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“To her he was a mystery, even more so
than she was to him, but she put more thought and energy, he believed, into
solving the mystery, or at least attempting to divine its properties, than he
ever did.”
This description, though chilly on its face, hints at the rich depth and keen
perceptiveness of Henry, protagonist of The Master. He is a man who sees
into the personal character that lies beneath a polite surface, yet he finds
himself strangely unable – even with those he cares for most – to connect. He is
a fictional reflection, conjured up in Colm Tóibín’s most recent book, of
expatriate 19th-century American novelist Henry James, himself a master of
fiction.
Tóibín (pronounced “toe-bean”) is among the first rank of Irish writers, and
both The Master and his earlier novel The Blackwater Lightship
were
short-listed for the Booker Prize. He relates the story less through action or
dialogue than by narrating Henry’s impressions of the individuals around him,
his reactions to their manners and their talk.
In flashbacks, Henry reveals himself as a withdrawn young man from a Brahmin
family of Boston intellectuals and Union soldiers. In his later life as a
writer, he jealously guards his solitude as essential to his craft and avoids
close connections for fear of any entanglement or hint of impropriety. He
falters in his friendships, holding confidants at arm’s length or allowing good
friends, like the mystery-divining woman mentioned above, to fall from his hands
like neglected trapeze artists. But beneath his seeming aloofness, Henry simmers
with undirected affections. The book flirts with the writer’s famously reticent
sexuality but never seeks to pin him into the butterfly case for decisive
classification.
The Master moves from London and Dublin to Boston, Florence, and Venice
as Henry glides through the upper reaches of cosmopolitan Anglo-American
society. His famous associates include his brother William James and jurist
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he brushes elbows with literary contemporaries like
Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Oscar Wilde, and the less-known
novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson.
Like in The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s paean to Virginia Woolf, Tóibín
renders all these scenes and personalities with a palette reminiscent of his
subjects', but the brushstrokes of this subtle and powerfully affecting work are
wholly his own.
Review by Mark Bradshaw, August 18, 2005
Related reviews:
Specimen Days, a novel by Michael Cunningham:
http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0805-011.html
Love in a Dark Time, essays by Colm Tóibín:
http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0505-021.html
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