Vita interiore di un apostolo
L'incontro con questo libro è stato eccellente, perchè è scritto in modo brillante e il protagonista è un critico d'arte inglese: l'arte mi affascina e il Regno Unito anche, per quello che ho visto.
Procedendo nella lettura, l'ho trovato un po' incredibile: il protagonista è uno studente di Cambridge, colto, indeciso se dedicarsi alla matematica o all'arte, sceglie l'arte. Affascinante, imparentato con la regina madre, frequenta clubs esclusivi e la società degli Apostoli, un ristretto gruppo di studenti di Cambridge; ma non si prende troppo sul serio, conduce una vita bohemienne in una specie di comune. Predilige Poussin, pittore secentesco di Arcadie non del tutto inconsapevoli della loro transitorietà (Et in Arcadia ego, ricorda il teschio facendo capolino da sotto le frasche): come si fa a prediligere Poussin, mi chiedo, con tutti i pittori che hanno dipinto negli ultimi 900 anni. All'inizio della seconda guerra mondiale, mancandogli di pepe la vita, diventa una spia sovietica: per avere qualcosa di interessante da dire, prende parte al progetto Enigma di decriptazione dei messaggi nazisti in codice. Taccio per non spoilerare della vita relazionale e sentimentale. La vita gli dà qualche dispiacere e l'affoga nel gin, preferibilmente.
Insomma, mi pareva il tutto un po' troppo inverosimile, per quanto scritto benissimo, con tutti i chiaroscuri che ci si aspetta da un critico d'arte e da un celebre scrittore come Banville. Inoltre, da un inglese elegante che torna inorridito da un viaggio in Russia, ci si chiede perchè mai dovrebbe fare la spia sovietica.
Dopo aver chiuso il libro, ho letto la quarta di copertina e ho appreso che il protagonista Victor è quasi esattamente Anthony Blunt, protagonista di uno dei più grandi scandali del dopoguerra: critico d'arte che aveva catalogato la collezione privata di Elisabetta II, imparentato con la famiglia reale, spia sovietica e tutto il resto. Alla mia domanda risponde brillantemente Wikipedia: quel gruppo di giovani intellettuali, gli Apostoli, riteneva la politica imperialista e conservatrice del Regno Unito responsabile della povertà della classe operaia e della strage di giovani della prima guerra mondiale (the flower of England face down in the mud) e aveva provato a rimediare, diventando filo-sovietico.
Non temete lo spoiler, tanto la qualità del libro trascende decisamente la quarta di copertina: è una specie di memoir della spia dopo essere stata scoperta, nella quale ripensa alla sua vita, quando volge al termine, facendo i conti in particolare con le persone care che aveva trascurato, perso nel suo egocentrismo – ma non ho ucciso nessuno, almeno, non con le mie mani -.

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.

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.

would happily read over and over, would give more stars if i could

Not your typical spy novel! The tragic and, at the same time, darkly funny story of an art historian who becomes a double-agent for England and Russia in the 1930s and ‘40s. Some of the characters in the novel are based on real people, including Graham Greene, but I didn’t know this until I was halfway through the book and started Googling. The tale is told through the reminiscences of the historian and jumps around in time as the story unfolds. It’s this narrator who really makes the book special. He is unsparing toward the characters he is describing, and even more harsh on himself, and there’s a cloud of rueful sadness hanging over everything. The casual cruelty he displays at times is the coping mechanism of a deeply conflicted, self-loathing individual who is forcing himself to relive and relate the mess he’s made of his life as perhaps some kind of atonement. This is my first Banville, and the writing is beautiful throughout, with some extraordinary descriptive passages in addition to the psychological complexity on display. I’ll certainly be picking up more books by him.

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.

There is a Portuguese song from the 80s that goes something like this:

I am free and you are free
And there’s a night to be spent
Why don’t we go together?
Why don’t we stay in the adventure of the senses?

This song, written by a gay man who would die of AIDS, flies me over to a world I never knew. A freshly liberated Lisbon, free from the constraints of a right-wing dictatorship, ready to embrace democracy and modernity. Many of Lisbon’s most famous bars and discos appeared around this time. Everyone who knows anyone who frequented Lisbon’s nightlife in the 80s and 90s will share the same references: the same places, songs, haircuts, and the belief in a brighter future.

The Untouchable, although about a very different gay man from the hairdresser who wrote the quoted song, also pulls me back to a world I never knew. Yet I can see the dark pavement of a dripping Bloomsbury night, the seedy bars just off Edgware Road, and crowds of former public-school pupils cruising Hyde Park, looking for a quick fumble in a public bathroom.

This is the London Anthony Blunt…pardon me, Victor Maskell dwelt in. The mistake is almost inevitable. Building another character based on Blunt was a smart decision; it drags the plot away from the dungeons of History, and grants Banville the freedom to do what he likes. Maskell becomes an Irishman – solidly Protestant and well-connected, but still a man born on the wrong side of the Irish sea. He is raised by a kind stepmother and an absent-minded father who loves him, and alongside a brother with Down’s Syndrome (just like the Belfast-born poet, Louis MacNeice). Just like Blunt, Maskell becomes a prominent Art Historian, a member of the Cambridge’s Apostles, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, and finally a spy for the Soviet Union, particularly active during the WWII years. His justification, which retains astonishing prescience, is that he did it all in name of Western – European, really – civilization. The Brits with their good intentions and heroic retreats from France would never be enough to fight off fascism; they hadn’t been of much use, after all, when fascists were burning Spain to cinders.

The book is conspicuously timid about Maskell’s motivations, however. He was a spy; he had his reasons. The theme of his homosexuality looms over the novel, and the conclusion seems to be that even after he ceased to be a spy, his trysts with men – as forbidden and damaging as spying for the enemy – provided much needed adrenaline and a sense of purpose. Maskell is a man hiding from himself, yet constantly daring himself to be found. One can know oneself too well, as he says.

Keeping in line with many other books, which are not nearly as well written as The Untouchable, all characters are realistically unpleasant. Banville captures the vocabulary and the tone of a very specific class placed in a very specific historical period. Maskell, his friends and his family, whether they are Marxists or fascists, all share in the same vices of the upper-classes which reared them. You can’t escape your class, not even when you’re spying for the Soviet Union. This is where Banville’s novel becomes a triumph: he invokes an England which no longer exists and generations of people who are almost unimaginable now. Certainly, they are unlikely to be recognized by modern readers. Yet in Banville’s hands they become as familiar as the London I know, familiar as bygone cities fleshed out from popular songs.

Ha declarado Banville que como tal puede escribir tan sólo “200 palabras diarias”. Para nada resulta extraña esta afirmación si se tiene en cuenta lo depurada que resulta su narrativa. Es una delicia dejarse seducir por una prosa llena de una riqueza al alcance tan solo de algunos autores. Un autor que enamora en la primera frase.

En El Intocable encontramos algo más que una novela de espías, en la que un ex agente doble, Victor Maskell, es descubierto y decide, en los que prevee últimos meses de su vida, escribir sus memorias. Y lo hace de una forma inteligente e interesante, rompiendo todos los mitos del espía como un personaje oscuro que maneja información de alto secreto e importancia. Nuestro protagonista, al igual que el resto de colegas espías, vendidos o no, de uno u otro lado del telón de acero, es un hombre extremadamente culto, amante de la buena ginebra, sensible y experto en arte, además de homosexual. Igualmente interesantes el resto de personajes secundarios de la novela y la inteligencia con que Banville maneja el ritmo narrativo.

Una novela que deja buen sabor e invita a volver sobre su autor.

After reading something written so well, it’s a disappointment having only my own less eloquent words available to praise it. Maybe it’s better to let Banville’s passages sell themselves. I’ll get to those soon, but first a bit of context. The book, I learned only today, is a Roman a clef -- more or less a true account of the infamous Cambridge spies disguised as a novel. The focus is on Victor Maskell, a composite figure based primarily on real-life Anthony Blunt. It’s structured as a memoir by Victor in his mature years reflecting back on his days as a would-be ideologue in the socialists' camp (stoicists', really), an intelligence officer in WWII, a spy for the Russians, a renowned art historian, an uninvolved family man, and a fancier of men. Finding conflict in a life like that was no challenge. Breathing life into an inherently cold fish was. Victor was undeniably complex, but there was not a lot of empathy to endear him to anyone. The pleasure in reading the book was not in witnessing any ultimate humanization, but in the language and intelligence of the author. Here are some samples. Judge for yourself.

Illustrating one aspect of the man Victor was: “[T:]he 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. Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort.”

And another, as mentioned by a friend: “The trouble with you, Vic, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.”

Victor comparing his Irish upbringing with that of a Jewish friend: “[W:]e shared the innate, bleak romanticism of our two very different races, the legacy of dispossession, and, especially, the lively anticipation of eventual revenge, which, when it came to politics, could be made to pass for optimism.”

On his evolving views, speaking about: “the American system itself, so demanding, so merciless, undeluded as to the fundamental murderousness and venality of humankind and at the same time so grimly, unflaggingly optimistic. More heresy, I know, more apostasy; soon I shall have no beliefs left at all, only a cluster of fiercely held denials.”

Victor reminiscing with old friend, Nick: “’Do you remember,’ I said, ‘that summer when we first came down to London, and we used to walk through Soho at night, reciting Blake aloud, to the amusement of the tarts? The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. He was our hero, do you remember? Scourge of hypocrisy, the champion of freedom and truth.’ ‘We were usually drunk, as I recall,’ he said, and laughed; Nick does not really laugh, it is only a noise that he makes which he has learned to imitate from others. […:] ‘The tygers of wrath,’ he said. ‘Is that what you thought we were?’”

“How to Write” books tell you to use adverbs and adjectives sparingly. When you’re John Banville, though, and know all the right ones, maybe the rule shouldn’t apply. He may not be to your taste if, say, Hemingway shots are your beverage of choice, but as cups of tea go, for English Lit types, this guy’s well worth a try.

Banville's rich prose exudes an eloquent yet haunting style that delves deeply into the inner musings and meditations of the Cambridge Five's fifth member. The story unfolds in gloriously slow detail, packed to the brim with florid sentences carefully crafted to reflect the protagonist rather than the writer. While Victor's reflections can at times wear thin, they all work well considering his pretentious and bombastic nature; the way he expresses himself is both disturbing and beautiful but always exquisitely stated. It was a book I found myself returning to with pleasure if only for the writing and the way it so fully supports the character Banville's created.

There's a slickness to Banville's writing that I found tiresome after a while. Most of this book simply flew by as a quick read, but it did little to scratch at my thinking beyond the surface. Yes, I know there were ironies about ideologues and a few jokes Cold War believers might get snooty about.

There were some clever lines and observations. But it didn't push me. Every Cold War trope I knew was in use, which made it less interesting, not more so, even though that was the framework of the novel. Made me wonder if I'll ever read another Banville book again. The answer is probably: not. I've reached a point where I can see plenty of reading ahead; but time, like all things is finite.

I've feeling the same way about Julian Barnes, though Flaubert's Parrot was better and more fun, it too was slick but also so bloody English by the end of it.

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.

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