming of beach weather also means that Page Terror’s summer of paperback classics may officially commence and we will be beginning the twelve week revelry with the great monster: Henry James.

During that cusp week where spring showers merge with the sweltering heat, I happened upon a copy of Colm Tóibín’s The Master. I must confess that I had not previously heard of the novel nor seen the film with Philip Seymour Hoffman. I knew of Colm Tóibín though and, being ashamed that I had yet to read any of his work, thought I would give it a whirl.

I am elated that I did.

If you know nothing about Henry James, do not fear. A prominent figure in the progression of narrative realism and trans-Atlantic literature, James published over twenty novels and contributed greatly to literary criticism. He also wrote and published biographies, travel literature, and was a prolific pen pal. In life, his relationships with men and women alike were beyond complicated; his relationship with America perhaps even more so.

The Master captures James in the last years of the nineteenth century as he embarks on new stories, contemplates the haunting loves of his past, and confronts his fears for the future. An introvert who was practiced in extrovertsim, James introduces us to some of the most extraordinary minds, figures, and artists of his time. Not only do we encounter on a personal note the intellectual family to which he belonged, but others who were close to him, such as Hendrick Andersen, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Edmund Gosse. Tóibín begins with the failure of James’ play Guy Domville on the London stage and ends with the departure of Henry’s elder brother William and his family after their extended visit in 1899 at James’ home in Rye. In between the years of 1895 and 1900, Tóibín elegantly transitions the reader through James’ present and his past, addressing the Wilde Trials in 1895, the tragic nature of the Civil War, and the deaths that sprinkled throughout James’ life like an unrelenting rain storm. From the people in his life and his experience within theirs, we see the consummation of the characters that would emerge in his intricate weavings of point of view, interior monologue, and the heightened realism of his dialogue.

This is a novel worthy of its subject. The manner of Tóibín’s narration is a compliment to James and perfectly assesses the psychology of a man who believed that a novel must show life in action. In a matter of chapters, the reader learns to think as James. The prose slowly unravels the clockwork of his mind, steadily building in an emotional intensity that invites the reader to conceive of his work from the interior and, as a result, to understand an individual who sought unconditional love, while at once showing unmitigated trepidation at the possibility of commitment and inevitable promise of isolation.

I believe we will be reviewing The Bostonians next.

-Page Terror

pageterror.wordpress.com

After giving this book to myself for Christmas, I finally finished it this afternoon, having read, as is usual, the last two hundred pages in two days. It took the three months to read the first hundred pages.

The book is a fictionalized biography--it describes itself as a novel but I think it's too close to the truth to be called that--of an aging Henry James living in London and then in Rye, England, and visited by his friends and family. The most wonderful part of the book is the narration of Henry's interior monologue--his acid descriptions of frivolous people at parties, his sensual gazes at young men, especially servants, and, most important, how he forms his characters, his plots, and the situtations and dramas that people his novels and short stories. This last description of the process of writing novels is wonderful, not only because it's very particular to Henry James, but because it's the most precise and feels the most accurate description of the process of writing fiction yet expressed.

This is a remarkably good book. If you know anything of Henry James, you know, among his other attributes, how acutely sensitive he was to shades and nuances of the human condition, as expressed in the various particular individuals he knew-and invented--and wrote about. But I think Colm Toibin equals the real/fictional subject he is writing about at the level of `sensitivity.' We know a great many facts about the life of Henry James; however he was a very private person, and the inner world of his psyche, feelings, memories, thoughts, etc., can only be intelligently guessed at. What Colm Toibin has succeeded in doing is to some degree deduce, but mostly imagine, and imagine in acute, micro-detail, that inner world of Henry James. There is no melodrama here. All of the events of the novel are really psychological events, and most occur at a very subtle level. Toibin writes in a relatively simple, direct way that seems almost commonplace at first, but as he almost effortlessly guides the reader into ever deeper levels of the psyche of his imagined/real protagonist, the reader realizes the very uncommon talents of the author of this novel.

If you are interested in Henry James, or simply wish to go on a journey into the inner recesses of the human spirit, you should give *The Master* a try.

After the dreary, inconsequential "Story of the Night," Colm Toibin's superlative new novel "The Master" represents a gratifying jolt forward for this fine gay writer. The subject is the interior life of Henry James, who may have gone to his grave a virgin--a gay virgin. His entire life and work were deeply closeted and every loved one who sniffed around him, trying to open what was closed, found themselves stiff-armed brusquely. If James wrote today, out of the closet, I am convinced he would have emulated Toibin's gleaming, crystalline elegance instead of his dense, unnatural voice of the fusspot. This, not Hollinghurst's "Line of Beauty," should have won the Booker Prize for that year. The London gay mafia backed the wrong homo.

Historical fiction as if written by James himself. The episodes justly reveal character and place, especially James who prefers to keep to himself. The connections between James and others and with the various locations make up this novel's heart.

To start, I know almost nothing of Henry James. For me the novel worked as a beautiful character study with some absolutely haunting and stunning scenes. Toibin is a great writer.

And yet the book took me six weeks to finish. Though each chapter was wonderful, there was a such a total lack of forward momentum that I rarely felt compelled to continue. I made myself finish, out of respect for the author.

Colm Toibin's poignant and merciless examination of Henry James's interior life allows us to recall the work of the master and suffer the longings and memories which inspired it. In exact and simple prose, Toibin evokes inner and outer landscapes with great beauty. The book is a subtle argument for the pain of interiority, passivity, and civility, rather than the destruction of aggression and externalization of pathology. Vexing and mature questions are raised and answers merely suggested.

A book group selection! This book seems to be mainly for Henry James fans - which I'm not. I had fifteen books on my bedside table, any one of which I would rather have been reading that this self-absorbed, tedious excursion into the life of a self-absorbed and tedious author. I called Rule of Fifty on this one.

The Grapes of Wrath, which I tackled next, was an upbeat, action-packed page-turner in comparison.

A fictional biography of Henry James, this masterpiece truly deserves being hailed by The New York Times as one of the five best novels of 2004.

Anyone who loves Henry James will find this book an enriching, engrossing portrait that combines the pace, plot and psychological insights of a novel filled with the thoroughly researched facts of James' colorful life.

A must read for anyone who loves good literature, Henry James, and who wants insights into how a writer achieves great art.

When I finished this book, which lingers with you, I wanted nothing more than to visit James' cosy and comfortable home in the countryside of England that he loved so much and that Colm evokes with such splendour.

A beautiful, pellucid novel that gets into the very particular mind, sad and anaemic heart of Henry James. Brings vividly to life the entire brood of the James' family, from William to Alice and their parents, as well as their principal connections in a way unmatched by biographies that I've read about them. Highly recommended.

While I was fascinated and drawn in by this marvelous writer's amazing wordcraft, I ended this book feeling empty and disaappointed. Perhaps if one had an active and rich knowledge of Henry James' life this book would bring one to some new places, but alas, I do not...and so, I was not inspired by the story. The press and the critics seem to have already decided this is a Booker Prize winner, and the writing merits that kind of attention...but truthfully the story did not bring me anyplace I hadn't been before.

Having read "The Blackwater Lightship," I was particularly moved by Toibin's evolution from a very good writer to a masterful writer. His craft here is exquisite. The writing is lyrical, deeply thoughtful and deeply felt. The narration carries the reader along gently, sometimes with great sadness, though the storytelling is never sentimental. Toibin touches on homosexual themes but at the same time keeps the tension somewhat distant, as I imagine might have been correct for its time. I couldn't wait to get to this book every evening and was sorry to see it end. I've not felt this way about a novel in a long time.

The Less one knows about Henry James, the less likely one may be annoyed--or offended--by the made-up-stuff. At the same time, the less likely one might find any interest whatever in the life of the depicted, industrial-stength bore and situational eremite who supposedly shunned human contact more intimate than a kiss on the hand because he was--again supposedly--an all-orfice retentive, closet gay. One does not expect car chases in novels of 'delicate nuance' etc, but here the big moments are a ridiculously overworked account of dismissing a pair of drunken servants, and a likewise run-on business of disposing of a dead friends' clothing.
The More one knows about HJ, and his work, the less likely to see any point in writing about him at all--fictionally or otherwise. Of all writers, his personal underpinnings would seem the least relevant to understanding his work, and attempts to make revelatory connections, based on pitiful scraps a century on, must inevitably bear the mark of glib parlor psychologizing.

As to the "subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James's psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world", as PW and other hypers put it, while it is occasionally affecting, it far more frequently becomes tiresome and pretentious, a terribly obvious, stylistic party piece--as if an entry in a parody contest. Imagine Anita Brookner when off her game, at her most uninspired, insular, and inverted.

Amazing insights to the history, psyche and art of Henry James. A must read for anyone who writes fiction. Fascinating for its historical settings, and other famous men of the late nineteenth century, as well as the psychological biography of one of America's most admired and lasting novelists.