Henry James on the couch

HENRY JAMES is an unexpected star of this season's fiction. First he had a walk-on part as a philosophical guide in Alan Hollinghurst's “The Line of Beauty”, already a popular summer novel in Britain. Then David Lodge and Colm Toibin turned him into the granite centrepiece of their latest novels, “Author, Author” and “The Master”. Producers of popular films based on James's fiction were never able to arouse such interest in the 19th-century New Englander.

Taking a literary lion and setting him up among friends, rivals and would-be lovers produces a queer concoction that is part fiction, part memoir and part ventriloquism. Only the most talented of writers can keep such work from sliding into lazy biography or mere pastiche.

Mr Lodge has produced an account of James's life, tearing it down into three separate acts: apprenticeship; a middle stage when James felt unable to galvanise his literary career; and the period when his recovery from a disastrous foray into the theatre led to his late, great flowering with the publication of “The Wings of a Dove” and “The Ambassadors”. Mr Lodge focuses in large part on James's rivalry with his great friend George du Maurier whose second novel, “Trilby”, became a worldwide bestseller when James's works were merely trickling out of those shops that were brave enough to stock them.

Mr Toibin's book is radically different and by far the more interesting of the two. By insinuating himself under James's skin and writing in the first person, he covers not only the known episodes of James's life, but also the darker corners of the writer's loneliness and uncertainty.

With a subject whose sexuality was never made explicit, Mr Toibin's approach offers infinite possibilities. Will James reach out and touch the back of his vigorously heterosexual childhood friend, Oliver Wendell Holmes, on the only occasion they are forced to share a bed for the night? Mr Toibin's deftness and sensitivity in teasing out the moments in James's life where might-be slides into might-have-been are particularly memorable.

The author also helps to cast new light on James's decision, conscious or otherwise, to eschew marriage and lovers in order to safeguard his art and the quiet he needed to be a writer. How else could he have become such a chronicler whose greatest work is still studied as the precursor of the modern psychological novel?

Mr Toibin and Mr Lodge are not close, though they have remained on genial terms since they first met in 1993. On that occasion, they discussed Jamesian marginalia. Nevertheless, Mr Lodge writes in his afterword to “Author, Author” that he learnt of Mr Toibin's novel only when he had finished his own. That's as maybe. If you have space to pack only one of these books, be sure it is Mr Toibin's.