Reading John Banville is always a revelation about the power of language. He can describe the subtleties of loneliness, alienation, but also of joy and even ecstasy, in such a striking way that the reader immediately feels that little ping of recognition, that sense that someone has looked deep into our mind (or heart) and understood our thoughts (or feelings). Granted, his protagonists are often cold-hearted, even reptilian characters. But we don't necessarily need to like the protagonist of a book in order to enjoy the book.

Of the John Banville books i've read, this is my favorite. That's probably because it is so unapologetically inspired by the life of Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies. Part of the fun was trying to identify the real-life counterparts of his characters. But the book imagines a more complex Victor Maskell than Anthony Blunt seems to have been. The book is written as a kind of memoir by the ageing Victor Maskell, shortly after his public unmasking. Lonely and ill, he welcomes the visits of a young female author who wants to write a book about him. But a lifetime of deception can not be entirely ignored, and so he amuses himself by toying with her. An unreliable man becomes an unreliable narrator.

I loved this book. I never mark up books, but I might have to break my own rule for this particular book and get out a marker and highlight all the wonderful passages.

My favorite John Banville book, and I haven't even tried the Booker-prize winning "The Sea" yet.

"How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life."

In 1979, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher revealed that Sir Anthony Blunt — art historian, a close associate of the royal family, and former MI-5 officer — had been a Russian double agent during WWII. He’d confessed back in 1963 and had been granted immunity, but this public exposure meant he lost his knighthood and his public standing. “The Untouchable” is therefore Banville's take on this sordid affair

In this novel Blunt's name has been changed to Victor Maskell and is basically a fictional memoir of Maskell's whole life written after his fall from grace.

I must admit that I find this a difficult book to review in part because I'm not sure how to characterize it. Banville is obviously a technically gifted writer but with the exception of Maskell himself all the other characters are as one dimensional as the paintings that he studies. Therefore, the book isn't really character driven. None of the other characters seem to take part in any of the action but are merely peripheral to it. Some of these characters seem to have been based on real people, Boy Bannister on Guy Burgess, Querell on the novelist Graham Greene, Sykes on Alan Turing but many are complete fabrications, so it isn't historical either. The fact that Maskell has already been unmasked as a spy means there's no mystery, no cunning deceptions, therefore it's not a spy novel either. He doesn't seem to have any real Marxist convictions but seems to simply find the idea of being a spy a bit of a laugh. So, what is it?

For me this is Banville's take on the class system at the time with its gentlemen spies. Maskell doesn't seem to have any real Marxist convictions but seems to simply find the idea of being a spy a bit of a laugh and the value of any of his revelations to the Russians seem to be questionable at best. Maskell is from Ireland so when his English cohorts need a scapegoat to throw to the wolves, he is the one that is chosen.

Despite my reservations about this novel, I found this a bit of a slow burner that was strangely compelling and I rather enjoyed,

Like many of Banville's narrators, Victor Maskell, the eponymous "untouchable", is an art historian. The details surrounding Maskell's life roughly correspond to a conflation of Anthony Blunt (1907-83), who was exposed in 1979 as a former Soviet spy, and the Belfast-born poet, Louis MacNeice (1907-63). The form of the novel is a fictionalised memoir, written out by Maskell in the last year of his life, detailing his rise from Cambridge undergrad in the early '30s to member of the Royal Household as Surveyor of the King's Pictures and leading figure in British art history (Indeed, I have one of Blunt’s books, Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration, gracing my shelves, one of the few remaining from my grad school days.)

This is Banville's longest novel, and in a way, the most focused (in terms of plot), deriving as it does from historical figures and incidents. But the roman à clef mode simples serves as an armature upon which Banville constructs diverse meditations on art, friendship, loyalty, authenticity, patriotism, academia, family and so many of the other topics which defined and defied the tumultuous twentieth century.

And as always, Banville prose is luminous and delightful, poetically effervescent: sticking one's nose in a Banville book the bubbles practically tickle it. Though I was slightly shocked by how much he appropriated from Blunt's life, the book is not of course about the "facts"—be they fictional "facts" or factual "facts"—it's about how they are presented and developed. The facts surrounding a life do not make a character, particularly a literary character. Nor does it put the type of ruminations into the head of a narrator as Banville does. That takes a master craftsman, an artist. A poet.

"Metamorphosis is a painful process" for Victor, an art expert and ambitious man who turns to the life of a spy. In the end, his ambitions ruin him and his friends betray him. His journey of exploration begins late: when he has been ousted in public, deserted, and he tries to make sense of his life through his memoirs:

n  

I imagine the exquisite agony of the caterpillar turning itself into a butterfly, pushing out eye-stalks, pounding its fat-cells into iridescent wing-dust, at last cracking the mother-of-pearl sheath and staggering upright on sticky, hair's-breadth legs, drunken, gasping, dazed by the light.

n

What makes a person want to live a disguised life that the truth is elusive even to himself? This seems to be the exploration for both character and reader, a question never really answered and one that cannot be fully explained. What is both appealing and shocking is to see Victor, at one stage of his life, try to find his truth, even at the detriment of those he love. This is a grim story about betrayal and trust, booze and love, sexuality and personal evolution, and of course, spies.

The older Victor looks retrospectively at his life with remarkable calm and wisdom for someone who is incredibly turmoiled and at a cross-road; his present-tense narration is one I wanted to follow, one I wish had more grounding in the narrative:

n  

Great hot waves of remembrance wash through me, bringing images and sensations I would have thought I had entirely forgotten or successfully extirpated, yet so sharp and vivid are they that I falter in my tracks with an inward gasp, assailed by a sort of rapturous sorrow.

n

This has been a surprising fourth John Banville read for me. The novel is layered in both narrative perspective and style that sometimes the switch in styles can be offsetting, as if one is being thrown into another book. Although it explored similar nuances of identity, self, and rumination (like most of his novels), this one had more of an austere texture. So far Shroud has been my favorite.

The most useful thing any one reading this book can do is to abandon anything they know about the Cambridge spies, Anthony Blunt, any idea of this as fictionalised truth or being based on true events or people. This is a novel, Bainville is not using fiction to write history or biography and certainly not a Roman a clef. He is writing a novel about treachery, betrayal, honest, truth, love - life the universe and everything - it is a story, to get bogged down in source material is like reading War and Peace and worrying about the accuracy of Tolstoy's Napoleon or Tsar Alexander I or even worse searching out the models for his characters and fussing about how accurate representation. If you want to read about the Cambridge spies read of the numerous journalistic efforts they have inspired. Banville's are so much more then any real life supposed model.

Banville is a superb but challenging writer I have struggled with some of his novels. This one was, I hate to say easy going because that would be untruthful or at least limiting. It is wonderfully readable and that is why limiting it to real life models is such a betrayal of the books rich intelligence. This book may help understand the Cambridge spies - they will not provide anything to the enjoyment or understanding of this novel. It is brilliant, sharp, clever and utterly wonderful.

Едната звездичка минус не е заради автора, а заради мен. Всеки път навлизам мудно в прозата на Банвил, когото иначе много обичам. Обикновено влизам в ритъма на стила му след 50-60 страници, но този път не можах да се настроя на тази вълна и чак като стигнах до последните страници, ми просветна колко е хубава книгата и ми се прииска да се върна от началото.

Докато пишех ревюто за "Аз чета", попаднах на някои интересни материали, които ми се искаше да бях прочела предварително. Особено препоръчвам този, в койтосамият писател разказва как е възникнала идеята на романа.

Where to start...I love Banville's writing. I don't know much about spies or WWII but understanding that part of it didn't seem terribly important to me. It's his prose. Yes. Lots of words to look up if you need to but context worked fine for me. I dog-eared many pages and underlined favorite descriptions throughout...especially those of people. A favorite:
"Without warning the door flew open and Mrs. Brevoort stood there in her Sarah Bernhardt pose, a hand on the knob and her head thrown back, her bared embonpoint pallidy aheave....She was wearing a tasseled shawl affair and a voluminous velvet dress the color of old blood, and both arms were busy almost to the elbows with fine gold bangles, like a set of springs which suggested the circus ring more than the seraglio...She advanced, moving as always as if mounted on a hidden trolley, and grasped me by the shoulders and kissed me dramatically on both cheeks then thrust me from her and held me at arm's length and gazed at me for a long moment with an expression of tragic weight, slowly nodding her great head."
and on p 343 about art (his obsession with Poussin a key factor)
referring to critics "...who spent their energies searching for the meaning of his work..The fact, of course, is that there is no meaning. Significance, yes; affects; authority, mystery - magic, if you wish - but no meaning. The figures...are not pointing to some fatuous parable about mortality and the soul and salvation; they simple are. Their meaning is that they are there. This is the fundamental fact of artistic creation, the putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing. "
So much to think about in his writing.

Well, I have finally read a Banville novel, and it did not disappoint. The complexity of the language was exquisite, his philosophical musing on love, relationships, friendship, social structure and the need for Stoicism in our lives was interesting, to say the least.
He spent the whole novel referencing his beloved "Death of Seneca" by Poussin, I wasn't sure if this was simply a literary device to keep referencing stoicism, since Seneca was one of the great stoic philosophers, but Banville skillfully managed to turn a simple tale of espionage into a literary masterpiece.
I did find some of the descriptive language tiresome, simply because, at times there was just too much of it (for my liking anyway), I am sure many people would enjoy languishing these parts, but I found that they distracted me from the narrative. Still a very beautiful piece of writing.

Rereading my old review of this (after reading the novel for a second time), I'm a bit embarrassed. I seemed to badly miss some things and the harping on the similarities to Nabokov's prose style is grossly inaccurate. While he shares N's linguistic verve and love of the little details, Banville's style is very much his own. However, I stand by my assertion that this is his best novel. It's involving, funny, and even occasionally moving (and it goes without saying that the prose is flawless). Let's bump this one up to five stars.

For posterity, my old review:

Probably his best book. The prose isn't as ostentatiously ornate as in a lot of his other work. Not that there's anything wrong with ornate prose, but in Banville's case it can get so Nabokovian that it almost feels like plagiarism. Here he reins it in a bit, only without losing any of the best elements of his more ornate stuff. It's still full of perfectly chosen details and words. Extremely vivid. I feel like I use that word in almost all of my complimentary reviews, but that's because vividness is something I value really highly, and it's something Banville excels at. A lot of the time I would find myself with that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the one you get not because of any one aspect, but because the whole thing is Really Good. Never quite Great, but always Really Good.

The content itself is also very absorbing. Our Protagonist is well rendered and I loved watching his life unfold, no matter how badly it went. I wish he had put a little of that effort into sketching some of the other characters (though a disinterest in others does fit into the narcissism of the narrator, so who knows? Maybe it was intentional). For example, I thought Qurell was extremely undeveloped given his importance to the plot. I also felt like the device of the woman wanting to write a book about him that kicks off the novel didn't really serve much of a purpose. But minor complaints aside, this is a really good novel and almost a masterpiece.

Loved the writing which is absolutely brilliant – clever, luscious and descriptive - and the main reason I persevered; the plot itself was certainly complex and intriguing as a spy story should be but I was underwhelmed by the main character.

Banville has taken Anthony Blunt, one of the five Cambridge spies, as a model for his narrator Victor Maskell, who, after being outed in the final years of his life, is talking to a young biographer while writing a kind of memoir of his own.
But as a character he doesn’t come alive the way Banville’s other male anti-heroes have for me. (I’m thinking of Freddie in The Book of Evidence and Max in The Sea.) Maskell is retiring, passive and frankly unconvincing and unimpressive both as a human and a spy. Perhaps that was supposed to be his cover – he was, like Blunt, an art historian and was appointed Keeper of the King’s Paintings – but Banville introduced so many variations from Blunt’s real life that this portrait wasn’t close to being a fictionalized biography.

Like Blunt, Maskell was queer, but Banville gave him a fictional Irish background, as well as a wife and two children that he was singularly uninvolved with. And many other real characters like Burgess and McLean make fictional cameo appearances, but to be honest I wasn’t really motivated to search for the parallels between the real and fictional lives.
Another problem is that Maskell’s motivation for spying is obscure and certainly not driven by political passion. At one point he says “I did not spy for the Russians, I spied for Europe. A much broader church.” But unfortunately, there’s no evidence in the narrative that he did that or that he had any close connection with Europe.

I was motivated to keep going with The Untouchable by another reviewer who said it was slow to start but improved with the wartime years. That was true, those years actually forming the bulk of the plot and I was surprised to find, with only two of 16 chapters to go, that it had got no further than the 1950s. At the end, the story rather petered out in 1979 when he was publicly outed, just as Blunt was, by the then Prime Minister.

Finally, there was an off-putting thread of antisemitism; I hope it was his creation talking, but that wasn’t obvious. And the same went for the strong misogynistic streak throughout – again something that I had encountered in his other antiheroes. All in all, not my best read this year, but 3.5 stars.

En los años 30, un pequeño grupo de estudiantes de Cambridge, convencidos socialistas, establecieron una célula que pasaba información a la Unión Soviética. Pertenecientes a la élite intelectual y social, llegaron a ocupar cargos cercanos a las esferas del poder y no fueron descubiertos hasta bien entrados los años 60.

Los nombres están cambiados, pero esta novela reconstruye los hechos a partir de la trayectoria vital de uno de ellos, Víctor Maskell – en la realidad Anthony Blunt – quizá el personaje más especial del grupo. Estudioso de Arte, llegó a ser conservador de la pinacoteca real y durante años tuvo acceso, no sólo a la familia real, sino a altos cargos de la cultura y el poder.

La novela empieza en los años 70 con el anuncio público de su traición, que conmocionó al país, y vemos cómo el ya anciano personaje caído en desgracia empieza a dictar sus memorias que abarcan desde su época universitaria, pasando por la guerra en España, la guerra mundial y la consolidación posterior de la guerra fría.

Ciertamente no es una novela de espías al uso, el lector que busque acción o aventura se encontrará en cambio con largas reflexiones y monólogos interiores que nos retratan plenamente a una persona llena de conflictos y contradicciones en una época turbulenta.

La homosexualidad encubierta del protagonista y de otros miembros del grupo aparece como otro factor que los desarraiga de una sociedad donde saben que no son aceptados, una sociedad que ellos aspiran a cambiar. ¿Qué es lo que te lleva a traicionar a tu país? Creo que ésta es la pregunta que John Banville intenta contestar a través de un estudio minucioso de una de las figuras más interesantes del siglo XX.

El estilo de John Banville es cuidado, denso, de gran calidad literaria pero la lectura requiere esfuerzo y a veces los saltos temporales pueden desorientar, así como algunos temas que quedan insinuados más que descritos - con una narración más abstracta que convencional.

En conjunto, una buena novela sobre un tema que retrata admirablemente las tensiones ideológicas del pasado siglo.

Victor Maskell is quite the unreliable narrator: he was a spy for the Soviet Union who moves among the royal family of the UK, a closeted homosexual who enjoys the transgressive thrill of not only acting against established morality but also breaking the law in his quest for sex partners, the son of an Anglo-Irish bishop with dual nationality. Maskell is Anthony Blount, the "Fourth Man" among the Cambridge spies, filtered through the author's imagination.

Maskell has just been outed by Margaret Thatcher and is preparing himself for total social isolation. He tells his story to Serena Vandeleur, a young woman who wishes to write his biography. "Why did you do it?" is her first question. Maskell provides several answers, none definitive and the question becomes where the truth might lie.