Victor Maskell is a 70+ man whose damning life secrets have just been exposed in the press. Maskell tries to come to grip with how he arrived at this juncture by flashing back to those key life events.
But, even after 80 pages, I could not find anything to hold on to. It feels like the ramblings of an old man who is losing his marbles (which is purposeful, I think). He jumps forward and backward in time, decades at a time and completely loses the thread he was following. It was still unclear what he had done, why it was so criminal and what the press knew.
As many other reviewers have said, Banville's writing is lovely and hearkens back to a time of true literary prose. But I was weighed down by the chore of having to look up so many unknown words and time/event references without the reward of understanding what Maskell was up to.
For now, I have decided that Banville is not for me.

This was recommended as "like Le Carré," which it is not. Yes, it's about the interiority of a spy in the highly ambiguous world of pre-Cold War and Cold War espionage. And it does explore the questions of loyalty (to whom?), deceit (whom?), the personal and professional. But it's quite different, both for the better (it's definitely not derivative) and for the worse.

Which is only to say: don't read this just because you like Le Carré, if you do.

The novel is loosely about the Cambridge spies, and the very, very unlikable first-person narrator is one of them, a composite of some of the real ones. If you know much about that historical milieu, or even the broader WWII British context, you'll recognize lots of people, despite change names (Alan Turing, for example), and wonder about some others. (I'm wondering if Querell is Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, or Le Carré, or bits and bobs of them all.)

The last ten or so percent of the novel rescued it for me, but I can't say anything else because it would be a total spoiler. I mean I can't talk about the plot or even what I take the novel to be about, ultimately.

But it was hard getting there, because the Victor is so deeply unlikeable. He's an art historian, and I have academic colleagues who are like him, so I would rather not have spent all these pages with him, even though in the end I was satisfied.

The other thing that kept me reading was Banville's beautiful prose. He knows many words.

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.

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).

An Irishman, Victor, has reached a pinnacle of his profession, working the the Royal Household of Windsor, a prime custodian and recorder of His Majesty's art collection. His friends are the cream of British schooling, prime young men on their way up, polished and groomed for service. Victor has secrets, as do many in his elite social class. He has married well, too, into a rich Jewish family, tied by strange attractions. He is also a homosexual, and even more to hide in this era, during the pre/post WWII years, he is also a Soviet spy. The tale echoes the life of the scandalous Anthony Blunt, double agent, art historian living what seemed a charmed life. Banville is a magnificent writer, and delights with prose and the razor edge tease of this story. A highly enjoyable book, a seesaw of emotions, rampant and raw with human folly.

A roman à clef of the Cambridge Five spy ring although in the book it reads more like a Cambridge Seven or Eight.
If you wanted to, you could work out all of the real life characters and events in relation to the novel. As far as I wanted to go into this it held up. I suspect there is more scuttlebutt and rumoured treason at the heart of the British establishment that is explored but quite frankly I did not want to go into it.

One has to consider why Banville would write such a book. By 1997 this saga was old news. There had been plays and teledramas at least 10 years before about this scandal. There is more going on in this book than a mere fictionalised retelling of old news.

The story is told through the eyes of Blunt/Maskell. By the end of the book although we realise that he is a brilliant aesthete , he is also dispicable. Not because he "betrayed" his county" but rather it is his vague but febrile anti-fascism and an innate overbearing arrogance that came from a life of privilege in the belly of the British establishment that makes him a deluded grotesque.

He is one with the prejudices of his class and era. The deplorable racism and in particular antisemitism is stomach churning. The shallowness of his relationships to any human is breathtaking. He walks into a room and immediately judges people, especially women, by what they are wearing and their curtains and couch. As a Gay man he enthusiastically pursues casual, gratuitous sex but he is also an appalling homophobe.

And he is protected. He is Untouchable. The establishment decides to make a deal with him and let him keep his position and honours as long as he goes along with polite interrogation. This all falls apart, when what is common knowledge in the spy agencies, becomes public.

I am no Julian Assange fanboy but it is notable the way a nobody, someone with no ties to the British Establishment was imprisoned for 7 years not for spying mind you, but for exposing embarrassing truths. Blunt was simply stripped of his title. It was all too embarrassing to admit that the cousin to the then Queen mother was a traitor.

A well written book about a repellant man that flourished in a rotten society. I cannot say I liked the book.

Racing through this it is so so brilliant. Incredible writing, the story of an expose spies life which is largely based around Anthony Blunt. There are some fold-in elements taken from Louis MacNeice's life which are fine but sort of sit a little oddly - that's my only complaint. Otherwise this is a huge treat - intelligent, waspishly funny, the snobbishness is played to the hilt. As the novel moves into its second half Maskell's lies about himself slip out of the narrative; I'm thinking about the section dealing with the death of his father & when he commits his brother to a home - chilling and heartbreaking as you realise that Maskell is detached and heartless and giving you the airbrushed version of himself. And the death of a lover. What's so brilliant is not just that his narration is unreliable in parts but that you see the double-deception within his own mind.

Superb.

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

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Няма съмнение, че чисто стилово романът си заслужава, ясно е и че с преводач като Иглика Василева текстът на български ще отразява достойно оригинала. Но самото действие за мен е твърде затлачено и нищослучващо, за да остави добър спомен – трудно е да си представя книга, която да се води шпионски роман (с всички клишета, които се подразбират), но да е толкова далеч от всичко, свързвано с този жанр. Главният герой на Банвил става шпионин от скука, а потъвайки в спомените си, той всячески се опитва да принизи и омаловажи действията си в полза на Съветския съюз, докарвайки вода от девет кладенеца, за да обясни идеологически това, което по-лесно би било обяснено чисто емоционално. Виктор Маскел може да бъде герой на който се сетите снобски роман, изпълнен с вечеринки, високопарни разговори за изкуство и политика, с изкуствени пози, комплименти, заучени вербални дуели и разочароващ секс, който да следва цялата тази досада.

Colibri Books​
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I first read John Banville several years ago when I picked up a mystery, Christine Falls, written under a pseudonym. By now, I remember little of that story, but I still remember that the writing was of close to literary quality rather than the somewhat less quality that is usual in the genre. I wasn't disappointed here in The Untouchable.

Several GR members have this shelved as spy/thriller, and, with the GR description, I was sort of expecting something in that vein. Well, it isn't. This is written in the first person as a sort of memoir, and it is true that Victor Maskell was a spy during WWII. Some 35 years later, he has been outed and disgraced.

My early thoughts were that this was an unreliable narrator, and then I changed my mind. Who would tell all of the worst sides of himself and still be called unreliable? And then I changed my mind again, and then yet again. Frankly, I'm still not sure, but I admit to being more than a little gullible, so perhaps you should not rely on me on this point.

Sometime during the early pages of reading, I asked my husband if you can like someone and not like what he does. I asked because - at least in the early pages - I liked Victor Maskell, but I could pretty much hate spying for the Russians. It turns out also that Victor discovers (in his 30s - even wonders what took him so long!) that he is queer - his terminology. I seem to have stumbled on several books with male homosexual protagonists. In this, the sex is often and promiscuous, and, while the reader is never in doubt, it isn't graphic.

This is well-written, interesting prose, and a compelling read. Not quite 5-star material, but a good, solid 4 stars. Now that I have finally revisited him, I fully intend to read more of John Banville. Some days I wonder why it takes me so long to get back to the really good stuff.

3.5

Self-reflection, as my dad recently commented to me, is a powerful character activator. This fictional memoir is 367 pages of reflection — Maskell looks back on his whole life. Somehow, this process yields absolutely nothing. It is highly self-conscious self-reflection, so excessive that it becomes about the act of reflection, rather than actually discovering something about yourself. The worst kind of postmodern: self-reflexive, instead of self-reflective. I was at first enthralled with the characters and the poetic prose, but by the time I finished, that veneer of style chipped away to reveal a noxious worldview and an empty artistic philosophy.

The book’s emptiness is best seen in its characters. In the whole cast, Victor himself is the only character who ever becomes three-dimensional. The flatness problem might have something to do with the type of person art critic Victor is: an aesthete, he sees others as impressions instead of people. This does not, however, get the author off the hook. The manner in which a first-person narrator describes other characters is only half of what forms that character. The other half is the action they take in the story. Alas, the characters in this book hardly take any.

Each character is composed with a habitual gesture, a linguistic quirk, and a connotative name. Does this really constitute a person? The best example is Querell, the delightfully (at first) disgusting stand-in for Graham Greene. Querell is a lecherous, Catholic, chain-smoking writer and intelligence officer of the Oxbridge boys’ club variety. Maskell writes: “I used to chuckle over newspaper photographs of him hobnobbing with the Pope, since I knew that the lips with which he kissed the papal ring had most likely been between some woman’s thighs a half-hour previously.” Querell is identified by his gestures: he always has one hand in his pocket, and smokes “without cease, apparently the same, everlasting cigarette, for I never seemed able to catch him in the act of lighting up.” Indeed Maskell — who is “never able to catch him in the act” — never understands this man in any depth.

This set of details is a vivid, even amusing set of lines to draw a caricature. And that’s a funny character for a set piece — an emblematic figure, like Lt. Kilgore’s fifteen minutes in Apocalypse Now. It’s a funny caricature, but it’s not a human being. Yet the whole book is made up of these figurants. Perhaps worst of them all is Maskell’s meaningless wife, “Baby,” who exists only as a mediator for his desire for her brother, and whose internal life he (characteristically) makes no effort to explore. Characters are never fleshed out beyond this amusing surface, and they never take any action in the plot, either.

The book isn’t plot-driven, and it isn’t character driven either; it’s purely aesthetic. It’s form without content. In an essay on the book, critic Allan Hepburn (Intrigue: Espionage and Culture) writes: “Maskell spies for Russia, not because he believes Stalinist Russia is morally or politically superior, but because the formalities of treachery beguile him. Form matters, not content.” The same could be said of the book: rife with technically beautiful descriptions of places and people, it lacks any content about human values or relationships.

I can recognize the value of Victor Maskell as a character, as a surfacey person who prizes form over content. I take issue with the way the book itself embraces this value system — in its inactive characters and its endless, formless self-reflection which, finally, yields no substance. I object to this surface-level human engagement. I object to the loaded dialogue whose meaning is never parsed. I object to the pessimistic aphorisms Maskell derives from each interaction. You can’t reduce people down like this, to a gesture, a hand in a pocket, and then run them through the mouse maze and point to their interactions as demonstrative of fundamental human truths. You didn’t create any real human beings, so your results have no human substance.

The Untouchable is a book that earned top ratings from many of my GR friends, but it irked me and left me untouched. It is a book that will appeal to readers of spy thrillers. Banville’s prose is polished, controlled, and penetrating. His use of vocabulary is opulent and rather intimidating. It is a pity that this story of a disgraced double agent held no personal interest for me.

The novel opened with 72-year-old Sir Victor Maskell writing his memoir, which he called ‘my last testament.’ He was giving a retrospective account of his life as a Soviet spy to a young woman who was writing his biography. In his reminiscence, we become privy to the motivations, impulses, and ambitions of this Irish Protestant Cambridge man who was a renowned art historian appointed as the Keeper of the King’s Pictures.

Along with his fellow Cambridge contemporaries, Maskell worked for British intelligence but was also recruited by Moscow to spy for Russia in the years leading up to World War II. Maskell was a complex character and the impetus for becoming a Russian spy equally complex. On the one hand, Maskell believed in an ideal linked to his one untainted love – Art. He was opposed to the bourgeois interpretation of art as luxury. He wanted art to be appreciated by the populace and rooted in ordinary life. On the other hand, he was moved by a reckless impulse for mind-numbing activity as a cure for boredom. A colorful group of friends he admired such as Nick Brevoort and Boy Bannister in the Intelligence Service, their late night parties and drinking, rendered his double existence a natural way of life.

This story was set in the 1940s through 1970s when homosexuality was a crime. A happily closeted homosexual, Maskell suffered from satyriasis and was always on the prowl, hanging around public lavatories. He was more in love with his brother-in-law than his wife. Raffish and disreputable (‘dangerously louche’) in his private life, Maskell was hard to like. By his own admission, he cared more about things than people. In recalling his past, he was made to confront his own shortcomings and regrets. The ending was sad but not unexpected.

Take my rating of this book with more than a pinch of salt. Banville deserves a more sympathetic reader.