What a pure delight! I have only read one Henry James book, but I can truly appreciate how Toibin captured the rhythm and flow of James's prose. The story is moving and coherent, although it does move from episode to episode with few initially discernable ties. The Master is a wonderful study about life in the late nineteenth century. How much of it is fact and how much is fiction is unclear, especially to this reader who is not seeped in the James mystique. But this really doesn't matter. The essence of Henry James was surely captured and made accessible for all.

To paraphrase Fitzgerald, great artists are different from you and me; they have more drive. Charlie Parker played only the high notes of chords in melodic line to build an expressive storyline. John Coltrane composed by first blowing scales. "Basics man", he'd say, "start with the basics; the song will come out." Surely, Da Vinci and Michelangelo would agree. So would Henry James, known in his day as the Master. In this eponymous book---what to call it?--- historical-novel-biography by Toibin, the basics that drive James the artist, are laid bare. For him writing is a form of primitive hunting. Driven to find new characters, new mind-games, new egos, new ways of looking at people and their motives, everyone he encounters, no matter how briefly, become prey to Jamesian transmogrifications. Watch out dear lady, you with that insouciant walk, that misplaced wisp; mind that pursed lip young man; Madam, that vapid look won't do but that that blue dress with ruffled lapel could land you on page 85 of a drawing room novel. Spill your tea buddy, and Bam! You just might end up as a scary character in a ghost story. If you're a fan of James, you'll love learning where many his of ideas and characters originated. Toibin has done all the research. But if you expect a work with a compelling story, you know, like one that Bird or Henry James might conjure, The Master is not it. Alas, more Phillip Glass than Ornette Coleman, Toibin's The Master is all rhythm and not enough plot.

I most hightly recommend this book to anyone who, like this reader, adores the work of Henry James but has found the many (often very good, even excellent) biographies of him curiously lacking in nuance. Toibin supplies this through the use of his creative imagination--we have a picture of James that finally seems really true, precisely becuase it has been re-imagined by a very sensitive and intelligent artist. Indeed, it would be hard to overstate the intelligence, as well as the artistry, of this work. Reading it only now, after actually owning it for some time, I have found it to be something of a revelation. I thank the author deeply for this magnificent work.

To start, I know almost nothing of Henry James. For me the novel worked as a beautiful character study with some absolutely haunting and stunning scenes. Toibin is a great writer.

And yet the book took me six weeks to finish. Though each chapter was wonderful, there was a such a total lack of forward momentum that I rarely felt compelled to continue. I made myself finish, out of respect for the author.

After the dreary, inconsequential "Story of the Night," Colm Toibin's superlative new novel "The Master" represents a gratifying jolt forward for this fine gay writer. The subject is the interior life of Henry James, who may have gone to his grave a virgin--a gay virgin. His entire life and work were deeply closeted and every loved one who sniffed around him, trying to open what was closed, found themselves stiff-armed brusquely. If James wrote today, out of the closet, I am convinced he would have emulated Toibin's gleaming, crystalline elegance instead of his dense, unnatural voice of the fusspot. This, not Hollinghurst's "Line of Beauty," should have won the Booker Prize for that year. The London gay mafia backed the wrong homo.