Few novels are as simultaneously literary and accessible as Colm Tóibín’s 2004 novel “The Master”. Regardless of whether you know the eponymous master referred to is Henry James, or if you’re an avid James devotee, this book treats everyone equally. Everyone, that is, except Henry James, who we meet in his 50s and on the verge of the biggest failure of his prodigious career. Rather than drag the reader through a whole-life narrative, Tóibín focuses on a five-year period of flux, a period dominated by self-doubt, repression, regret, ambition and perhaps most of all, ambiguity. It is this latter quality of James, a cat-like elusiveness to categorisation, which the “The Master” captures so well. It’s a novel that doesn’t rely on plot to drive the story forward, but rather relies upon an alluring atmosphere of ambiguity that sweeps our eyes across its pages like mist over rolling hills.
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