I’ve had this book on my shelf for many years and had carried it back and forth to Vermont a number of times, never succeeding in opening it until this month.  And thrilled that I finally did.

Toibin is a remarkable novelist and this book shows him at his best.  Very reminiscent of his more recent book, “The Magician”, about Thomas Mann, “The Master” introduces the reader to Henry James, the American novelist who spent most of his adult life in London and Rye, England, Rome, Venice, and Paris.  James’ novels, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Daisy Miller”, “Washington Square”, “The Ambassadors” and his novella, “The Turn of the Screw” have assured his place as a giant in late 19th C and early 20th C fiction.

We encounter James in 1895 at the age of 52 and spend the next four years with him as he moves through his various European homes, interacts with his family, especially his sister Alice and his brother, the famous Harvard psychologist and philosopher, William, and spends time with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances.  The details of his family, his childhood in Newport, RI, and his earlier years of writing are learned with retrospection.  There are strong intimations of  repressed homosexual longings with several male friends including the young Oliver Wendall Holmes, but none of these opportunities appear to have been acted upon. James remains a bachelor until he dies.

The book is at its best creating a mood of a brooding emotional maelstrom under a patina of calm as it focuses on how James’ observations of people, relationships, and situations provide the material for his fiction.  Throughout, while apparently having strong friendships and meaningful relationships with at least one woman, James is cooly seperate, guarded, “desperately holding himself back”, “finely balanced and controlled”, “disguis(ing) longings”—in short, unable or unwilling to express emotion, form meaningful connections, or support relationships that go beyond the surface in life while delving deeply into those areas in his writing.

Toibin creates the magic of fiction in this book—the reader’s total immersion in the world, life, setting, and inner being of his character.  The mood is set early and sustained throughout as the reader settles into the inner life of the mind of Henry James.  The final line in the book captures James subtly and completely:  “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 tasselled 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.”   James the observer, separate and standing alone and apart to observe, remember, capture, and hold but not to participate.

Interestingly, the Norton Lectures at Harvard which are being delivered this year by Sir Steve McQueen make a cameo once again as James encounters Lily Norton, the niece of the eponymous Charles Eliot Norton, a Cambridge friend of the writer.

The book was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award when it was published in 2004 and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize that year that went to Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty”.  It’s hard to imagine that book being better than “The Master”.

I loved Toibin’s book about Mann and this one as well.  Great writing about great writers.