The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

2004: Colm Tóibín, The Master

the part the novel itself plays is not to interpret that freedom but to accommodate it. As a result, its most expressive component is its seemingly casual, open-plan architecture (the story begins and effectively ends in Delly’s mansion, a place of many disparate levels). Given that paradoxically changeable structure, the citizenry’s instabilities seem consistent. The transient reality of their extravagance and need, their presumptions of liberty and their knowledge of loss, the scope of their own limited worlds and the impact of others’ worlds on them all contribute to a fluid structure, conveying the sense that where we are is a provisional and uncertain answer to the question that seems in the forefront of most of the characters’ minds, even if they are not sure how best to ask it – where are we? Supplementary Reading Keith Ridgway, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ (on Beckett’s Mercier and Camier), The Guardian, 19 July 2003 Michael Pye, ‘A Million Kittens in a Sack’, The New York Times Book Review, 13 June 2004 Michael G. Cronin, ‘“He’s My Country”: Liberalism, Nationalism and Sexuality in Contemporary Irish Gay Fiction’, Éire-Ireland, vol. 39, no. 4 (Fall/Winter, 2004), pp. 250–67 Also Published in 2003 Clare Boylan, Emma Brown; Gerard Donovan, Schopenhauer’s Telescope; Anne Enright, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch; Jamie O’Neill, Disturbance; Sean O’Reilly, Love and Sleep; David Park, The Big Snow 2004 Colm Tóibín, The Master A noted journalist and cultural commentator, as well as a playwright and short-story writer, Tóibín (b. 1955) is the author of six novels. A native of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, which features prominently in The Heather Blazing (1992), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and Brooklyn (2009), his work is equally at home in such foreign settings as Spain in The South (1990) and Argentina in The Story of the Night (1996). Issues of gay identity are one of Tóibín’s recurring fictional concerns , often seen in the context of the intricate intimacies of family life. ‘The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work’. Yeats’s lines seem particularly applicable to the life and work of 158 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 Henry James, who in The Master resolves their stark polarity by electing to perfect the life in the work. The mastery he attains in the crucial years the novel covers – 1891 to 1899 – is evident in the degree of aesthetic refinement and narrative sophistication he brought to the works of that period. But the inner drama from which these accomplishments issue, and on which The Master focuses, concerns significant choices James made regarding his personal history, which he refashioned, and his personal relations, which he maintained in largely a formal social sense. The first choice James makes is to rededicate himself to his fiction in the aftermath of the disastrous premiere of his play Guy Domville. The opening night debacle not only dashes his hopes of the theatre becoming a lucrative sphere of activity, it also enables him to arrive at a more subtle and far-reaching awareness of how best to serve his own creative interests and abilities. One effect of James’s response to the challenge of rededication is that his fiction now possesses a greater degree of interiority , manifested in an increasingly nuanced moral sense, a more complex psychological range, and a keener exploration of the pathways of consciousness. Embarrassed by the unavoidably public character of his theatrical failure, he proceeds to turn to creative account failures of a more private kind. Haunted by memories of missing persons and lost loves, he reanimates them as repositories of symbolic value and vehicles of imaginative truth, addressing his work ‘as though the processes of imagination themselves were as a ghost’ (64). A case in point is The Turn of the Screw. This novella’s origins in a dinner-table anecdote are already part of James’s scholarly and biographical record. But the story is now also seen to draw on James’s childhood, and on the estrangement he and his sister Alice felt when the family undertook its European peregrinations. Such a reading highlights James’s own investment in the story, whose shock value is consequently deepened. Similarly, James not only fondly remembers his cousin Minny Temple, but by using her as the prototype for Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, preserves and honours her radiant spirit. Other instances of the personal dimension...