Apologies to all my countless readers in the blogosphere for being remiss in offering recent posts. (I bet at least 25% of all blog postings consist of similar apologies.) It’s just that as I approached the end of my employment with “A Once-Leading Irish Software Company, Erstwhile Great White Hope of the Dotcom Bubble”, I found myself in a slight mental funk. Faced with the prospect of updating my CV and smiling during interviews with the desperation of a jobbing actor looking for a walk-on part in Holby City, I have succumbed (when not engaged in haphazard house husbanding, of course) to a DVD binge. (In passing: My recommendation from the hours of watching would be Pedro Almodovar’s overheated noir ‘Bad Education’–think of it as Alfred Hitchcock meets Robert Mapplethorpe. And although Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ is an enjoyable ride, the script’s sub-Nietzschean musing can’t hide the fact that the characters are about as complex as Indiana Jones.)Anyway, in the last two weeks, I think I’ve read about as much as a dyslexic Premiership footballer, but I think I’m slowly emerging from intellectual lethargy. Unfortunately, I put the blame for the recent bout partly on Colm T�ib�n. A friend lent me his highly praised “The Master” just before Christmas and I’ve been averaging around 4 pages a day ever since. The ragged bookmark currently lies hanging out from the hardback like a mocking tongue.It’s not that the book is in any way not beautifully written; indeed part of my problem with the book is that it’s almost too sensitively executed. It’s a book that basically revolves around Henry James’ ruthless determination to avoid getting entangled in the messy emotional lives of others, chiefly intelligent, highly strung women whose inability to accept conventional marriage mirrors James’ own ambiguous position. T�ib�n makes the clich� of living for one’s art come vividly alive–and it’s not an edifying sight. With still another sixty pages to go, the near-blasphemous thought struck me about T�ib�n’s James–how would anyone possibly tolerate this rather boring emotional vampire, a man whose sense of decorum is in fact closer to the cagey blandness of a spy gathering info. Nowhere in the book is James presented as saying anything particularly interesting or even offering the throwaway bon mot. We are told that James detested the facile wit of Oscar Wilde, but after a few hundred pages of wandering in the fustian gloom of James’ intellect, a few glib aphorisms wouldn’t go amiss. It’s not that I expect characters in novels to be good or even likeable, but I do like them to make an effort.(There’s is a very good tragicomedy sequence, however, in which James ineptly tries to deal with his increasingly truculent and drunken servants). I feel vaguely embarrassed by this trenchant attack on the book (as so often is the case, soon after I started typing my condemnation became stronger than I initially envisioned). Perhaps I’m missing something everybody else is swooning over. But, I ask you, can’t you find something incredibly well-made and pretty boring at the same time? …as the character in the sketch used to say, I’ll get my coat.