Fiction: Colm Tóibín has developed a style distinguished by its careful gravity and consistent with his skill in the construction of narrative - with what he calls, in his new book, "the slow, sly systems used to write a novel, the building of character and plot through action and description and suggestion".
The practice of these arts makes emotional demands on the writer, whose "systems" are regulated by conscience and sometimes distorted by guilt. A novelist whose concern is with these matters above everything else is bound to admit allegiance to, or descent from, Henry James, and Tóibín's new book is a meditation on that master.
He chooses 11 moments in James's life, between January, 1895, and August, 1899, reflecting in each section on the novelist's state of mind at the time, but also looking back to his earlier life. Nothing is said of what was to come later, of James's distress at the outbreak of the Great War, or of the great late novels, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, though they were in a sense germinating in this period. The Wings of the Dove, particularly, has a strong presence in the book because of James's pervading sense that out of a selfish preference for solitude he turned down a chance to save the happiness or even the life of the beloved Minny Temple. In this book, he is in his 50s, the decade of The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, and What Maisie Knew; we observe him studying little girls and buying furniture.
The early chapters centre on the rowdy, painful failure of his play Guy Domville, a catastrophic event which ended all his hopes of theatrical success. They also treat of a visit to Ireland, where he was not altogether happy with the rich entertainment provided by its rulers, though he was much moved by the attentions of the beautiful manservant allocated to him. This man had several successors, loved in James's intense, remote way, and Tóibín beautifully records these gusts of unexpressed desire.
At a ball, in a garden, James is always more a witness than a participant, like his sister Alice, an outsider, though a welcome one, and always on the watch, always American; responding with mind and feeling to the manners of the English, listening to them, using them. Tóibín catches expertly the complexity of James's fate, his reticence, his ambiguous longing for love and his withdrawal from the prospect of it. He copies a moment celebrated by James himself - the perception of figures seen from a window or a doorway, "a small gesture standing for a much larger relationship, something hidden suddenly revealed". From such sights and insights grew novels and stories to which Tóibín plants many allusions.
We become familiar with many members of the James family: the eccentric father; the reclusive genius Alice, like Henry "recoiling from the warmth of love"; the brilliant William, Henry's elder brother, at work on The Varieties of Religious Experience and usually ready to condemn Henry's devotion to his art. And there were the younger brothers, Wilky especially, who died of his wounds in the Civil War. Henry is here represented as having some unease of conscience at not enlisting. He had a celebrated disability, an "obscure hurt", much argued about, but it may have been a simple backache, possibly an excuse to himself for avoiding military service. He could, like Wilky, have fought with the 54th Massachusetts, the famous African-American regiment that marched from Boston in May 1863 into the disaster of Fort Wagner. Had he done so he would almost certainly have been killed.
Tóibín makes ample biographical and topographical provision, but the book is primarily a study of Henry James's mind and temperament. There are some striking confrontations. Wendell Holmes brutally charged James with responsibility for Minny's death. Knowing the accusation is in some sense true, James nevertheless stored away his grief and guilt for later use - "he could control her destiny, now that she was dead". He made notes on the case, and as he read over them "was horrified by the sheer callousness of the story".
Another woman on his conscience was the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, who killed herself falling from a window in Venice. In a finely conceived scene we see James unable to walk past the spot where she had lain: "Constance," he whispered, "I have come as close as I could, as near as I dared." Later, he takes sculptor Henrik Andersen to see her memorial tablet in the English Cemetery at Rome. He is, in his own way, in love with Andersen. When he weeps, Andersen embraces him; he does not want the moment to end, "knowing that this embrace was all the comfort he could receive". James would have admired this scene.
Aware of the importance of character and setting, Tóibín provides brilliant sketches of Lamb House, James's beautiful house at Rye, of such friends as Edmund Gosse, and of his servants, including the drunken butler, Smith, his house-boy, Noakes, and his dour Scottish stenographer, MacAlpine. But his main business is with the mind of a venerated predecessor in the art of fiction. On the question of the cost of such devotion, he is clear and moving. He makes Andersen ask James whether he had planned his life. James turns away in tears, "facing towards the window". He knew what Yeats meant when he spoke of memories that appalled his conscience or his vanity.
This book meets the requirements of action, description and suggestion mentioned above. It is a quiet but bold tribute to a writer whom serious artists still acknowledge as The Master.
• Frank Kermode is a former professor of English at Cambridge and the author of many books