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Read The Untouchable (1998)

The Untouchable (1998)

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Rating
3.97 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0679767479 (ISBN13: 9780679767473)
Language
English
Publisher
vintage

The Untouchable (1998) - Plot & Excerpts

This is my second try with John Banville. Once again, he impresses me with his ability to write nearly perfect prose and characters who are as flesh and blood and flawed as any who ever breathed, while completely boring me. That's strike two, Mr. Banville, and two is all most authors get from me.Banville is a serious Literary Dude, and this is a serious Literary Dude's novel. The Untouchable is written as a memoir by one Victor Maskell, who is based on real-life Cambridge spy Anthony Blunt; although this is a novel, it's only loosely fictionalized history. Maskell, as he tells his story, was, like Blunt, formerly the keeper of the British royal family's art collection, and has recently been exposed as a Soviet spy since before World War II. Maskell is also a homosexual, which plays a large part of his narrative - he describes his sexual encounters with the same precise elegant prose as he talks about watersheds in history and his role as a Soviet double-agent.Everybody nowadays disparages the 1950s, saying what a dreary decade it was. And they are right, if you think of McCarthyism and Korea, the Hungarian rebellion, all that serious historical stuff. I expect, however, that it is not public but private affairs that people are complaining of. Quite simply, I think they did not get enough of sex. All that fumbling with corsetry and woolen undergarments and all those grim couplings in the back seats of motorcars. The complaints and tears and resentful silences, while the wireless crooned callously of everlasting love. Feh! What dinginess! What soul-sapping desperation! The best that could be hoped for was a shabby deal marked by the exchange of a cheap ring followed by a life of furtive relievings on one side and of ill-paid prostitution on the other.Whereas, oh my friends, to be queer was the very bliss! The Fifties were the last grace age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride. Pride! But these young hotheads in their pink bellbottoms, clamoring for the right to do it in the street if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear.Maskell is wry, cynical, sometimes humorous, and a bit depressive, looking back on a career that's been generally distinguished while always overshadowed by these twin secrets: he has lived his entire life in two closets, as a homosexual and a double-agent. He has few regrets, and he seems as much amused as he is upset by his public disgrace, the shock of his friends, the shame of his family.As brilliantly narrated as Maskell's story is, the problem is that it isn't much of a story. It's an old man reminiscing about being a young Marxist and a gay blade back when either one could get you hard prison time. There are no dramatic "spy" moments — even during World War II, he's just passing on not-very-important information to the Russians, until eventually he gets tired of the whole thing and rather anticlimactically (as much as a book that's had no suspense to begin with can have an anticlimax) drops out of the spy game. Then, years later, he's thrown under the bus by some of his former associates. (Figuratively, not literally; if anyone were actually thrown under a bus in this book, it would have been more exciting.)Most excellently written? Yes. Banville wins literary prizes — go John Banville. Did I care about Victor Maskell and his whiny, cynical, misogynistic moping after decades of being a Soviet spy? Noooo. If you have a real interest in this era, particularly with a realistically (if not particularly sympathetically) depicted gay character, then you probably won't regret reading this, but don't make the mistake of thinking that because it's about spies it's thrilling.

A book I’d like to erase from my mind to be able to experience it all over again.As an espionage thriller it has the mood and tawdry realism of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. But (with the greatest love and admiration for early John le Carré) this is much more than a genre novel. I’ve seen Banville compared to Vladimir Nabokov and on the evidence of The Untouchable the comparison is not overblown. In fact I’d go as far as to submit that this as good as Lolita in the way it uses a heinous crime (treason) as the vehicle for exploring societal hypocrisy and male vanity, insecurity, regret and frustrated ambition whilst simultaneously rendering the crime itself morally ambiguous and almost incidental. Like Nabokov’s Humbert, Banville’s Victor Maskell is a vain, cynical, self-pitying, predatory old failure who you cannot help but sympathise with and ultimately root for. There are also worthy comparisons to be made with Brideshead Revisited, particularly in the way Banville balances a deeply sad human story of infatuation and lost innocence with an epic social history of England in the first half of the twentieth century. Banville is an Irish literary writer and I suppose it is therefore obligatory that the book includes a few forays into Ireland and what it means to be Irish. The answer in the context of this novel is “not a lot” and the only parts that feel contrived and slightly half-arsed are those in which Maskell speculates that his Irish origins are somehow linked to his confused feelings towards England. You reckon? The scenes in which Maskell visits his family are among the most moving in the book but they would have worked equally well set on the South coast of England (where Anthony Blunt, on whom Maskell is based, was actually from) as in Ireland. The Irish angle is the one part of Maskell that departs substantially from the real life of Anthony Blunt and it appears to be for no good reason other than that Banville is Irish. But this really is nitpicking. This is a brilliant book by, for my money, an exceptionally good writer and you can't make straight-faced comparisons with the likes of Nabokov and Waugh and award anything less than five stars.

What do You think about The Untouchable (1998)?

This is the fourth Banville novel I've read this month. It shows the attentiveness to history evident in COPERNICUS and KEPLER, and its narrator Victor Mask ell shares characteristics with that of THE SEA. THE UNTOUCHABLE fictionalizes the British spy ring in which Anthony Blunt, the art historian and Royal appointee was the "fourth man," unmasked for years after the defection of Donald McLean ("the dour Scot") and Guy Burgess ('Boy") with the aid of Kim Philby (Nick, the MP; Querell, the Le Carre-like novelist?).Narrated by Maskell, the style is an effective combination of aesthetic observation and British slang, fitting the movement between the public lavatories and the art institute in which he resided. The doubling of selves in Maskell, Irish Protestant risen in English society, Russian spy and British intelligence officer, rough trading homosexual and emissary for HRH, actor and agent, develops one of Banville's main obsessions: can we know anyone else, or even ourselves. The most aware of his intimates, his wife Vivienne ("Baby"), observes sharply and, one way or another, has gathered all the details. In a slight twist from Joyce's Daedelus, it is Maskell finally, who does not know that his children are his own.Literary in a number of ways (in a book populated with homosexuals, the hetero Querell takes his name from a Genet novel), we are given flashes of Fitzgerald, James, interestingly enough both expats, and so on.I am beginning to think Banville a rather saucy chap, sticking his ink-stained thumb in the eyes of just about everyone in his trade and in those of the status-obsessed or effete.
—Richard

I like to think that this book describes the activities of people on the very outer fringes of society. If in fact the majority of citizens behaved with such crassness and with no real loyalty to their countrymen this world would be an even darker place.it is difficult to feel empathy for spy Victor Maskell who is rudely awakened from his priveleged shallow existence by the betrayal that alters his perception of life. Victor Maskell does not live up to my ideals as a hero. His choices to be absent, as a son, brother, husband and father do not lend him credibility. Even his choices of lovers are flawed leaving him isolated in a world of physical, emotional excesses without the intellectual companionship that could have resulted from more permanent partnerships. The one being he professes to hold an undying secret devotion for emerges as the greatest disappointment of his life.even though the book is written proficiently I felt as though it had nothing uplifting to teach me about human nature, very little to say in defence of the mechanics or subtleties of spying and worse still, no silver lining on the black cloud of treachery.maybe it is a little to close to the truth for comfort.Carinya
—Carinya Kappler

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.
—Steve

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