text: Reading late James - particularly "The Golden Bowl" - often strikes me as being similar to reading a novel in a foreign language whose vocabulary you have mastered but whose grammar remains partially a mystery. Anyone who has attempted this will recognise the sensation of understanding all the words, yet not understanding how they fit together. You read a sentence two, three or five times, and it is only then that you understand, if at all, the meaning of all the words combined. Sometimes the meaning never becomes clear.
  
  "Late James" is a foreign language, but one in which I have become more fluent over the years. When I first read "The Golden Bowl" some years ago I understood very little and did not enjoy it. The long, convoluted sentences, with so many things only half spoken - and often never spoken at all - seemed a vast and elaborate machine which never seemed to produce enough to justify its own existence. 
  
  Yet now, having read most of James over the intervening years, I have become more fluent in his language, and find the circumlocutions, complexities and ellipses of the "late style", if not exactly crystal clear, then certainly much clearer, and even rather comforting and enjoyable. The subtle discriminations, the way James holds up to the light tenuous motives and turns them slowly - very slowly - so that their hidden facets become, fleetingly, visible; the very real portrayal of interesting characters that James reveals; as well as the languorous, unpredictable turns of a Jamesian sentence - all offer the kinds of pleasures that no other writer (possibly excepting Proust) is able to produce.
  
   "The Golden Bowl" consists largely of conversations, some continuing over many, many pages. The content of those conversations would, for most writers, comprise the details between the main actions of the plot; and for most writers, those conversations would occupy, at most, a few pages. But for James, it is the interstices between big events, the dramas, not so much of everyday events, but of the subtle daily manipulations, the unspoken victories and losses of personal relationships, which interest him and which comprise the novel. 
  
  The subject of "The Golden Bowl" is the reciprocal marriages of father and daughter, to a pair of former lovers. The novel is about the tensions and deceptions, and the manipulations, that arise as a result. Who knows what about whom? Who is responsible for what actions? Who is deceiving whom, and who has the moral authority as a consequence? Ultimately, who, if anyone, triumphs, and is their victory a hollow one? These are the sorts of questions James is concerned with. 
  
  "The Golden Bowl" rates as a great novel - one of the greatest of the twentieth century - because of these qualities as well as its ambiguities. It is also an enjoyable novel, but to enjoy it you must first be sympathetic to the sorts of concerns James is interested in, and you also need to be conversant in his distinctive language. Both of these require - or at least I would recommend - first reading James' earlier and middle period works. For most of us, late James can be a struggle, but one which is justified by its rewards. I don't regard reading "The Golden Bowl" as an exercise only for academics, pretentious aesthetes or literary masochists, but I sympathise with those who do. 
  
  Giving "stars" to a James novel seems a little inappropriate (he is beyond these kinds of simplistic judgements), But I have given "The Golden Bowl" four stars, because there are times when it strains the patience even of those who admire the writing style and enjoy the late James novels, and I prefer "The Ambassadors" or "The Wings of the Dove". Nevertheless, "The Golden Bowl" is one of the great novels in English and is highly recommended to anyone who has read and enjoyed James' other novels.
  