COLM TOIBIN PHONES from his house amid the sweep of Georgian mansions in Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin. Fresh from weeks at his house in the Pyrenees, he is home alone to work on a book on provincial Ireland, polish a play and promote The Master, his newly released novel about Henry James.
We should doubt a writer offering this Jamesian image of himself as the solitary scribe balancing the profession with cosmopolitan pleasure. But the links between James and Toibin are too compelling. Set in the 1890s, when James, like Toibin, was middle-aged, it opens with the lowest point of the great writer's career, the failure of his play Guy Domville. James' English pretensions saw him shy from an Irish heritage in which many of his family in America took pride. Toibin is also gay, as James was, though it's debatable whether the American fulfilled his desires. While the Irishman avoids sitting too long on the gay question in conversation, the strength of his fifth novel - the first since 1999's The Blackwater Lightship made the Booker Prize shortlist - is his handling of the voids in the James biography, especially James' sexuality and the moulding of his stories.
'Being bald helps,' Toibin says in an accent that switches with his mood, from the straight lilt of his Wexford upbringing to the tougher, flat irony of a Dubliner. 'James was bald, too. It's quite easy to imagine being middle-aged, bald in 1898 in some house outside London working on your own all day.
'I've become pretty solitary, having not been solitary ever before. I live alone in a house that's too big for me. I'm 48. Drugs-sex-and rock'n'roll feels less interesting, oddly enough, than reading a book and going to bed early. I don't have any servants, though, and I suppose my sexuality is much clearer than his.
'I found that the consciousness of anybody who is alone and who is working is very like another person's, unless you're in medieval Europe, where the plague is at the door and there is no hot water. But once you've hot water it's all pretty much the same. Hardback books printed in 1895 look slightly like hardback books today.'
Toibin wrote non-fiction on James until he 'found that it was coming out as fiction, an imagined life, rather than a described life or as analysed life'. He learned that Beatrice Monti, widow of the novelist Gregor Von Rezzori, had opened her house outside Florence to writers. Toibin wrote the first chapter at the house in April 2000 while watching Monti's aristocratic friends. He then went to New York to do 'a lot of listening to Americans'.
