The Master deals with the life of Henry James, from the dramatic failure of his play Guy Domville through the creation of a string of masterpieces including The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of a Dove, and The Turn of the Screw.

It moves chronologically through his life, the creation of these works, and James’ travel around Europe, living in voluntary exile from America. It also looks back frequently to his life up until this phase, taking in his childhood, his unresolved sexuality and his relationship with his family and those close to him to see how these factors fuelled his work. Tóibín uses the techniques of biography to create a work of fiction in a way similar to that of Michael Cunningham’s in The Hours, to create a moving, subtle and sophisticated depiction of James as an individual.

Guy Domville is ‘about the conflict between material life and the life of pure contemplation, the vicissitudes of human love and a life dedicated to higher happiness’ - a fair description of the novel. Guy Domville the character decides to ‘renounce the world and devote himself to a life of contemplation and prayer in a monastery’ - an interesting point of comparison to James in the novel.

James keeps his sexuality very close to him, never acknowledging its character explicitly, and perhaps it is this which draws him as a writer to hiddenness, depths and concealment. This is not explicitly put forward in the novel - Tóibín adopts a non-judgemental tone purely descriptive in nature, leaving readers to draw connections themselves, which works effectively. In the narrative we see James observing points of hiddenness and concealment directly in life before him, as he matures as a novelist and his life and his art become more closely linked in himself.

James has an intense need for solitude, but also intimacy, and these appear almost simultaneously a number of times, acknowledging his complex nature. He has an inherent and deep detachment from the world. Tóibín hints that this may stem from his childhood, being taken around the world by his father and being an outsider to society and conventions, resulting in a position of detached observation. At other points his detachment appears to be a flight from painful emotions. He finds a happiness and contentment in solitude that is conveyed in the novel in a way that is beguilingly beautiful and moving.

Along with this detachment, James is severely inactive, impassive in temperament. This is in great contrast to his father and his brother. His father is a driven and restless spirit on a quest for truth in its ultimate form. His brother William, we learn, was physically active and vigorous as a child, and carried this ebullient spirit over into the life of the mind, becoming a man of robust opinions, greatly engaged with the world. The dynamic between Henry and William is well portrayed, capturing elements of sibling rivalry common to all brothers.

Throughout the novel, James is haunted by the past and the dead obsessively. The shifts back into the past are often taken through his memories of the dead who were once close to him. He appears not to take the normal grieving procedures that others do - he misses his father’s funeral accidentally, and later in the novel, misses that of his great friend Constance Fenimore Woolson deliberately, unable to face the horror. So instead of discharging his grief in this way, he lives with it, it working in him constantly - those he has lost fuel his writing, finding expression in it, and it appears as his way of reconciling himself with the dead and honouring them.

Tóibín’s writing sometimes imitates James’ own circumlocutory sentences, and sometimes at points of great emotion it takes on a terseness, a sparseness, that does well at pointing to the depths of emotion in James’ life.

There is a wonderful passage of dialogue towards the end of the novel - James is speaking with Henrik Andersen, a young sculptor full of wild dreams who comes to visit him, who, seeing his collection of his own works asks him

‘Did you always know that you would write all these books?’
‘I know the next sentence,’ Henry said, ‘and often the next story and I take notes for novels.’
‘But did you not once plan it all? Did you not say this is what I will do with my life?’
By the time he asked the second question, Henry had turned away from him and was facing towards the window with no idea why his eyes had filled with tears.

It’s as if Henry never made this active choice, his career as a novelist was determined by his past, he was driven into it, giving his identity as a writer a desperation - it’s all he knows, all he can do. None of this is explicit in the text at this point, but Tóibín hints beneath the surface, imitating James himself.

To end with another quotation, taken from near the end of the book, which it seems to me is about the beauty of writing itself more than anything else -

‘The moral is the most pragmatic we can imagine, that life is a mystery and that only sentences are beautiful’.