Colm Toibin: The Master

Reviewed by PETER WELLS

Henry James was maestro of the comma, a mandarin American who fled to Europe and wrote monumental works. By his death he seemed to have fallen from fashion.

Yet by 2004, his sumptuous elegiac writings, so full of psychological insight, were the novels most likely to be made into films. He seemed both contemporary and old fashioned as a lorgnette.

Colm Toibin, an Irish fairy from the post-Celtic Twilight, has fashioned a somewhat magnificent novel out of Henry's life. Himself homosexual, Toibin tenderly parts the fur down James' shrinking backbone to reveal his inner feelings.

Cleverly, Toibin starts the novel in the ominous year of 1895. The flamboyant Wilde has had a great theatrical success, then plummets to infamy, and ultimately, iconic status. James had his own play, a total flop.

He went back, somewhat heavy of heart, to writing his enormous, otiose, brilliantly perceptive novels.

Toibin's cleverness is to peel back the vast onion called Henry James, so we see him afresh. He places James in the historical parameters of the Civil War, in which two of his more virile brothers died.

Toibin allows us to see who James may have based his famous women characters on, and takes us breathtakingly close to the mystery of the creative act — most clearly in James' magnificent and protean ghost story, The Turn of the Screw.

Early in the novel, Toibin recreates a typical Jamesian moment, a child brought face to face with adult sexual play. This is as contemporary today as an out-of-it mum on drugs playing up in front of her appalled preteen.

Then Toibin takes us through the (long) paces of James musing on a story told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, about children left behind in a vast, sepulchral house.

Toibin flatters the reader by taking us inside the charmed circle of a genius working his way towards writing a contemporary classic.

This novel is a sustained work of the imagination. Every so often it feels as if Toibin doesn't know whether he's writing biography or fiction.

Some of the more "brilliant" pieces of dialogue are too clearly lifted from letters, where the somersault of a bon mot is more easily turned, but this is a relatively small criticism for what is possibly Toibin's least gloomy, most brilliant work.

His own Irishness has given him access to James's ambiguity towards Englishness: Toibin manages to be both critical and yet also pay homage to the real loveliness and charm which still resides in England.

And as for James, the emotional being, we see him as perhaps we have never seen him before. A truly Jamesian character, in fact.

Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film-maker.

Picador, $34.95