Customer Reviews

The Untouchable

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Loosely based on the life of British art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, and with capsule portraits of characters based on Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, John Banville's "The Untouchable" is a witty and literate, if sometimes overwritten, novel, that never fails to entertain. The question of how a man like Blunt, or, in his present incarnation, Victor Maskell, could betray his country is a sticky one, but here the answer seems to be, quite casually. Maskell never appears to be very comfortable in the role of socialist, except when he's put on the defensive by his mocking friends, but he is amused by the idea of spying, which dovetails nicely with his personal philosophy of stoicism, as in Seneca, the Roman philosopher who ended his own life after being implicated in a conspiracy against the emperor, Nero. The obvious foreshadowing here is driven home by Maskell's obsession with a picture by Poussin depicting Seneca's suicide, which turns out to be possibly as fake as Maskell himself. Irish by birth, a father and husband, soldier and scholar, Maskell is also a closet homosexual, as well as a distant relation of the Queen. He is a mass of contradictions, who, having been betrayed as a spy and diagnosed as dying from cancer, has begun to wonder what was real and what illusory about his paradoxical life. In the end, he must face up to the ultimate betrayal. In "The Untouchable," Banville offers a perceptive glimpse into the world of those among us who are obliged to lead a double life, sometimes by choice, as in the case of spies, and sometimes not, as in the case of homosexuals. In the final analysis, spy and queer are not that far apart: the glamor and tawdriness, the mystery and banality, and always the backward look over one's shoulder. Victor Maskell may not be the most likeable of protagonists, but he is one of the most complex.

John Banville's "The Untouchable" is.....untouchable in its literary qualities and an instant classic. It's a shame it didn't enjoy more widespread recognition as a major and enduring literary work than it did. I've read many award winning contemporary novels these past two years but few have been as engaging and satisfying. Despite its topically controversial subject of the "Cambridge spies", Banville eschews cheap and tabloidy sensationalism in favour of a subtle and intimate approach to the unrevelling of the minds and motivation of a small group of intellectuals who betrayed England by passing state secrets to Russia. When their treachery was made public, the shock was compounded by the fact that the last of these spies to have been exposed (renamed Victor Maskell) was not some hip lefty but an art historian personally as well as professionally close to the Royal Family. But what emerges from this poignant and fictionalised treatment of the scandal and Victor Maskell's psyche is the realisation that these acts of treachery were probably committed for reasons that had little to do with ideology but with a desperate need to satisfy a hidden longing. Remember, the Soviet cause never took hold of Victor after an early visit to Russia which totally disenchanted him. But he secretly revelled in the furtive recruitment interviews and the risk of being caught as it provided relief and outlet for his (unconsciously) unhappy existence as a repressed homosexual. To all appearances, he was a family man but there is no trace of fatherliness in his relationship or feelings towards his adult children. The reader isn't spared a tragic ending and Banville's restraint only heightens the pain. "The Untouchable" makes a truly compelling read because Banville's writing is elegant, smart, humourous, subtle and hits you in between the eyes. His prose is never pretentious, always accessible and smooth as silk. This is an outstanding novel that should have made it to the Booker Prize shortlist. I'd give it a 6-star rating if I could. Read it.

I enjoyed this book tremendously. The character of Victor Maskell (the "mask" in Maskell representing a persona of Anthony Blunt) is complex and believable; the story is suspenseful, and Banville's prose can only be described as both luminous and effortless: "A huge, bone-white moon hung above the prostrate sea, and the ship's wake flashed and writhed like a great silver rope unravelling behind us." [p. 57]

And yet, since I have read biographies of Anthony Blunt and Louis MacNeice's autobiographical "The Strings are False" (not to mention every available book on the Cambridge Spies), I feel rather like Dorothy of Oz, who has glimpsed "that man behind the curtain" who should be ignored, if the magic is to be believed.

Those who have not read the literature on the Cambridge Spies will enjoy the book without reservation. Those who have will discover that "The Untouchable" represents a fascinating roman à clef. The boisterous Boy Bannister, who haunts the Gryphon [read Gargoyle] club, can only be Guy Burgess; Philip MacLeish, the "dour Scot" code named Castor [read Homer] can only represent Donald Maclean. Other characters are more equivocal. For instance, one detects a bit of MacNeice not only in Maskell but also in the character of Nick Brevoort. Furthermore, Banville's use of names of actual people who figured in Blunt's real Cambridge life (e.g. Leo, Victor, Sykes, Alistair) as ingredients mixed into his narrative, from which they emerge reborn into new characters, contributes to the verisimilitude of Maskell's character. Except for Boy Bannister, however, the other spies are composites. For instance, Alistair Sykes (who seems to be puffing on Kim Philby's pipe) is given a job at what passes for Bletchley Park, and he suffers Alan Turing's tragic demise. One is not so naive, however, as to suppose that any resemblance between the "department" bureaucrat Querell, who finds Catholicism and writes "The Orient Express," the first of many "overrated Balkan thrillers" [p. 76], and SIS officer Graham Greene, who underwent a similar religious enlightenment and wrote "Stamboul Express," is strictly coincidental.

In Victor Maskell, Banville has portrayed a tragic anti-hero, grafting the life and persona of poet Louis MacNeice onto that of the art historian and (need one mention?) Soviet agent Anthony Blunt (Both of their fathers were clergymen.). For example, Banville has given Victor Maskell not only MacNeice's mentally challenged brother but also his stepmother, and his domineering governess; he has likewise provided him with MacNeice's Irish nationality, and he has even given him MacNeice's wife, Mariette, whom we meet in Maskell's wife, the enigmatically perverse "Vivienne." Banville also takes Maskell and Brevoort on a pre-war trip to Spain, a journey that Blunt actually took with Louis MacNeice. Banville's literary transplant, however, results in a beautifully rounded characterization that Blunt, whose personality was severely compartmentalized, could never have hoped to achieve in real life. Since MacNeice and Blunt were such close friends at Marlborough School, one can only imagine that as far as the character of Victor Maskell is concerned, Anthony Blunt would have been rather pleased with Banville's finished product.

It is rather commonplace, I suppose, that it is difficult to write an "objective" review of a book one so deeply enjoys. Nevertheless, I'll give it a whirl. Banville truly does seem incapable of writing about anything that does not become a work of art under his pen. And, while John Le Carre is frequently praised as writing spy novels that are literature, they aren't. They're merely a cut above the usual 007 sort of thing. For something to be labelled art, correctly, it must soar above not only any genre it supposedly represents (herein, the "spy novel"), but must also must stake a unique claim in the reader's mind as something rich and strange, the like of which she/he has never yet come across. Banville accomplishes this feat with such apparently effortless ease here that this reader, in any event, is left, after reading it, in a swoon of delight which I'm still savouring.

It's a pity to dissect what makes this so, but, really, it's not much of a dissection, only one cut into two parts: 1) Banville's lyrical, lulling yet erudite prose which comes here through the medium of our somewhat flawed protagonist, Maskell. It is literally transporting, in its Yeatsean reveries, not only to a different time and place but to the inside of Maskell's mind and heart, or perhaps some would prefer the term soul. 2) The Proustian depths of Banville/Maskell's insights into the kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting nature of life, love and identity.

I suppose I'm obliged to say something about the "spy" aspect of the book and the to-do about the Cambridge set. I shall. It's of no importance.........Well, let me qualify, it's of no importance save as the setting in which Banville writes. It's just a sort of prop, as is Maskell's homosexuality. For, after reading this book, one realises that whether one is homo or hetero, spy or patriot (Maskell is, at times, all four.), we are all a bit out of our depths in this world in defining who we are and why we do things. To quote from the book, "Yes, how deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps in life we take."

When is a certain Swedish committee going to take note of this fellow?

John Banville, the Dublin author whose fiction is at once literary and accessible, funny and mordant, informed by history but rooted in subjective reality, is one of best writers in English today. "The Untouchable," his 1997 novel based on the life of Sir Anthony Blount, the Fourth Man in the Cambridge Spy Scandal, is extraordinarily good.

"Who am I?" art historian Victor Maskell asks himself in this first-person narrative, crafted ostensibly for the benefit of an ersatz amanuensis in a leather skirt. "What do I know? What matters?"

Maskell, an essential outsider, has spent a lifetime using his studied charm, suppressed emotions, closeted homosexuality, and distant family connections to winnow a place for himself in the English establishment. It matters not that his marriage is a failure, that he is estranged from his children. Art, he concludes at one point - even the prized painting, attributed to Poussin, which has hung on his wall for 50 years - has no meaning; it simply is. The same, in his view, might be said of existence itself.

This passive and unexamined life comes apart after Maskell, once an amateur intelligence operative, is publicly disgraced for having passed information of questionable value ("state secrets," the press calls it) to wartime ally the Soviet Union (the "enemy"). Why did he do it? Certainly not for money. Was it for the cause of worldwide socialism? For personal amusement? To put on the mask of a man of action? To avenge the underclass? Or was it simply another form of casual duplicity, no different is substance from the duplicity of proper gentlemen who take mistresses or of friendly governments which destroy villages in order to save them?

Nothing is as it seems in this ambiguous, allusion-stocked, politically savvy, richly imagined life of Victor Maskell and his times. Robert E. Olsen

While other reviewers have dissected the spy background, the force of Banville's prose has gained less attention. He gives marvellous set pieces about entering the Kremlin's inner sanctum, of meeting his mother-in-law to be to ask for her daughter's hand, and of ghastly encounters with related royals at both Buckingham Palace and post-war Germany. Banville conveys the querulous self-deprecating, yet stubbornly principled, career of one claiming to be Irish, royalist, husband, father and queer, relative of the Windsors yet a committed Marxist loyal to Stalin's regime, all while in the pay of the Crown in peace, hot, and cold wars. If you're wondering about how the book's composed, not only what it's about, here's three samples.

First, Victor ponders his unmasking. After noting how Marxism obviously replaces "the faith of my fathers," he reflects: "But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? The fact that you place your bet on red does not mean that black is not still there." (96)

On the next page: [. . .]I have a different definition of what constitutes effective action. The worm in the bud is more thorough than the wind that shakes the bough. This is what the spy knows. It is what I know."

Not all's so aphoristic. One favorite analogy, late in the book: eating lunch at the German Prince Willi (cousin to the British royals) after WWII, Victor recalls how the dumplings "looked like the testicles of a giant albino, and were so dense and repulsive that after my knife had gone through them the lips of the wound would shut again with a repulsive, kissing sound." (302)

Who can top that? If you like this tone, then read this intricately crafted novel! My only criticism is that the conceit of dictation to Miss Vandeleur, the excuse for Maskell's composition of his memoirs, seems a bit too pat and standard for this novel, and lacks dramatic tension. You also do not gain enough of a feel for broader reactions to Maskell's exposure, even if the hermeticism of most of what Maskell relates may be therefore intentional as his outside support system crumbles.

But as to the story Maskell narrates, it's not to be missed. It takes its time developing, in a skillfully created but rather suspended ambiance that evokes well the more restrained early decades of Britain's last century. Up to the birth of his son, Maskell's memoir unfolds slowly and demands much patience; with the coming of the WWII, the pace quickens and the book picks you up with its brutal, queasy, yet honestly heartfelt, momentum.

Victor Maskell takes us step by (often debauched) step through what passes for his life. Maskell, a thinly disguised Anthony Blunt, is one of several by now well-known Cambridge spies from the thirties and forties. Banville vividly recreates not only the political and social turmoil of the period but also the intellectual experimentation and the search for values spawned by these turbulent times. The depiction of decadence, drunkenness, sexual depravity, and social snobbery, combined with intellectual arrogance and political naivete, all show the reader how someone could have been seduced into becoming a willing spy. Though it is difficult to feel any real sympathy for Maskell, one can understand his need for significance--for something bigger in his life--and equally, his eventual need to reject that role. In prose that is astonishing in its facility and virtuosity, Banville sweeps away the fustiness of previous journalistic accounts of the Cambridge spies and creates flawed, breathing humans

Getting long in the tooth now after a lifetime of spying on London for Russia, Victor Maskell is shocked to learn that someone has ratted him out. In trying to figure out what went wrong, he begins keeping a long journal in which he reviews his life, and which, basically, becomes this novel. There are lots of interesting and quirky turns of events, including his relationship with his family, his dealings with upper-crust Englishmen, and his realization that he is gay. Victor is a good analyzer, but a poor summationist, and as he explores his past life and dances around the central question of why he chose to live the life of a spy as he did, he never seems able to answer it. This can be frustrating for the reader. But John Banville is a superb writer and he relates the story of Victor Maskell (based on a true character) incisively and with power.

One of the most stunning pieces of fiction I've ever read, brimming with passages that truly took my breath away; I am in awe of writers who can repeatedly help a reader see something in a new way, and John Banville did this over and over again. Victor Maskell, the narrator, is such a satisfying creation: intelligent, possessed of passion and wit, complex, flawed...desparately human. Throughout the book, Victor does not often dwell on the matter of who has betrayed him--he has his ideas, though, to be sure. When we find out who this is, it is heartbreaking. One mark of a good book, for me, is the triggering of an interest in related material. In this instance, I am eager to read more about the Cambridge circle of spies (Philby, Blunt, et al.) on which this work is based. I am also eager to read other work by Banville. DO NOT MISS THIS BOOK!

Victor Maskell, John Banville's protagonist in "The Untouchable," is a thoroughly unlikable character, singularly unlikable. The book itself, although perhaps self-consciously literate, is a fascinating study of a man narrating his own very long suicide note. He is intelligent, pretentious, self-effacing, arrogant, prudish, promiscuous, married to the sister of the man he loves, fearless, and timid. I've read Banville. I should have known better than to expect a traditional espionage thriller -- Banville doesn't write "traditional" anything. I kept thinking to put the book down half read. I could not. Nevertheless, thank god I was reading the book on my Kindle. Without the Kindle's embedded dictionary, reading through Banville's archaic usage would have been "untouchable."