3.5/5 Estrellas.
Ejercicio literario impresionante. Largo y en determinados momentos tedioso monólogo, que hace que engancharse a la lectura requiera una considerable dosis de motivación.

El libro se plantea como las memorias de uno de los 5 topos que la Unión Soviética reclutó entre los Universitarios de la Universidad de Cambridge durante los años 30, Antonhy Blunt, aunque en el libro aparece con otro nombre. Estos 5 hombres, pertenecientes a las élites británicas, se infiltraron durante años en los servicios secretos, el Foreing Office e instituciones próximas a la Corona, de tal forma que su desenmascaramiento o deserción durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX, convulsionaron hasta sus cimientos a la sociedad británica.

Espectacular ejercicio introspectivo del personaje, desde sus raíces en la clase media-alta de provincias (Belfast), sus estudios en Cambridge, sus coqueteos con los movimientos antifascistas que lo llevan a ser captado por los Servicios secretos soviéticos, su participación en la Segunda Guerra Mundial como agente de los servicios secretos británicos, el doble juego entre unos y otros que nos envuelve, que nos confunde durante todo el libro, que ni él mismo consigue explicarse.

Las múltiples facetas del personaje se entrecruzan durante toda la novela llevándonos a una vorágine que desemboca en su caída en desgracia, cuando se hace público su papel de agente infiltrado al servicio de la URSS: su faceta de vividor, padre de familia y luego homosexual tardío, de experto en arte, de profesor, marxista.........
¿Espía doble manipulador o pobre hombre manipulado por otros para constituir la pantalla tras la que se ocultan los personajes verdaderamente importantes de la trama?
¿Porqué personajes cultos y muy inteligentes, se pusieron al servicio de la Unión Soviética, cuando de sobra sabían la realidad que allí se cocía? ¿Odio al fascismo encarnado por Hitler, odio al capitalismo americano, odio al clasismo inglés en el que ellos mismos estaban cómodamente instalados, idealismo socialista, ganas de aventuras, inconsciencia? Estas y muchas otras incógnitas son planteadas por el personaje, ninguna de ellas satisfactoriamente resuelta, quizá porque no tienen explicación. Interrogantes interesantes también para el lector, que puesto en la piel del personaje, ya acabado y condenado, se plantea qué hubiera hecho él en muchas de estas situaciones.

No se trata de una lectura fácil, pero es recomendable para sumergirnos en uno de los aspectos más importantes de la Guerra Fría: El juego de espías entre las potencias occidentales y el bloque del este.

I didn't know anything about the real-life events behind this - I'm a little curious but not at all concerned how much of it was fact and how much fiction - I was content simply to enjoy it as a stand-alone work, and enjoy it I did.
All the elements were promising - a world-weary English(ish)man for a main character, a WWII backdrop, a healthy dollop of debauched high society, and a bit of a spy mystery driving the narrative - but it would all have been for nothing without the right delivery, and boy does Banville deliver.
OK, so his prose, characters and settings don't quite have Mr Graham Greene's unique touch of aching genius, nor does his dialogue quite have Mr Joseph Conrad's spark, but I place The Untouchable almost in that same league - at a minimum these things are all mahogany-solid throughout, and quite often the prose quavered on the brink of being beautiful. For a 400-page spy novel, that was a very welcome surprise.
I'm told The Sea is a bit meh, but on the strength of what I've just read, I'll be returning to Mr Banville in the not-too-distant future...

Favourite quote:

Is there anything more dispiriting than an empty, hand-warmed, sticky gin glass?

A well told, gently paced, character based, spy novel about Irishman, Victor Maskell, an art historian and lecturer who at the start of World War II undertakes to work as a spy for Russia. Victor through his Cambridge connections works for British Army Intelligence. Victor is educated at Cambridge, England and lives in London for the majority of his life. Victor’s story is told in the first person. Victor, now 71 years old, is writing his memoir, mainly about the friends he met at University, his marriage, his homosexual activities that began when he was in his 30s, his art historian work and his spying activities.

It reads as a very British novel providing good descriptions of life in London during World War II. Victor’s character is partly based on the British Cambridge spy and art historian, Anthony Blunt.

Banville’s writing style is very graceful and readers who have enjoyed his other novels like The Sea and The Book of Evidence should find this novel a very satisfying reading experience.

Here are some lines from the novel that I particularly liked:
‘How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.’
‘I shall strip away layer after layer of grime - the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling - until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.’

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.

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 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.

One of the best books I have read in quite some time, ‘The Untouchables’ demonstrates why Banville is a top modern novelist. The plot differs from your standard best-selling spy book in that it seems inconsequential. There is no great tension on what secrets he will uncover or whether he will be caught or shot. There are no car chases and guns are more rumor than reality. Even though the time period includes the London bombing by the Nazis, the fall out is not what you’d expect. In this case, the bombing serves as the narrator’s entry into homosexuality, two men attacking each other while the building shakes. The end of time aura creates a type of liberation where the characters lean forward into the wind of life as though they must rush to their destination if they are ever to make it. People do not drink alcohol, they guzzle it. They behave as though social standards have been put on hold, and because they act that way, they have been.

It is the interior life of this narrator that makes the story enthralling. Banville’s understanding of human emotion and all its fits and starts was immersive. Just one example:

How eerie they are, those silences that fall between intimates, making them strangers to each other, and themselves. At such moments anything might happen. I might have stood up, slowly, without a word, as the sleepwalker stands up, and gone out of that room, out of that life, never to return, and it seemed as if it would have been all right, that no one would have noticed, or cared. But I did not get up, I did not leave, and we sat for a long while, curiously at rest with ourselves and each other, cocooned inside that membrane of silence . . .

I recorded this passage because it shows the detail and aliveness that the author brings, even to silence. The potential, the intrigue, the tension of this spy novel hangs on these type of passages. He is a master of description. It was both inspiring and disheartening to read his prose because every page contained a passage where I couldn’t help but be awed by his tremendous attention to detail and creativity with which he described the setting, the characters, and their thoughts. As much as I write, I can’t imagine achieving at this level, but as a reader, it was a gift to experience.

Who knew that semen tastes like sawdust and fish? According to the narrator, it does. Or at least one of the many individuals whom he conquers has such a flavor.

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.

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.

“Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy’s world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching on to things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriadness that the world takes on, is both the attraction and the terror of being a spy.” – John Banville, The Untouchable

Seventy-two-year-old protagonist Victor Markell has been exposed as a spy and publicly disgraced. He tells his story to a woman who wants to write his biography. Markell was born in Northern Ireland, son a bishop, but lived in England much of his adult life. Most of the story takes place in WWII in the UK, and describes Victor’s life, including marriage and children, lifestyle once he determines he is gay, interest in art, journey to the Soviet Union, and passing of information to Soviet agents. Victor tells his life story in first person in the style of a fictional memoir.

If you are looking for a spy thriller, this is not it. This is a slowly developing character study of a not very likeable person and his unpleasant friends. It is filled with lots of alcohol consumption and sexual liaisons. Victor is vain and self-absorbed. He ignores his family and provides only the flimsiest rationale for his involvement in espionage.

The prose is the highlight of this book. Banville writes beautifully. For example, “How cunningly the grieving heart seeks comfort for itself, conjuring up the softest of sorrows, the most sweetly piercing recollections, in which it is always summer, replete with birdsong and the impossible radiance of a transfigured past. I leaned on a rock and gently wept, and saw myself, leaning, weeping, and was at once gratified and ashamed.”

The story could have been more fully developed and the first half is more compelling than the second. The plotline revolves around figuring out who betrayed Victor to the authorities, but the plot is secondary to the characterization and the writing. This is the second of Banville’s books I have read. While this one is worth reading, I much prefer, and highly recommend, The Sea.

The novel is the memoir of Victor Maskell, scion of the estate of Carrickdrum in Northern Ireland, an Art Historian, expert on Poussin; and a spy for the USSR since his time at Cambridge in the 1930s. His journal is written down as if for Miss Serena Vandeleur, a journalist who comes to him after his exposure to the press long, long after the Security Services had become aware of his treacherous activities. He thus bears a more than superficial resemblance to Anthony Blunt but doubtless the parallels are not entirely exact.

The attention here is incidental but Banville has previously had painting and painters as a subject - as in The Sea, Athena, The Book of Evidence and Ghosts. The focus here (obviously drawn from Blunt's non-espionage career) is Poussin, specifically Maskell's prized possession, The Death of Seneca, but, in keeping with the book's theme of duplicity and subterfuge, there is a suggestion that the work is not genuine, or at least not by Poussin.

The novel is wonderfully written. Each sentence is in perfect balance; a work of art in itself, the text studded with unusual observations, “The silence that fell, or rather rose – for silence rises, surely?” or comments, “He was genuinely curious about people – the sure mark of the second-rate novelist,” and the occasional barb, “Trying for the common touch .. and failing ridiculously.” The literary allusions include a reference to Odysseus’s men drinking sea-dark wine.

There are subtle inferences to the insights of a spy, “He made the mistake of thinking that the way to be convincing is to put on a false front,” and the regrets of the trade, “It is odd, how the small dishonesties are the ones that snag in the silk of the mind,” and later, “It is the minor treacheries that weigh most heavily on the heart.” On encountering a tramp with a dog inside his coat Maskell tells us, "(I was) ashamed that I felt more sorrow for the dog than I did for the man. What a thing it is, the human heart."

Maskell claims almost from the outset to have been disenchanted with the USSR, a feeling to which his visit there in the 30s only contributed, and that his controllers consistently misunderstood England (as he puts it.) “Much of my time and energy .. was spent trying to teach Moscow to distinguish between form and content in English life.” Despite his betrayals he says, “I was nothing less than an old-fashioned patriot.” In mitigation he asks, “who could have remained inactive in this ferocious century?” and avers, "We should have had no mercy, no qualms. We would have brought down the whole world."

He receives the Order of the Red Banner (his medal glimpsed only once by him before being hidden away by his handler) for contributing to the Soviet victory at Kursk by transferring details, relayed from Bletchley, of a new German tank design. How much such information really affected that battle is of course debatable.

Some of the dialogue is representative of the times in which the book is set, “Mind if I turn off this nigger racket?” and "'What's the matter with the dago, sir?'" being cases in point.

One of Maskell’s defining features is his homosexuality (though he came to it late, after marriage to one of his University friends.) Of a lover of his he tells us, "Patrick had all the best qualities of a wife, and was blessedly lacking in two of the worst: he was neither female, nor fertile,” and further comments “(I ask myself..... if women fully realise how deeply, viscerally, sorrowfully, men hate them.)" He is of the opinion that in the fifties "to be queer was very bliss.... the last great age of queerdom." The "young hotheads" of the narrator's present day, "do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear."

Part of his early protection from wider exposure was that he was sent by the King to Bavaria after the war to retrieve some potentially compromising papers. A distant relation, he refers sardonically to the Queen as Mrs W.

He has a jaundiced view of humanity and at one point he describes the American system as “itself, so demanding, so merciless, undeluded as to the fundamental murderousness and venality of humankind and at the same time grimly, unflaggingly optimistic.”

His observation about his work on Poussin, that he was trying "to pull together into a unity all the disparate strands of character and inspiration and achievement that make up this singular being," might be a description of the novel itself. In The Untouchable Banville has laid out for us a life in just such terms.

It is all a fascinating examination of the existence of a spy. As he ponders who it was who unmasked him - possibly twice - Maskell begins to question everything about his life but asides such as, "My memory is not as good as it's supposed to be. I may have misrecalled everything, got all the details wrong," and, "As to this - what? this memoir? this fictional memoir?" point to the unreliability of his account.

Brilliant stuff.

(Another fabulous novel — I am fast becoming a huge admirer of Banville. If you want a laugh, look up his Wikipedia entry…, sly bastard!)

Review: this is a fascinating, almost perfectly constructed novel of the inner life of a lightly fictionalized Anthony Blunt. Impressive in all aspects. This, and the Sea, are among the best books I have read in the past year or two — if not more.

Banville has a fierce and sardonic eye, and his portrait of Blunt (written in the unreliable first person) becomes increasingly complex and disturbing as the novel proceeds. His deep knowledge of art and history are perfectly suited to his topic.

Highly, highly recommended!