CultureWatch Review, Colm Toibin's The Master: A Novel

THE MASTER: A Novel

Scribner; Paperback, 340 pp.

Nicole Kidman in Jane Campion’s adaptation of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady (1996)

Reading The Master was so like my memory of reading Henry James, I was amazed that a member of the 21st Century could so faithfully reproduce not only the literary style, but the moral stance of the 19th, especially in a fictional personification. Just to make sure the resemblance was deliberate, I read a recent essay by Mr. Tóibín. No question the diction, syntax, and authorial posture were carefully chosen to suit the narrative. The feeling engendered for the reader is uncanny and moving.

Most of us today are accustomed to interior monologue and a considerable degree of psychological penetration in fiction. Most are disappointed if we don’t find them. Unhappily, also most readers are even more disappointed by the absence of graphic descriptions of mostly underlying (gritty) facts of everyone’s life — the more lurid, the better. In this book, as in its subject’s literary and personal careers, such matters remain out of the purview of polite society and that of the reader. In deference perhaps to modern tastes, delicate allusions appear occasionally that do nothing to upset the enveloping mood of nearly two centuries past while suggesting how James was aware of being something of a misfit.

Henry James, Jr. is the master of the novel's title. He was born in New York into wealthy intellectual privilege in 1843, wrote in the mid to late 19th Century, mostly from his homes in England and Italy. Tóibín paints a portrait of a young man who has grown up in the shadows of two men — his father and his older brother William — whose shade chills him emotionally as well as to some extent intellectually.

Not surprisingly, James finally makes his home across the Atlantic, and just before his death he even became an English citizen. Travel in the Old World is central to the development of The Master. Numerous scenes show how James perceived the subtlest as well as the most notable differences in architecture, history, and the mindsets of his friends and acquaintances. His entrée to Society (with a capital S) gave him an enviable position from which to form opinions, make judgments, and even to fabricate scenarios based on the people he met and whose stories he knew or heard about.

This portrait of The Master is, however, written in our century, in spite of how its tone resembles that of the past. We are allowed glimpses behind the veils of custom and privacy to see a man whose loneliness is subdued, though without hope of alteration.

Indeed, we are led to consider that James failed to understand (or certainly refused to recognize) his own fundamental place in a larger scheme of personal behavior — even of how to be comfortable in his own skin.

It would have been impossible to ignore the Civil War going on in his own country, yet oddly, it appears that James tended to keep it in the background of his fictions, seldom mentioning it at all.

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CultureWatch Review, Colm Toibin's The Master: A Novel

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