Product Description

In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

In The Master Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25047 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

John Carey, Sunday Times
‘Toibin makes James seem more human than, for me, Leon Edel’s famous biography ever did.’

Anne Chisholm in Sunday Telegraph, November 2004
'In its quiet way, this novel's imaginative truthfulness crosses boundaries and challenges biographers.'

The Independent
Exquisitely crafted and full of finely nuanced psychological observation. It is also profoundly moving.

Customer Reviews

"Life is a mystery and only sentences are beautiful."
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

Life versus art
First impressions of "The Master" were of how obviously different it was from the writer's other Booker short-listed work, "The Blackwater Lightship", the only other of his novels I have so far read.
Where the previous novel was set in contemporary Ireland, here we are taken back in time to the end of the nineteenth century, and a fictionalised rendering of a period spanning some five years in the life of the American writer Henry James. As the century draws to its close and James advances through his middle years, it is very clearly a time for taking stock, for both retrospection and introspection.
The first important event in the novel is the painful, humiliating failure of James's incursion into writing for the London theatre, "Guy Domville", a failure counterpointed against the resounding triumph of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" - while the opening words of the novel are "Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead..." The tone is thus set for a novel about failure, regret, and frustrated hopes. Thereafter actual events play a secondary role: there is no plot, but rather a series of episodes from James's life, episodes whose essentially inconclusive nature gradually builds up an impression of the emptiness at the heart of that life. Where Wilde is quoted as saying he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work, it becomes slowly and painfully apparent that James has so far channeled everything into his work, with the result that a distressing void has opened up in his emotional life. There are repeated discreet but clear references to emotional chemistry with men which might have developed into sexual relationships, but which didn't for reasons which the narrative tantalisingly never makes clear, implying thereby that James himself chose not to ponder such matters, to shut them out and concentrate instead on his next work of art.
The style of Colm Toibin's writing is very different from that of Henry James himself, and yet the same impression gradually seeps through to the reader: the impression of the chaos of human emotions, and their elusiveness when it comes to setting them down in words.
"The Master" is not an easy novel, and yet the reader eventually finds himself feeling both sympathy and pity for a writer who changed the direction of the English novel, but in doing so made sacrifices. Whether they were worth it is one of the questions Toibin's novel leaves unanswered.

Excellent depiction of a lost world
This novel is based on the life of Henry James, but you don’t need to be a James fan to enjoy it. The writing was evocative of the era and its society, including the casual presence of servants and the movement of the elite around centres of ‘civilization’ and ‘the empire’. I was struck by the emptiness of James’s life – the emotional emptiness – but the novel gave no clear explanation why it was like that. He had chances for physical and emotional closeness, with both women and men, but was never brave enough to take up any of them. Fear? Or an obsession with mentally noting it all to re-fashion it as fictional entertainment? There are traces of these ideas but nothing is ever explicit. Still, Tóibín writes beautiful, sustained prose that captures the gentility of a privileged world and the differing sensibilities of the Americans and the English.