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

His attention was attracted by those who seemed to be burdened by misfortune and illness. The people in his own life he loved best, like his sister Alice, had a way of dying. He was often bereaved. These events in his personal life were echoed in his work. Dialogue created for the novelist's purposes, full of wit and considerable bitterness is so convincing we need to remind ourselves that it did not take place. Tóibín manages similar verisimilitude.

As time passed and his successes expanded, James became unable to write because it became too painful for him to hold a pen. As though there were no problem in changing the way he put words together, he hired a man (who must have been extraordinary in his own way) to whom he dictated for decades.

We are treated to wonderful descriptions of settings where James lived and worked. We are allowed to imagine how he viewed these beloved places. We can see Rome and the English Berkshire countryside through James’s eyes, and are privileged to understand how these scenes were transferred to his stories. It might be noted that James wrote a great many travel articles as well as the fiction for which he is best known today.

Tóibín manages to show us a reserved, cultured, extremely sensitive intellect who is also endowed with unyielding principles and staunch pride. James projected many of his own most sterling moral standards; they became the sources of the especially "Jamesian" characteristics of the actors in his stories and novels. He came from a background of propriety at its most pervasive after the reign of Queen Victoria, and he never forgot what it was to be a gentleman — incidentally in spite of being an American. He lived a comfortable, deprived and rather sad life.

He peopled his narratives with figures who lacked neat endings to their struggles as much as he himself did. Maybe there is an implied message about how art imitates life. This unique habit of standing back from the subjects of his work gives the portrait Tóibín limns for us a look at how far ahead of his time the Master was. The structure of fiction is always evident, but without the underlined absolute conclusions — what the modern reader has come to accept — though often James's contemporaries deplored ambiguities.

This is a moving, artistic, imaginative, but very convincing novel about the novelist whose trademark is objective analysis of the inner personalities of his characters. In this penetrating imagining of Henry James the man, the foundation of his fiction comes through. The Master is an ambitious, daring, gracefully executed piece of work.

"The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park." Portrait of a Lady

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

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