The Untouchable (Audible Audio Edition) John Banville Bill Wallis Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : The Untouchable (Audible Audio Edition) John Banville Bill Wallis Audible Studios Books
Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons, the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his photograph is all over the papers. His disgrace is public, his position as curator of the Queen's pictures terminated... Maskell writes his own testament, in an act not unlike the restoration of one of his beloved pictures, in order for the process of verification and attribution to begin.
The Untouchable (Audible Audio Edition) John Banville Bill Wallis Audible Studios Books
This is a novel about spies, but it is not a spy novel. Rather, it is an incredibly well-written fictional biography of one of the Cambridge Five spy ring which passed secrets on to the Communists before and during WWII. This is a first-person account of the life of lead character, Victor Maskell and unravels at length the years when, in addition to being a somewhat tepid spy, Maskell rose to the heights of British academia until he was revealed and disgraced by the government years later. Maskell seems to be based on real-life Anthony Blunt, one of the members of the real spy ring. This book moves along at a deliberate pace, somewhat a la Le Carre, but there is enough insight and action to keep the reader's mind occupied and tension high. Banville is a much better writer than LeCarre -- in fact he's one of the best writers I've read. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, didn't skip a paragraph and found it extremely satisfying.Product details
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The Untouchable (Audible Audio Edition) John Banville Bill Wallis Audible Studios Books Reviews
John Banville has quietly been having one of the great literary careers of our time, and “The Untouchable” is perhaps his best work. Inspired by the peculiar case of Sir Anthony Blunt, who managed the British royal family’s art collection while betraying Britain’s deepest secrets to the Soviet Union, Banville’s book imagines the conflicted inner life of a fictional aesthete-traitor. His anti-hero recalls every trick he played, every lie he told, every boundary he transgressed and justifies everything he did, sometimes pathetically, sometimes hilariously. Banville’s sentences are all finely wrought, yet each carries his propulsive story forward—the comparison to Nabokov and “Lolita” is inescapable. By all means begin Banville by reading his Quirke crime novels written as Benjamin Black, but move on as quick as you can to “The Untouchable” or his other confessional classic, “The Book of Evidence.”
As most readers will already know, this is a fictionalized account of the life Anthony Blunt, one of the "Cambridge Five," who spied for the Soviet Union. The book was highly recommended to me by friends who loved Banville's use of language, but while I found some of his turns of phrase to be insightful and novel, I don't think that's sufficient to carry a 360 page book.
Our narrator is (inevitably, in a book narrated by a spy), evasive and unreliable. Though the story spans about fifty years, we learn almost nothing about what the narrator was doing most of the time. At the end of his life, as he tells this story, he's more concerned with old relationships. The reader has some fun teasing out which of the characters are gay and which are spies (though, if you, like I, keep close tabs on what the narrator says about his friends, the book's big surprise ending will turn out to be too inartfully hidden to have any surprise as all). Without plot, one might find pleasure in the characters, but the truth is that few are described in any detail. Try to describe "Boy" or "Beaver" in anything other than the crudest factual descriptions; it can't be done. Can we guess how they would have responded to some stimulus outside the narrative? No. The characterizations are not paper-thin, but perhaps they are pancake-thin.
So the plot is thin, the characters are thin, the "surprises" at the end are thoroughly foreshadowed for a close reader (and in the case of the fate of the narrator, even for a casual reader). What's left? Some nice turns of phrase, enough for three stars out of five but no more.
Mr. Banville has given us a fictional account of the life of a sociopath based upon Anthony Blunt, spy, mathematician, art historian and a very unsavory character. The genius of Banville's work is that by writing in the first person, he brings us into the mind and soul of Victor Maskell and his perceptions of his world in a way truer than a biography could do. It allows him and us to speculate as to motives.
By writing in the first person, he also assumes the mask and personae of a man who is is most erudite and classically trained in the Cambridge tradition. I found is a pleasure to have to refer to the OED to get the meaning a some arcane word that is introduced by Maskell in a totally comfortable manner. We can believe that his character speaks this way.
As to motives perhaps it was best said by Graham Greene (who appears in this book as Querell, an unsavory associate of Maskell) that the reason for Judas' betrayal of Jesus was to be found in Judas' childhood. I found that this character, Maskell reminds me of another, to me, indecipherable sociopath and that is Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley.
This book is as complex and intriguing whether one is familiar with with the historical persons or not. As mesmerizing as watching spider devouring its prey.
There is surely a story here, but I don't believe that John Banville quite found it. He seems never to get to the core motivation of his narrator and central character. What makes a man betray his country? Banville's narrative vaguely suggests that Victor's reasons were political or philosophical, but even within the fictional narrative Banville has created, I think the evidence suggests that the motivation was aesthetic. The story tells us that Victor is an art historian and some kind of aesthete, but the author doesn't have much empathy for what it can mean for a man to make his life choices around what he finds beautiful rather than what he finds ugly. Without this thread, the story is a window into a world of characters nearly all of whom are entirely unlikeable.
This is a novel about spies, but it is not a spy novel. Rather, it is an incredibly well-written fictional biography of one of the Cambridge Five spy ring which passed secrets on to the Communists before and during WWII. This is a first-person account of the life of lead character, Victor Maskell and unravels at length the years when, in addition to being a somewhat tepid spy, Maskell rose to the heights of British academia until he was revealed and disgraced by the government years later. Maskell seems to be based on real-life Anthony Blunt, one of the members of the real spy ring. This book moves along at a deliberate pace, somewhat a la Le Carre, but there is enough insight and action to keep the reader's mind occupied and tension high. Banville is a much better writer than LeCarre -- in fact he's one of the best writers I've read. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, didn't skip a paragraph and found it extremely satisfying.
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