The Untouchable | John Banville | Banville-The Untouchable

The Untouchable | John Banville | Will the real Victor Maskell please stand up

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The Untouchable

	The Untouchable John Banville Vintage, 1998 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?

As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre.

Winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction

"Contemporary fiction gets no better than this... Banville's books teem with life and humor." - Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review
"Victor Maskell is one of the great characters in recent fiction... The Untouchable is the best work of art in any medium on [its] subject." -Washington Post Book World
"As remarkable a literary voice as any to come out of Ireland; Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding." -San Francisco Chronicle

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Banville-The Untouchable

It is rather commonplace, I suppose, that it is difficult to write an "objective" review of a book one so deeply enjoys. Nevertheless, I'll give it a whirl. Banville truly does seem incapable of writing about anything that does not become a work of art under his pen. And, while John Le Carre is frequently praised as writing spy novels that are literature, they aren't. They're merely a cut above the usual 007 sort of thing. For something to be labelled art, correctly, it must soar above not only any genre it supposedly represents (herein, the "spy novel"), but must also must stake a unique claim in the reader's mind as something rich and strange, the like of which she/he has never yet come across. Banville accomplishes this feat with such apparently effortless ease here that this reader, in any event, is left, after reading it, in a swoon of delight which I'm still savouring.

It's a pity to dissect what makes this so, but, really, it's not much of a dissection, only one cut into two parts: 1) Banville's lyrical, lulling yet erudite prose which comes here through the medium of our somewhat flawed protagonist, Maskell. It is literally transporting, in its Yeatsean reveries, not only to a different time and place but to the inside of Maskell's mind and heart, or perhaps some would prefer the term soul. 2) The Proustian depths of Banville/Maskell's insights into the kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting nature of life, love and identity.

I suppose I'm obliged to say something about the "spy" aspect of the book and the to-do about the Cambridge set. I shall. It's of no importance.........Well, let me qualify, it's of no importance save as the setting in which Banville writes. It's just a sort of prop, as is Maskell's homosexuality. For, after reading this book, one realises that whether one is homo or hetero, spy or patriot (Maskell is, at times, all four.), we are all a bit out of our depths in this world in defining who we are and why we do things. To quote from the book, "Yes, how deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps in life we take."

When is a certain Swedish committee going to take note of this fellow?

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Will the real Victor Maskell please stand up

John Banville's The Untouchable is a remarkable book for myriad reasons. For the sheer artistry of his prose alone, I would recommend this book. The weight and care placed upon each word and sentence gives the novel a wonderfully balanced and effortless feel, and at the same time leaves the reader in no doubt that he/she is in the presence of a true master craftsman of the English language.
But it is not just Banville's prose that makes The Untouchable a book of the highest merit; it is the character of Victor Maskell, portrayed in all of his ambiguity and nuance, which moves this book. Based of the Cambridge spy Anthony Blount, Victor Maskell narrates his pseudo-memoir in the first person, but that doesn't clarify the man or make him easily understood. In short, Banville gives us a masterful insight into a man of many contradictions: Royalist, jaded Communist, spy, husband, father, homosexual, Irish yet working for the British at Bletchley. The sheer amount of contradictions gives the reader a sense of wariness when it comes to trusting Maskell's word, but that is the point for I doubt that Maskell himself truly knows who he is.
The setting and ancillary characters like Boy (based on Guy Burgess), Nick and Querell (Graham Greene?) are also deftly handled with meticulous care.
This is a profound, beautiful and at times darkly humorous work of art that deserves to be ranked among the great works of Western literature.

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Insight into the mind of a Soviet Spy.

A witty, insightful view of a famous spy for the Soviets in Britain. Sometimes hard to follow the roles of all the characters. Well worth reaing.

Spying on the self

Getting long in the tooth now after a lifetime of spying on London for Russia, Victor Maskell is shocked to learn that someone has ratted him out. In trying to figure out what went wrong, he begins keeping a long journal in which he reviews his life, and which, basically, becomes this novel. There are lots of interesting and quirky turns of events, including his relationship with his family, his dealings with upper-crust Englishmen, and his realization that he is gay. Victor is a good analyzer, but a poor summationist, and as he explores his past life and dances around the central question of why he chose to live the life of a spy as he did, he never seems able to answer it. This can be frustrating for the reader. But John Banville is a superb writer and he relates the story of Victor Maskell (based on a true character) incisively and with power.

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I spy with my little eye

Better than his novella THE SEA for which he won the recent Man Booker Prize, THE UNTOUCHABLE is almost the perfect novel by which John Banville could display his unique talents, in that it provides a thinkly disguised fictional portrait of Sir Anthony Blunt, the so-called "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge spy ring. Blunt's background as the head of the Courtauld Institute and as a leading expert on Poussin (and Purveyor of the Queen's Pictures) makes him as suitable a subject for Banville as does his conflicted ethical choices and crimes. The novel reconstructs what it was like for Blunt (here called -- unfortunately -- Victor Maskell, and given an Anglo-Irish background closer to Banville's than to Blunt's) to have do0ne what he did, centering particularly on his experiences spying before and after the Second World War. Two-thirds of the book are very successful, but the last third, wherein Maskell's adventures in spying wind down and he goes fuklly against the grain of his character by coming out of the closet and becoming a superstud, doesn't hold together. Otherwise it is a fine and gripping study of identity and betrayal, and one of Banville's best novels.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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