The Untouchable

Con una prosa impecable y una traducción excelente se noveliza la trayectoria de un personaje complejo, el historiador Anthony Blunt.
Una de la figuras esenciales de la cultura británica del siglo XX que espió para la URSS y, al mismo tiempo, fue conservador de arte de la colección real y director de una de las instituciones londinenses mas prestigiosas, el Instituto Courtauld. Yo leí hace años su magnífica monografía sobre Borromini, el arquitecto barroco. Una investigación de síntesis gracias a la cual pude apreciar su enorme contribución al arte de la arquitectura.
Resulta una obra maestra de orfebrería en la descripción de los ambientes y la profundidad de los personajes, sobre todo del protagonista principal.
Un libro extraordinario como no leía desde hace tiempo.

Lēns, drīzāk sabiedrību, nekā spiegus raksturojošs spiegu stāsts.
Paralēli klausos podkāstu par pasaules kariem no britu perspektīvas un jā, ir pilnīgi skaidrs, ka britiem eksistē tikai viņu Britānija (arī īriem un skotiem - viņu vēsture ir viņu salas un viņu cilvēki), visi pārējie ir tāds vēsturiskais fons tikai. Mazākām tautām tādā ziņā ir jāņem vērā arī citi spēlētāji, tādējādi tie stāsti un vēsture izdodas tādi krāsaināki.
Kā grāmata šis lasāmais bija labs, bet man kā latvietei uzsita asinis, marksisti un spiegi, bļin, ko neteiksi.

There is a Portuguese song from the 80s that goes something like this:

I am free and you are free
And there’s a night to be spent
Why don’t we go together?
Why don’t we stay in the adventure of the senses?

This song, written by a gay man who would die of AIDS, flies me over to a world I never knew. A freshly liberated Lisbon, free from the constraints of a right-wing dictatorship, ready to embrace democracy and modernity. Many of Lisbon’s most famous bars and discos appeared around this time. Everyone who knows anyone who frequented Lisbon’s nightlife in the 80s and 90s will share the same references: the same places, songs, haircuts, and the belief in a brighter future.

The Untouchable, although about a very different gay man from the hairdresser who wrote the quoted song, also pulls me back to a world I never knew. Yet I can see the dark pavement of a dripping Bloomsbury night, the seedy bars just off Edgware Road, and crowds of former public-school pupils cruising Hyde Park, looking for a quick fumble in a public bathroom.

This is the London Anthony Blunt…pardon me, Victor Maskell dwelt in. The mistake is almost inevitable. Building another character based on Blunt was a smart decision; it drags the plot away from the dungeons of History, and grants Banville the freedom to do what he likes. Maskell becomes an Irishman – solidly Protestant and well-connected, but still a man born on the wrong side of the Irish sea. He is raised by a kind stepmother and an absent-minded father who loves him, and alongside a brother with Down’s Syndrome (just like the Belfast-born poet, Louis MacNeice). Just like Blunt, Maskell becomes a prominent Art Historian, a member of the Cambridge’s Apostles, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, and finally a spy for the Soviet Union, particularly active during the WWII years. His justification, which retains astonishing prescience, is that he did it all in name of Western – European, really – civilization. The Brits with their good intentions and heroic retreats from France would never be enough to fight off fascism; they hadn’t been of much use, after all, when fascists were burning Spain to cinders.

The book is conspicuously timid about Maskell’s motivations, however. He was a spy; he had his reasons. The theme of his homosexuality looms over the novel, and the conclusion seems to be that even after he ceased to be a spy, his trysts with men – as forbidden and damaging as spying for the enemy – provided much needed adrenaline and a sense of purpose. Maskell is a man hiding from himself, yet constantly daring himself to be found. One can know oneself too well, as he says.

Keeping in line with many other books, which are not nearly as well written as The Untouchable, all characters are realistically unpleasant. Banville captures the vocabulary and the tone of a very specific class placed in a very specific historical period. Maskell, his friends and his family, whether they are Marxists or fascists, all share in the same vices of the upper-classes which reared them. You can’t escape your class, not even when you’re spying for the Soviet Union. This is where Banville’s novel becomes a triumph: he invokes an England which no longer exists and generations of people who are almost unimaginable now. Certainly, they are unlikely to be recognized by modern readers. Yet in Banville’s hands they become as familiar as the London I know, familiar as bygone cities fleshed out from popular songs.

The Untouchable by John Banville
Is it possible to write a brilliant novel which lacks an engrossing plot, is peopled by caricatures and has as its heart a thoroughly awful narrator who does not learn, develop or change? Banville proves that this is entirely possible. The novel is a many layered expose of the ultimate solitariness of human experience in which we see our own experience mirrored. It is also an insightful commentary on the nature of art, the art of writing itself and the slippery nature of truth.
Victor, the unrepentant art-historian, homosexual spy, tells us that in his memoir, in the manner of restoring a painting, that he will strip away “layer after layer of grime….. until I come to the very thing itself and know what it is. My soul. My self.” Unfortunately, the more he scrapes, the more fakery, deceit and hollowness he uncovers – he is no closer to his soul or true self at the end of the process and even the one thing which he prizes more than the people in his life, his Poussin painting, “The Death of Seneca”, also proves ultimately to be a fake. Perhaps he has no soul – he is untouchable, incapable of human empathy. To compound his misery, his one true love, the person for whom he has a life-long yearning, Nick Breevort, also becomes his betrayer, throwing Victor under a bus to protect more important, and undetected, members of the double agent spy ring. Suicide now seems the only viable escape from personal insights and betrayals too shattering to bear. Banville has also been at pains to reveal the truth of human experience through his onion-layered examination of Victor’s psyche.
What Banville demonstrates is the postmodern notion that truth is illusive for both the character and the author. The more we chase meaning, the more it is deferred or pushed on to the next signifier. This is particularly true of a character who has rejected the core values of all grand narratives, including democracy, capitalism, Roman Catholicism and even Marxism. He even coldly rejects and hurts each member of his own family, even those he has some affection for, with the relinquishment of Freddy to a ‘home’ and subsequent death particularly poignant. The only thing Victor apparently believes in is the purity of art, but this also proves to be an unstable truth with Victor at one time asserting that it is the art historian that consolidates the worth of art through monographs and lectures rather than the intrinsic value of art itself. Banville, too, unravels an unstable persona in Victor. Even though the author attempts to represent Victor from multiple angles, the reader and Victor are no closer to understanding the character’s motivation for spying at the end of the novel. He is a hollow man constructed from opposing discourses and fleeting ideologies – a man of no conviction save a relish in personal pleasure for pleasure’s own sake.
On a psychological level, Nick is a quintessential outsider: he is Irish, of an embarrassingly lower intellectual and social class to the Breevorts, and never quite taken seriously by either his MI5 cohort or his Russian spy mates. Invariably, apart from his lower-class lover Patrick, and his tragically loyal daughter, he describes people as being unhappy to see him. Some significantly accuse him of ‘not being serious’. Even Baby Breevort, his wife, seems to hold him in a sort of aloof disdain, recognizing that he has always been in love with her brother. “It was always him,” she flatly states – Nick is simultaneously Victor’s betrayer and his great love. Victor’s homosexuality, in a time of societal taboo, also sets him apart from hetero society but amply sets him up for the spy’s heady double life of lies and deception. But he is also a fairly grubby exponent of a loveless homosexual lifestyle. His one proud but ideologically hollow act is to retrieve papers embarrassing to the royal family from postwar Germany. Perhaps he finds his niche as royal sycophant. Banville proves the post-modern psychological concept of the fractured self. Victor is an actor, one skilled at wearing masks (Maskell) or adopting different false identities to suit the occasion so much so that he loses sight of any stable idea of his own identity.
Victor’s hollow selfishness is emblematic of a between wars time in British history, but the characterization is also universally relevant to each reader. How much of ourselves do we glimpse in his egocentrism, in his shabby treatment of significant others, in his struggle to comprehend his motivation? His chief motivation seemed to be the universal wish to belong to a group, to be accepted and liked into a social class that is only just within his reach. This is aligned with his unrequited love for Nick, something that sadly motivates his decisions and actions throughout the entire memoir. In fact, his love for Nick contributes to his inability to be touched by others, especially his children. He is also motivated by a wish to escape the tedium of everyday life – he relishes the cloak and dagger aspects of a homosexual lifestyle and the life of a double agent, and the irony is that he is a very mundane spy who reveals to the Russians mainly what they already know. He also loses Nick’s trust when he loses his nerve evacuating from France. Victor is in fact a cover and a scapegoat for the real spying carried out by the likes of Nick, who is a genuine and very upwardly mobile member of his class and the spy ring.
Of course, the element of the novel which most contributes to its brilliance is Banville’s richly descriptive and comically ironic writing style. Each minor character is unflatteringly portrayed in great visual detail in Victor’s judgmental voice with the effect that the writing is more like painting than writing.
In fact, Banville draws many parallels between the work of the author and the work of an artist. Apart from Victor’s metaphoric description of his memoir as a work of art restoration, Banville constructs a sort of triple doppelganger of Victor, Poussin the artist, and Banville the writer. What he has Victor say of Poussin and his artistry can equally be applied to Banville and his writing. Victor sneers at “those critics”, the Marxists especially, who search for the meaning of Poussin’s work; Banville is warning us, the reader, not fall into the same trap reading this novel. “There is no meaning. Significance, yes. Effects, authority mystery, magic…but no meaning.” The figures in the painting “simply are” just as the characters in The Untouchable simply are. Their meaning is that they are there “where before they had not been”. Banville has constructed Victor as a re-imagining of the historical Anthony Blunt but has offered us no neatly bundled meaning pertaining to “mortality or the soul or salvation”. Victor is just there. For Victor, Poussin was the only single authentic thing in his life but Banville even denies Victor that certainty. The painting is a fake and Victor admits that having constructed the representation of Poussin in his lectures and his writing, he has an unconscious urge to destroy him that he doesn’t understand. Victor is a fractured, unstable character; Poussin is a fiction constructed by Victor from his adoration of a fake painting and Banville denies the possibility of truth which, if it exists at all, is a fleeting notion always just beyond our grasp.

This is my second try with John Banville. Once again, he impresses me with his ability to write nearly perfect prose and characters who are as flesh and blood and flawed as any who ever breathed, while completely boring me. That's strike two, Mr. Banville, and two is all most authors get from me.

Banville is a serious Literary Dude, and this is a serious Literary Dude's novel. The Untouchable is written as a memoir by one Victor Maskell, who is based on real-life Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt; although this is a novel, it's only loosely fictionalized history. Maskell, as he tells his story, was, like Blunt, formerly the keeper of the British royal family's art collection, and has recently been exposed as a Soviet spy since before World War II. Maskell is also a homosexual, which plays a large part of his narrative - he describes his sexual encounters with the same precise elegant prose as he talks about watersheds in history and his role as a Soviet double-agent.

Everybody nowadays disparages the 1950s, saying what a dreary decade it was. And they are right, if you think of McCarthyism and Korea, the Hungarian rebellion, all that serious historical stuff. I expect, however, that it is not public but private affairs that people are complaining of. Quite simply, I think they did not get enough of sex. All that fumbling with corsetry and woolen undergarments and all those grim couplings in the back seats of motorcars. The complaints and tears and resentful silences, while the wireless crooned callously of everlasting love. Feh! What dinginess! What soul-sapping desperation! The best that could be hoped for was a shabby deal marked by the exchange of a cheap ring followed by a life of furtive relievings on one side and of ill-paid prostitution on the other.

Whereas, oh my friends, to be queer was the very bliss! The Fifties were the last grace age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride. Pride! But these young hotheads in their pink bellbottoms, clamoring for the right to do it in the street if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear.

Maskell is wry, cynical, sometimes humorous, and a bit depressive, looking back on a career that's been generally distinguished while always overshadowed by these twin secrets: he has lived his entire life in two closets, as a homosexual and a double-agent. He has few regrets, and he seems as much amused as he is upset by his public disgrace, the shock of his friends, the shame of his family.

As brilliantly narrated as Maskell's story is, the problem is that it isn't much of a story. It's an old man reminiscing about being a young Marxist and a gay blade back when either one could get you hard prison time. There are no dramatic "spy" moments — even during World War II, he's just passing on not-very-important information to the Russians, until eventually he gets tired of the whole thing and rather anticlimactically (as much as a book that's had no suspense to begin with can have an anticlimax) drops out of the spy game. Then, years later, he's thrown under the bus by some of his former associates. (Figuratively, not literally; if anyone were actually thrown under a bus in this book, it would have been more exciting.)

Most excellently written? Yes. Banville wins literary prizes — go John Banville. Did I care about Victor Maskell and his whiny, cynical, misogynistic moping after decades of being a Soviet spy? Noooo. If you have a real interest in this era, particularly with a realistically (if not particularly sympathetically) depicted gay character, then you probably won't regret reading this, but don't make the mistake of thinking that because it's about spies it's thrilling.

Недосегаемият е поредният роман на Джон Банвил, който ме опиянява с пронизителното си съвършенство.
Историята на Виктор Маскел е интересна, но не сама по себе си. Нищо оригинално няма в дейността на специалст по история на изобразителното изкуство, който работи за британското разузнаване и едновременно е агент на Москва. Последното, мотивирано от марскистките му убеждения, които според него самия се съчетават органично с непоколебим роялизъм. Може и да изглежда абсурдно на пръв поглед, но ми звучи изненадващо логично. В това е магията на Банвил – убедителен е всеки образ, всяка сцена, всяка мисъл. За мен огромната му заслуга се състои именно в отразяването на историческите събития от гледна точка на обществената атмосфера във времето, когато се случват. Мисля, че е грешка да се прави опит за опознаване на миналото с критериите от следващи времена. Банвил не допуска такава грешка. Благодарение на това героите му са автентични, пълнокръвни и ярки.
Впечатляващ е елегантният стил на писателя. Описанията на картини, предмети, природа и душевни състояния доставят наслада с красиви, умерено използвани метафори. Особено важна роля играят цветовете и това е допълнително удоволствие при четенето.

The Untouchable by John Banville is an exceptionally good book, one of the best I've read in a long time. The story focuses on Victor Maskell, loosely based on the figure of Anthony Blunt, one of the infamous Cambridge Five, or Six…or Seven…, who in the 1930s began spying for the Soviets and continued to do so right through WWII, when Maskell indicates that he'd had enough, he wanted to live out his life as an art historian (keeper of the King of England's drawings and paintings and director of an art institute.)

Setting the historical spy ring aside and focusing on the novel, Banville creates a marvelous, multi-faceted, cheeky, proud, insecure, and eloquent figure in Maskell. Like Banville, Maskell writes beautifully about the sky's soaring commentary on the earth (how the clouds scudded along, how the sun blazed, how the mists and fogs and shadows drifted down upon mortals in imitation of their engimas and flaws). Beyond that, he captures complex action involving English folk who seem to become more and more irritating the higher they rise in society and more vicious and cynical the lower they fall (or were born). The dialogue is great--fast, to the point, always in character--and there is a pretty convincing rendition of what spying in those days was all about: filching decoded documents, reporting on who was up and who was down, correcting Soviet misapprehensions about Great Britain's capabilities and intentions. Lots of this is what spies call pocket litter, stuff you snatch without seeing any value in it, just letting the analysts figure it out.

Maskell was born to a prelate in Ireland, went to Cambridge, and fell into a situation that was wrong-headed but made a certain sense at the time. He and his fellows saw the 1930s as a period when socialism and fascism were going head-to-head, England was too weak-kneed to deal with this battle, and America had no appetite for recrossing the Atlantic as well. The Spanish Civil War had an incendiary effect on these young men and women. They didn't like the Soviet Union and, as it is phrased in the book, wish socialism had prevailed somewhere else, but it didn't, so they sided with Stalin and stuck to him and each other through the ultimate struggle with Hitler.

Maskell becomes a respected art historian, a lover of Poussin, in particular, and marries. He may or may not have been the father of his children. Probably not. Soon after marriage, he realizes he's gay. A lot of his crowd is gay. So there are two undersides to respectability here: the refined Cambridge/Oxford class spying and the refined Cambridge/Oxford class slumming for homosexual opportunities.

Maskell is cheeky, diffident, candid, eloquent, snotty and wise about his situation. Coming from Northern Ireland, he's "all right," meaning he isn't Catholic, but his brain leads him upward and gets him, too smart by half, into a situation that has to turn out badly.

Passages in this book wherein the rain falls on windows and glistens on the street and is reflected in unsympathetic eyes are wonderful. Banville is a superb stylist. He refers to Blake now and then, but not too often. He describes Poussin and others in terms befitting a true art historian. He captures the misery, fatalism, and luck of living through the London Blitz persuasively.

Some of the characters in the book are fully realized the moment they walk on stage. Others, Maskell's wife, doesn't really come through until the end. And still others, it seems to me (I'm thinking of his brother-in-law) are a bit too archly and indefinitely drawn. Maskell isn't meant to understand exactly how and why his brother-in-law must come out on top, must have been the one who sold him out, and the confrontation with Mark at the end of the book is blown off in a kind of summary rather than a real scene, which is unfortunate.

The novel is written as a memoir after Maskell has been outed as a spy many years after making a deal to turn over what he knew in exchange for maintaining his place (and job) in society. He has some kind of cancer, but he has, befitting an art historian, an astonishing memory, and he wants what he's gone through to be known. The words "traitor" and "spy" thrown at him in the press are too simple; they don't convey the legitimate moral complexity or the substance of a life over which Maskell didn't have full control.

In the book, Maskell acknowledges that his actions must have led to certain deaths. Sir Anthony Blunt denied this. Both would agree they were out of their depth. Banville's Maskell is by far the more interesting character, though. The Untouchable is a book worth reading.

For more of my comments on contemporary writing, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).

Near the end of this book the protagonist talks about the spiritual exhaustion of the 1950s. Actually, though, the entire book seems to reflect spiritual exhaustion. Yes, it is droll and sometimes witty, but it is also sad and rather sordid. A spy in Mr. Banville's characterization is not dashing and romantic but cynical and disappointed. I don't know how Banville does it but he so well fills his characters with life that, even when they are basically unlikable, the reader is compelled to follow their stories to the bitter end.