By Darren Waters BBC News Online entertainment staff

Toibin is a journalist and writer

BBC News Online is reviewing one Booker Prize-shortlisted book every day until the award ceremony on Tuesday.

One can only imagine the bravery, and the anxiety, of Colm Toibin as he sat down to write The Master.

Henry James is rightly regarded as a genius - and yet Toibin felt confident enough that he believed he could take the reader on a journey to reveal the inner thoughts of the man.

Has he succeeded? Ultimately, it is impossible to tell. He has succeeded in delivering a novel that, through craft and subtlety, peels back the layers of a writer called Henry James.

Henry James, of the novel The Master, and Henry James, the writer in history, are ostensibly one and the same person - but I found it more useful to separate them, to treat them as different people.

In that way, the novel works beautifully. The Master is an elegant novel that presents the reader with the story of a writer whose fractured personal life and fractured psychology provide the fountain of a genial creativity.

Toibin constructs moving passages of genuine beauty from simple language

If treated as a psychological essay into the mind of the actual Henry James, then it is impossible to judge - for there is nothing to judge it against.

We will never know what passed through the conscious and unconscious mind of the real James.

James is well known as the isolated writer who locked himself away to create his classics - but Toibin attempts to show that even the calmest exterior can hide great turmoil.

The novel is set in just four years of the life of Henry James - from the grand failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895 and ending with the visit of his brother in 1899 in Rye, East Sussex.

Written sparingly, Toibin constructs moving passages of genuine beauty from simple language.

There no plot as such - more a journey in which Toibin examines James' apparent repressed homosexuality and captures an ache within James that the writer himself used to propel his own inner philosophy and creativity.

Powerful

Powerful passages, such as the account of a night spent naked in bed with a male friend and the attraction of a man servant in Ireland, are revealing in their eloquence.

The early part of the book focuses on the comparison between James and Oscar Wilde, both as writers and gay men.

James' play fails miserably and is replaced in the theatre by one of Wilde's - who is already enjoying success with An Ideal Husband.

James' frustration at his inability to succeed in the theatre becomes a metaphor for his sexuality - Wilde's success is mirrored in his open and voracious sexual life with men and the scandal it causes among some in society.

Not much actually happens - it is a novel of the inner voice, the inner life

The novel mixes fact with fiction - recorded events are reconstructed and mingle with imagined episodes in which Toibin takes great artistic licence.

A number of flashbacks break into the chronology - as James thinks back to his earlier life, dodging the American Civil War and time spent with his cousins.

The novels James wrote in the period are merely alluded to - the pain, graft and genesis of the books themselves are virtually not commented upon.

Not much actually happens in The Master - it is a novel of the inner voice, the inner life and many people may lack the patience to persevere.

But as a fine novel that grapples well with the question of what powers the creative mind, it is worth the effort.