Some thoughts while reading this book.
There are many ways of reading a book. Colm Tóibín presents me with an interesting view on Henry James, on his writing skills in particular. I believe this may be the strength of this book.
Once I have gotten the idea of 'manipulation of the reader' in my head, I continue to read with that particular notion in my mind. Rather than projecting and describing my own feelings on the story in this book, I find myself exploring the mind of the writer, his technique, his sense of reality and the relationship with the reader, his public.
What does Tóinbíms style of describing events say about the writer, of his own grip on reality? Manipulation of the readers mind, or an active role for the reader, in shaping an imaginary life and thinking all the while what the reader will think of it?
Spoiler:
194.195.'It was easy to put flesh on these bare bones, have a hearty, trusty housekeeper, make the little girl gentle and beautiful, make the boy both charming and mysterious, and make the house itself, the strange old house, into a great adventure for our heroine, the governess. He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.
The house was all emptiness and echoing sounds. The governess’s two charges made nothing of their abandonment, they paraded themselves to the governess and the kind housekeeper as brimming vessels in need of nothing more than what was provided for them. All sound, both within and without, was ominous sound matched by ominous echo. He set down as soon as he could the moment when, on retiring for the night, the governess heard the faint distant cry of a child and then in front of her door the sound of a light footstep. These, he determined as he moved up and down the room dictating the words, should seem like nothing at the time and would only become significant in the light, or in the gloom, of what was to come.'(...)'He had begun the story as a potboiler, a way of fulfilling a contract, a tale likely to appeal to a wide audience, and he worked accordingly to have it completed by the end of the year. He did not know why it disturbed his waking life in the months in which he prepared his move to Lamb House. He did not know why the voice he had so thoughtfully created, and so carefully controlled and manipulated, seemed to have worked on him so that he allowed his governess a power and a freedom which he had never intended for her. He allowed her to fool herself, something he had never allowed anyone before; he gave her permission to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it. He relished frightening her. He made her loneliness and her isolation into a longing to meet someone, for a face at the window, a figure in the distance.'
I found an interesting quote on the subject of reading in the beginning of the book, where Tóibín has Henry James reflecting on the difference between a story in a play and one in a book."Reading was as silent and solitary and private as writing.'(page 24)
I cannot but agree with that. Perhaps that is why I find some books of the bookclub hard to discuss, especially those of the war.