Colm Tóibín is not your typical quiet writer, withdrawn from the world. He is closer to a more illustrious tradition of Irish writers, like George Bernard Shaw, turning out essays and plays, or W.B. Yeats, writing poems and leaflets. Not for Tóibín the ivory tower, even if he does enjoy, as he has Henry James do, "the delight of solitude and the pleasure wrought from finished pages." A sociable person, who writes long reviews, selects art shows and participates in lively TV discussions, Tóibín has had a fascinating critical engagement with the issues of our time—issues of personality, spirituality and political engagement, especially where violence is concerned, a topic particularly pertinent to Ireland.

Yet his airy home in Dublin, a slender three-story Georgian townhouse, off leafy Fitzwilliam Square, is very calm. Save for the hundreds of books piled on shelves and strewn about the floor, it is the sort of calm Henry James might have wished for. It is an unexpectedly sunny spring day: around the corner, the square's aging tennis courts are being repaired while nearby Baggot Street offers an amiable stroll into an ever busy, ever noisy city.

The Master, Tóibín's new, acclaimed book about the life of Henry James just published by Scribner, is full of such an atmosphere. It is about James himself, facing into a difficult but highly productive period after the public rejection of his play Guy Domville on the London stage in 1895. Withdrawing into creativity, James takes these months—or Tóibín takes these months—to reflect on his life and on how the fullness of his exhaustive creativity contrasts with the mostly solitary, though by no means unsociable or, indeed, unattractive, life. Far from it; James has close friends and family, and the delights of foreign travel and an exquisitely refined, if restrained, aesthetic sense.

It is James's asceticism that, says Tóibín, liberates him and "enables [him] to imagine more fully, more deeply, the outside world in certain ways." Without such discipline, he would probably have been "a minor novelist, writing about minor manners and minor people," instead of being the great chronicler of American sense and sensibility.

This is Tóibín's fifth novel and the latest of many books. His last novel, The Blackwater Lightship, was short-listed for the Booker prize in 1999 and for the International Impac Award. He is, as one might expect of a man of such energy, highly prolific, not only with fiction but with reportage, anthology and criticism. In 2002, he wrote Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar and in 1999 published The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels Since 1950, in collaboration with Carmen Callil. He likes to have a few things on the go and has also recently written a small book about Lady Gregory, friend of Yeats and doyenne of the Irish Literary Revival. "Ah, but sure what else would I do," shrugs Tóibín disarmingly, when I comment on his energy. And on his curiosity, for it is this insatiable curiosity and discipline—he has read just about everything by, and about, James—that produces such ambitious, well-crafted works.

Tóibín, now 49, was a journalist before he was a writer—not a reporter in the conventional sense, but a considered and reflective feature writer for Magill magazine, a groundbreaking Irish journal focusing on issues political as well as cultural. He was to the fore in challenging the orthodoxies of modern Ireland: authoritarian religion, nationalist history and its attendant mythologies. And not just in Ireland; he also experienced post-Franco Spain, eventually writing a book about Catalonia called Homage to Barcelona, and has written about Argentina under dictatorship, an experience featured in his third novel, The Story of the Night. "I wanted to explore the poetics of the conservative mind, as opposed to the politics of it," he says, but, of course, in doing one he is illuminating, and giving context to, the other. What interests him is the interaction between the two, and he usually focuses on individuals caught up in larger situations.

With The Master, he has come to a new plateau. It is an audacious examination, a look at everything that really matters: at family, friends, the rituals of daily and yearly existence, about what keeps people going. Through the medium of James, and Tóibín's imaginative recreation of him, we find ourselves assessing all these realities. On one level, it is about the exacting price of one person's continuous creativity, but on another level, it is also a universal story, about loneliness and purpose and human destiny. "Oh, the experience is universal," he admits. "James could have been a businessman. With all that energy, he could have been a shipping agent." It's about all of humanity and the ordering of one's existence—how much for work, how much for living? And for what sort of living?

As for Tóibín himself, he is as busy as ever. In August, he will put on his play about Sean O'Casey and the consternation that greeted The Plough and the Stars, about the 1916 Rising. It is Tóibín's first play. Meanwhile, visitors to Dublin and the city's wonderful Chester Beatty Museum, home to one of the most impressive collections of Asian and Islamic artifacts in the world, can view an exciting exhibition, entirely selected by Tóibín, on the simple theme of the color blue. A delightful responsibility and one that the energetic aesthete, Henry James, might have killed for. Tóibín has abided by the stern advice he gives to Henry James in his novel: "whatever you do, live life to the full."