“The Untouchable” is in the form of a journal written in the first person by the main character, Victor Maskell, who, as a member of the British foreign intelligence service, was a spy for the Soviet Union from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. It is a fictional account of the infamous “Cambridge Spy Ring” which operated in Great Britain during the same period and included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Guy Maclean.

Maskell takes up writing his journal at age 72. We learn in the first few pages that he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and that the news of his unmasking has recently been made public. Maskell’s journal is a narration of the espionage and other activities of him and his group, all of whom were recent graduates of Cambridge University and had Marxist-Leninist sympathies. It is also a character study of Maskell himself. The novel is not a thriller. The only real mystery is the identity of the person who betrayed Maskell and revealed him to be a Russian agent.

Banville’s writing is insightful, clear, and flawless. His characterization of Maskell and his colleagues is complex and convincing. I give “The Untouchable” four stars.

Erg moeilijk boek om te beoordelen, want John Banville is zonder twijfel een Grote schrijver, en Grote schrijvers beoordeel je niet met 2 sterren. Daarvoor zijn de boeken nu eenmaal te goed geschreven.

Maar toch.
Het lijkt niet te klikken tussen John Banville en mij. Ook The Sea kon me zoveel jaren terug niet echt bekoren. Ik stak het daarna op mijn jeugdige onwetendheid op dat moment, want ik blijk geen probleem te hebben met boeken met weinig plot, integendeel. Ik was dus blij om John Banville nog eens een herkansing te mogen geven. Helaas was dit opnieuw een boek waar ik me doorheen heb moeten sleuren.

Er zijn uiteraard twee verzachtende omstandigheden waar Banville niets aan kan doen.

Enerzijds is er het coronagedoe waardoor ik veel minder tijd heb om te lezen. Dit is geen boek om te combineren met voltijds thuiswerk, thuisopvang met 2 kinderen en af en toe een pagina lezen op een gestolen moment. Maar toch merkte ik al vrij snel dat de zin om te lezen totaal niet opgewekt werd door dit boek, en dat is niet de schuld van het coronagedoe.

Anderzijds is er het feit dat ik niets ken van de Cambridge Spies. Ik heb de moeite gedaan om de Wikipedia-pagina te lezen, maar uiteindelijk schiet een mens daar niet veel mee op.
Ik vermoed dat dit boek maar écht interessant is als je wat afweet over de Cambridge Spies. Als je de sleutelroman kan doorgronden, kan meedoen met het intellectuele spel van deze roman, en volop kan genieten van de prachtige taal.
Als dat niet het geval is, dan moet je deze roman beoordelen op wat er overschiet. Er gebeurt bijna niets (enkel het einde heeft me nog doen twijfelen toch naar drie sterren te gaan), het hoofdpersonage is niet sympathiek (of uitgesproken antipathiek) genoeg om dat te verantwoorden, en ik heb geen idee wat John Banville nu eigenlijk wou vertellen met dit verhaal.

Maar hey, er staan nog 3 boeken van Banville op de 1001 boekenlijst, hij krijgt nog een aantal herkansingen van mij. Hopelijk in betere tijden dan deze.

John Banville is a fascinating writer. This is my second try at his novels, and there seems to be quite a pattern. The writing is gorgeous, the plot interesting and gratifyingly complex, and all of the characters utterly and profoundly unsympathetic. I get the sense that the author feels a bit like it would be giving in to cheap standards to give his principle character any redeemable personality traits.

Victor Maskell, the Cambridge spy around which the story revolves, is selfish and vain almost beyond the reckoning of it. Frankly, I’m not terribly bothered about the betraying his country thing - treason is such an odd and outmoded concept, I can’t really get my head around it. Does a person really owe loyalty to a country just because he happens to be born there? Probably not, really. However, I have a very good grasp on the idea of what it is to be a great big lying liar, and that’s where Victor loses my sympathy. What I disliked even more was that, at heart, Victor was a lazy nihilist. He didn’t really care two straws about the proletariat and all that communist nonsense; he thought Soviet Russia was a failure; he had no ideological passion that would in part excuse his treachery. He just wanted to look cool like someone in a spy movie. And it was the same with his colorful and depressingly soulless personal life. He abandons his wife and children without regret or apparent discomfort about what it said about him as a person in favor of chasing cheap thrills in the most stunningly tawdry settings. Even later, instead of settling down with his sort-of life partner, he prefers to maintain a solid shield of meaninglessness around himself.

The book succeeds on three main levels for me. First, as I mentioned, Banville can make language do things that few other writers can. It’s sharp and precise while being majestic and complicated. I had my dictionary app open half the time I was reading, and good for him for not being afraid of scaring me with arcane, delicious words. Secondly, even though I hated Victor and all of the rest of them, they were terribly convincing. Victor’s conceit, his feeling of having been betrayed by his friends, is palpable. Nevermind he’s a terrible person whose spent a lifetime betraying anyone and everyone just for the heck of it. He feel this wrong so fiercely that Banville makes you actually feel a little sorry for him in a pathetic sort of way. Lastly, I thought the ending was phenomenal. Banville wouldn’t give me characters with a soul, but he gave me a story with all the strings neatly, appropriately, and satisfyingly tied up. There was a very nice completeness to the story that is sometimes lacking in literary stuff where the writing and not the plotting take the main billing.

In summary: this was an interesting read that demonstrates some masterful writing. It was a little tough to get the swing of initially, though, and it definitely took a little work. Not a beach read, but worth doing if it’s your sort of thing. The three stars are mostly because it made me feel bad about being a human being, and not due to its technical merit.

1.5 stars. I’m only rounding up because it’s John Banville. Dense, ruminating prose that really isn’t very interesting. I could go back to figure out the geographic setting, to file it in my correct GR folder—but I really don’t care. This is by far the worst Banville I’ve ever read—and to my horror, I had selected it for a book group. If you told me that someone else wrote this and just said their name was John Banville, I’d believe you.

This novel is beautifully written, but I don’t feel as though I have much to say about it. It concerns the Cambridge spies, although it isn’t a spy novel. It is a novel of autobiographical soul-searching, in which Victor Maskell, an aging former spy, contemplates his past. I found this moving and powerful for the most part. I was particularly struck by this passage, a memory from his childhood:

’Not the birds, though, but the eggs, were what fascinated me. Pale blue or speckled white, they lay there in the scooped hollow of the nest, closed, inexplicable, packed with their own fullness. I felt that if I took one in my hand, which my father would never have permitted me to do, it would be too heavy for me to hold, like a piece of matter from a planet far more dense than this one. What was most striking about them was their difference. They were like themselves and nothing else. And in this extreme of selfness they rebuked all that stood round about; the dissolute world of bush and briar and riotous green leaf. They were the ultimate artefact.’

I found 'The Untouchable' to be a contemplative novel rather than a mystery one. Undoubtedly, the writing bewitched me.

So It took me a little over two weeks to read this book, and I feel that it should have taken much more. During each of my reading sessions - as I quickly realized that this is a book that deserves undivided attention - every time I sat down to read, once the outer world was efficiently filtered out, I sank into a sublime state of enjoyment, experiencing and savoring the superbly formulated thoughts and sentences sounding in my head in such a satisfying way. I should have probably proceeded at a much slower pace, I should have stopped and considered each and every one of them, but obviously I didn’t, because the sentences also drive the plot forward and I couldn’t resist wanting to move on with it. So I kept moving on at the cost of a constant sensation of losing something valuable.
It is not often that you come across a book that provides this kind of a positive frustration - to read, or not to read…
Now that I have reached the last page, I feel both satisfied and regretful and so happy that there are so many more books by John Banville that I have not yet read.

We aren’t even to the end of January yet, but I am quite sure this is the best book I will have read for the year.




+++++++++++++++++
A gift from Nancy, January 2022

This is a great novel based on a blending of the lives of several real-life British men, “The Cambridge Five,” who were spies for the Soviets in the 1930’s through the 1950’s. Our main character, given the name Victor Maskell, is a gay man who found out he was gay only after being married and having two kids. This was a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain and gay men had to resort to meetings in public restrooms. One character commits suicide after he was arrested in police sting.



Despite the threat of blackmail (by either side) that being gay presented, why does it seem that so many British spies were later revealed to be gay? Perhaps because of all their practice at dissimulation?

Given all this, it seems odd to say that first of all, I found the book loaded with humor. Victor is an academic, an art historian, and he knows King George VI personally from their meetings in libraries where King George spends his time researching architecture books. (Shades of Charles, Prince of Wales.) The Soviets are interested in Victor telling them things like the King’s opinions (not realizing those don’t matter); cocktail party gossip (inane) and -- this will induce hysteria in anyone who has spent time in academia -- “minutes from the Faculty Council meetings at Oxbridge.” Victor happily gives them all.

Why be a spy and betray your country? Victor’s reasons sound like all those that your teenage son came up with when he took the family car without permission. OK, he’s a Marxist, as many intellectuals were right after the Spanish Civil War when they were still flush with enthusiasm for the proletariat. But you’re betraying your country. “No I’m not, I’m from Northern Ireland.” But you’re supporting Stalin, a brutal butcher. “The theology of the Church transcends a bad Pope.” The Soviets are criminals. “They are fighting Hitler; don’t you want to defeat Hitler?” He claims most of what he gives the Soviets is stuff he takes out of the newspapers or will shortly be in the papers.

Here are a few quotes that I liked, illustrating the humor:

“Alastair heaved a happy sigh; gardeners have a particularly irritating way of sighing when they contemplate their handiwork.”

“…the crowd was so large it had overflowed from the gallery, and people were standing about the pavement in the evening sunshine, drinking white wine and sneering at passers-by, and producing that self-congratulatory low roar that is the natural collective voice of imbibers at the fount of art.”

“…it must be a mark of true grace to be able to sit in a deckchair without looking like a discommoded frog.”

“The fact is, the majority of us had no more than the sketchiest grasp of [Marxist] theory. We did not bother to read the texts; we had others do that for us.”

Much of the novel is structured as a memoir that Victor is dictating to a young woman interested in writing his biography. Being a spy involves constant suspicion, then and now, in retrospect. You can’t trust anybody. Even as you look back, you wonder “Was he a spy then?” “Did he know then that I was?” “Did the British know back then and were feeding him stuff to mislead the Soviets?”

There is quite a diverse cast of characters. The main character is a Northern Irish Protestant, interacting with Catholics, Jews and Russians. The title, “Untouchable,” comes from Victor’s ability to ingratiate himself with everyone – including the Royal Family, so much so that when his spying is revealed, he suffers no consequences because he even has the goods on them. Until the end, because there are always consequences.

A good read. I really enjoyed it.

Movie still from Bridge of Spies, blu-ray.com

"Недосегаемият" е от онези книги, които те поглъщат, не искаш да свършват и за които благородно завиждаш на онези, които са в началото на удоволствието. Книга, след която се страхуваш да започнеш друга, за да не налетиш на подобие на литература.
Трябва да се чете бавно, за да бъде по-дълга насладата от интересните, пълнокръвни образи, от езика и стила на писане, хумора и иронията, които Банвил ни поднася. Омесва банални, преексплоатирани теми като война, двойни агенти, английска аристокрация, нестандартни любови, алкохол и бохемски оргии в наръчник по майсторско писане.
Иглика Василева е очаквано перфектна в превода.

I last read Banville nearly a decade ago. The Sea and The Newton Letter didn’t impress me much. This one was better than both of those put together, I thought.

Banville has the ability to get deeply inside a character and that makes him the perfect author to tackle the tale of the double-agent Victor Maskell. Once inside though, he is quite appropriately only showing you what he wants you to see.

This is not a novel for those who like to have everything told them up front. This is a slow burn. You’ll need patience to make any sense of obscure references dropped here and there. Were life longer, I’d recommend a second reading.

But once things start to warm up just before about halfway, you find yourself drawn in, a party to secrets you cannot unknow. But no one is going to have to die because they know more than they should. Although Maskell reveals both state and personal secrets, it’s not hard to see that in reality neither his Russian contacts nor his readers find it of any real value.

Maskell is thus revealed to be a less than reliable narrator which is, after all, only as it should be. Banville has struck the tone of this so perfectly that you’re left wondering whether Maskell is simply a pitiful peddler of his own self-important illusions or whether you too have just been deceived.

For more reviews and the 1001 Books Spreadsheet, visit http://arukiyomi.com

DNF at 28%.

One does not wade into Banville territory expecting nonstop fistfights and explosions; his particular genius is in rendering times and places past. Maybe, in less pressed circumstances, I would have continued this one, but when I'd been reading it for days and discovered that I wasn't even a third of the way through, I decided to put this on hold. It wasn't really grabbing me.

I've got to really think before I do a review on this one and so will come back to it at a later time.