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.

Unfortunately I didn’t finish it. I ran out of interest in it

UPDATE 8/22/22 ... I have stopped reading this book again (for the last time) ... the story is impenetrable and even Banville's sparkling writing can't overcome the lack of a plot

***

It seems like I have been reading this forever. The story is confusing, but the writing is glorious. Reading Banville is like reading a text book for writers. But you have to read slowly, savoring the word choices and images. It's best to read on kindle, with dictionary at hand.

What forces a person to betray one’s country? Where do all the spies come from? What makes them ticking?

Now, such words – spy, agent, espionage, etc. – have always given me trouble. They conjure in my mind images of low taverns and cobbled laneways at night with skulking figures in doublet and hose and the flash of poniards. I could never think of myself as a part of that dashing, subfusc world.

Some true espionage stories are much stranger than fiction, especially when the tale is told by such master as John Banville.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

To achieve our own ideals we are ready to betray any ideals of others.

An auspicious introduction for me, to this very intelligent author. In this very well crafted novel the author takes us through a fictional account of the life of a Cambridge spy during the time around World War II. The protagonist leads a double life in almost every sense of the meaning, and finds thrills in his deception, the same way he finds comfort in art, which is his another of his loves. His identity is built on lies, and those lies are both his security, and potentially his undoing. Now for a book about espionage, fraught with the potential of danger, and taking place during a bloody war, there really is not a lot of action. However, this book does not need gratuitous action scenes to compel the reader to keep flipping pages; the story itself, filled with suspense and wit, is more than sufficient to keep one compelled and eagerly reading on.

جون بانڤل اكتشاف السنة و وجب علي الآن التهام جميع أعماله المترجمة!

Ambitious saga chronicling the disaffected, alienated generation coming of age in the WWI thirties (upper-class, well-educated, with no 'anchor') and their often-successful wooing by already-converted dons in their respective ivied universities such as Cambridge, Eton, Oxford. LeCarre' has already covered this ground somewhat, but this book is a 'life' of such a young man, played into his seventies and brutally illustrating the cost/benefits balance sheet of an existence predicated upon duplicity--to others and to oneself.
I am an easy mark for the the intelligence that is evident behind the writing, the slow (for the most part) pacing, the exquisite character development and the attention to detail. I could do without the graphic descriptions of his conversion, the character might use the term 'awakening,' to his homosexuality, and would make this same criticism of Murakami in 'Norwegian Wood', but maybe it is the expectation of the times.
Not a book for everyone, certainly not the suspense/thriller crowd. More a book, as I envision it, to be enjoyed while safely ensconced in a comfortable recliner with a cup of tea at hand, maybe an old dog at your feet, and the the steady drip of a gray Spring evening outside your window. (Forgot the throw rug across your legs.)
If this review doesn't send you screaming for the exits, then you may be an appreciative audience--and this book deserves an appreciative audience.

Victor Maskell spies for Communist Russia. He is also an expert on Poussin and custodian of the Royal Art Collection, hobnobbing with royalty. His public establishment persona, and his two secret lives - as a spy and a homosexual are beautifully constructed by Banville in this roman a clef about Sir Antony Blunt. The novel follows his public outing, and his deal for immunity from prosecution for a full confession of his activities. All of which sounds fairly dull territory, but it is constantly enlivened by Banville's prose, the waspish humour which he gifts to his lead character and personally I find that whole era of so many intellectuals being seduced by Russia, until the scales fall from their eyes when they find out what Uncle Joe Stalin was really like, and their degrees of squirming, self-justifying backsliding utterly fascinating. Much of this novel is based on fact. Much of it is unbelievable.

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.

Más allá de tratar temas como el espionaje, Segunda Guerra Mundial, guerra fría, homosexualidad, arte, lealtades y traiciones, más allá de todo eso, que de por sí ya es mucho, este libro esquematiza una introspección psicológica profunda de la vida de Víctor Maskell, mediante una prosa exquisita y una precisión que ya nos tiene acostumbrado Banville.

La forma en que aborda Banville las descripciones nada redundantes de estos temas, permite que navegues por los años 30 durante la tensión bélica, desarrollando en este contexto las tramas y situaciones con un contrapeso anti climático, en el que como lector te sientes incómodo y agradecido por ello. Asimismo, la discontinuidad y saltos en el tiempo permite que presencies los cambios en los ideales de Maskell.

Las reflexiones presentadas en el libro son memorables, cuestionando absolutamente todo lo ya conocido y aceptado. Este libro trata sobre la vida en sí misma y nos hace dar cuenta que las cosas en las que creíamos cuando éramos jóvenes, se desvanece conforme pasa el tiempo, agotando incluso nuestras ansias de venganza.

Доста скучна книга. Нещо средно между учебник по История на изкуството и документалистика.
В “ Търсенето на Немо” има повече интрига и екшън.
Разбива представата за шпионажът и го представя като доста скучно предаване на клюки.

Confession: I've never read John Banville, and I know little if anything about Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge spies. Starting from that blank canvas I came away from this novel highly entertained, a little confused and very hungry for more Banville. The writing is superb. Banville paints his hero as a self-pitying apologist, sardonic, sarcastic, and a little pathetic. I've been looking for fiction set in WWII England and to that extent this novel doesn't exactly fit the bill. Mostly I think because Banville assumes his readership is familiar with the saga of the Cambridge spies, and because he turns the trope of the MI5 upperclass nob on its head. In fact the character Victor is so astonishingly and beautifully specific that I completely forgot my expectations surrounding the Blitz, hardships, stiff upper lips, bloodsweatandtears.

Victor is that rare combination of mathematician, art restorer and connoisseur, double agent and homosexual. Recently discovered and disgraced by Margaret Thatcher, he is rehashing his history to a biographer. What we learn is that Victor's allegiance to Russia is about as authentic as the Poussin masterpiece that is his prized possession. He is more stoic than communist, more insecure than he lets on, and, looking back on his life and career, more than a little flummoxed about what it all meant. And by all I mean betrayal, secrecy, covetousness, greed--basically all the deadly sins. A man with voracious appetites gets chewed up and unceremoniously disgorged up by the people and government he is meant to hold dear. Why?

"I have never been a gambler," he confesses, "but I can understand how it must feel when at the end of its counter-clockwise run the little wooden ball, making a rattle that is distractingly reminiscent of the nursery, jumps tantalisingly in and out of the slots of the roulette wheel, first the red and then the black and then the red again, with everything hanging on it its whim, money, the wife's pearl necklace, the children's education, the deed to the chateau in the hills, not to mention that little pied-a-terre behind the tabac on the sea front that no one is supposed to know about. The suspense, the anguish of it, the almost sexual expectancy--now? Is it going to be now? . . . And all the time that fevered, horror-stricken sense of everything being about to change, completely, unrecognisably, for ever. That is what it is to be truly, horribly, jubilantly alive, in the magnesium glare of intensest terror."

Wow.