The Untouchable by John Banville.

I finished this book almost a week ago - so why has it taken me so long to write the review? A good question and one I have been asking myself in all that time. Maybe this following digression will help explain things.

Some few years ago I was having a heated discussion with a very good friend, Charles Unwin, who is a very clever guy and a great reader. We were talking about Martin Amiss, must have been about the time that Money came out, and I opined that while Martin was clearly very talented compared to his father Kingsley he had yet to produce a novel anywhere near as good as anything his father had produced. On this we kind of agreed and Charles suggested that the father's lack of natural. immanent talent had made of him a hard working writer who had thus produced some very good work by dint of hard work and application. The fact that Martin writes extremely well and obviously knows his history of the novel he has yet, in my opinion, to produce a very good let alone a great novel. I fear i fact that his publishing deal will stop him from ever so doing. And in some ways I think that this is my problem with Banville.

Banville is a great writer who has yet to write a great novel and yet ... And yet ... I still feel he might. HIs writing continues to improve but none of his subject matter matches his talent. And so I keep reading him. And his novels are good ... not very good ... and a long way from great ... but his writing shines through. One day he may do it.

The Untouchable is a loosely disguised contemplation on the Blunt, Burgess, Maclean betrayal of the UK. Banville's Maskell (Blunt) is well drawn and beautifully mannered but where I was expecting an essay on the nature of betrayal I received instead a classic lesson in UK class structures that came nowhere close to the insight that Genet brings to this fascinating subject. Banville lets the real notion encompassed in his topic escape him. Maskell comes out as slight and simply egotistical (as do his co-conspirators) and this is a travesty entertaining though his take on the whole thing is.

The traitor and betrayal are wonderful topics and Banville sadly manages to betray them. What, I wonder, will bring out his greatness? I shall continue to read him and would recommend yo to do the same.

One day. One day.

Fiction, Espionage, Based on real-life, Nature of the human psyche, Based on the enigma of the Cambridge spies, An extraordinary book, given its style and contents, Relationship between art and real world, Relationship between the surface of things and a more penetrating vision, Meditation on authenticity, “If something or someone is not what it seems, is it necessarily a fake?” Victor Maskell went to Cambridge in the 1920s, Infatuated with Marxism and dreaming of a new communist world, Maskell slowly becomes, despite numerous disappointments, a formal Russian/Soviet spy, He is also a quite active homosexual, Later he ceases his work as a spy and becomes a successful art critic and curator, friend of the royal family, art expert to the Queen, He marries, and he and his wife have two children, Only in his 70s, he is publicly unmasked as a Soviet agent, but no formal actions seem to have been taken toward him, He lost everything but is absolutely determined to keep a sense of style.
First edition, London, Picador, 1997, 8vo, 405 pp., hardcover. First US edition, New York, Knopf, 1997, hardcover, First Italian edition: Milano, Guanda, 1998, 378 pp., translated by Massimo Birattari ( )

Last year I started The Untouchable by John Banville and for some reason was bogged down in character names...some of main peripheral characters had several names that were thrown out all at once and I suppose at that time I was distracted, so I put the book aside.

I picked it up again last week and was immediately captured by Banville's prose. He has a way, like another author I could mention of making us see the real and human side of a verra nasty character. And make no mistake about it Victor Maskell is a person that has crossed the line many times in many different ways, both personally and professionally. He was a man that was in essence unable to commit that committed himself to a cause that was not loyal to him, and used him in an atrocious manner. The betrayer, betrayed?
Banville shows all the layers of a complex and tortured man in a way that causes us to empathize with him while knowing exactly what he is and has done. That is Nabokovian.

I definitely recommend this one. ( )

Touching and interesting scenes from The Untouchable by John Banville

p. 8-10 Victor meets Nick in the garden.
p. 31 Fragile eggs super artefacts like Seneca painting
p. 92-98 Interview with Jewish Mrs. Breevoort about marriage with daughter
p. 178- 184 Takes leave for camp after baby is born, can only feel pity for Vivienne
p. 205 ff. Nick leaves Victor and M. Joliet in the evening but they only talk. Later Nicks asks Victor to sound Anne Marie Joliet to work in a brothel: “he cares nothing for me”
p. 241 ff. Betrayal of Freddie
p. 328 ff. V. fetches letters to Hitler written by his brother Edward (Duke of Windsor) for the king at Regensburg, Bavaria. The female American major. The meal with the German noble family. The countess at the table and later handing him the chest of letters.
p. 251-257 Dinner full of teasing with son Julian and daughter Blanche, who gives coin to ruined wretch on his doorstep, later he can only feel sorrow for dog under man’s rags
p. 384 Seneca; the Spartan youth complained to his mother that his sword was too short. She replies: Step closer”
p.390 Task: to keep his (Nick’s) image in place, to kneel before him humbly
p. 398 The Agony in the Garden. Confrontation with Nick (= Satan)

Roman a clef:

Victor Maskell = Anthony F. Blunt (1907-1983), tutor of French, art historian, at first enthusiastic disciple of Bloomsbury, later of realism in art; art adviser to Queen Elizabeth, agent in MI5 during World War Two, "The Fourth Man, fellow at Trinity, Cambridge Spy (cryptonym Johnson, Tony); director of the Courtauld Institute, mathematics, homosexual comes from Northern Ireland rather than Bournemouth

Vivienne = Baby, his Jewish wife

Miss Serena Vandeleur his Biographer: ?

Leo Rothenstein = Victor Rothchild, heir to the English branch of the banking family, Jewish, heterosexual, jazz pianist. Supplied an apartment in London for some of the Cambridge spies to meet in, bought painting for Blunt. Spy for Russians

Boy Bannister (Boyston Alistair St John Bannister) = Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (1910-1963), BBC broadcaster, agent in MI6, (Madchen) secretary to Deputy Foreign Minister, Hector McNeil, British Foreign Office secretary, London, Washington cryptonym Hicks, MI6 officer and secretary to the deputy foreign minister campy, Quixotic, larky, thick-lipped, irresistible. Loved by Vivienne

Nick Brevoort = Beaver, Louis MacNeice?? Jewish by mother, father Max was gentile, English spy unknown to Victor, no defector, goes to Germany to look after Leo’s interest, red-jowled Tory Cabinet minister, Victor’s great love, who betrayed him twice.

Querell = Graham Greene, (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world; travels allowed him opportunity to spy on behalf of the United Kingdom, in Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Had affair with Vivienne, Blunt knew. Betrays Blunt to Department

Alastair Sykes = John Cairncross?? , Foreign Office secretary, private secretary to Lord Hankey, Secretary for Security, sometimes referred to as "The Fifth Man"

Philip Macleish = Donald Duart Maclean (1915-1983) (cryptonym = Homer) at Trinity, Cambridge Spy, Language student, foreign office secretary, Paris, Washington, Cairo, London. The Dour Scot never liked Blunt but appreciates his helping them to escape.

= Harold Adrian Russell ("Kim") Philby, (1912-1988) (cryptonym = Sonny or Stanley) at Trinity, Cambridge Spy, MI6 officer and journalist; "The Third Man" In 1934 consented to penetrate the bourgeois for Soviet Intelligence Service

Michael Straight, student first in economics, later American State Department employee. Recruited as Russian spy by B.

Frederick Louis MacNeice (September 12, 1907 – September 3, 1963) was a British and Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis; nicknamed MacSpaunday as a group. B’s best friend at Marlborough. B wanted to be Reason to Louis’s Chaos.

John Betjeman good friend at Marlborough

John Hilton with MacNeice good friend at Marlborough

Tom Minors good friend he shared a study with

Clive Bell (1881-1964) a British art critic and philosopher of art who defended abstract art, example for B. both in art and his attack of philistines and conservatives. Art superior to religion

The Cambridge Apostles, also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society, are an elite intellectual secret society at Cambridge University founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who went on to become the Bishop of Gibraltar. The society traditionally drew most of its members from St John's College, Cambridge, King's College and Trinity College, though this is no longer the case. The Apostles became well-known outside Cambridge in the years before the First World War with the rise to eminence of the group of intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and his brother James, G.E. Moore, and Rupert Brooke were all Apostles and subsequently prominent as members of Bloomsbury.
The Apostles came to public attention again following the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring in 1951. At least four men with access to the top levels of government in Britain — two of them former Apostles — were found to have passed information to the KGB. The four known agents were Guy Burgess, an MI6 officer and secretary to the deputy foreign minister; Anthony Blunt, MI5 officer, director of the Courtauld Institute, and art adviser to the Queen; Donald MacLean, foreign office secretary; and Kim Philby, MI6 officer and journalist.
Although only four men were identified, there were rumors of a fifth man, a senior British intelligence officer, who was never found. Many stories linked this rumor to Victor Rothschild, another Apostle, who had supplied an apartment in London for some of the Cambridge spies to meet in, though there is no evidence that he knew about their spying activities. In 1963, American writer Michael Straight, also an Apostle, and later publisher of his family's The New Republic magazine, admitted to spying.
Of the four named spies, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, both homosexual, had been members of the Apostles at a time when homosexuality seemed to be an attribute of many of the undergraduates chosen for membership, and stories persisted that the membership was mainly homosexual and Marxist

Stoics and Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy, founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early third century BC. It proved to be a popular and durable philosophy, with a following throughout Greece and the Roman Empire from its founding until all the schools of philosophy were ordered closed in AD 529 by the Emperor Justinian I, who perceived their pagan character to be at odds with his Christian faith. The core doctrine of Stoicism concerns cosmic Determinism and human freedom, and the belief that virtue is to maintain a Will that is in accord with nature.
In the life of the individual man, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. Since virtue resides in the will, everything really good or bad in a man's life depends only upon himself. He may become poor, but what of it? He can still be virtuous. A tyrant may put him in prison, but he can still persevere in living in harmony with Nature. He may be sentenced to death, but he can die nobly, like Socrates. Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. Greek philosophers such as Zeno and Cleanthes, and later Roman thinkers such as Cato the Younger, Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, are associated with Stoicism. Stoic philosophy is often contrasted with Epicureanism.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca, or Seneca the Younger) (c. 4 BC – 65 AD) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero. Although it is unlikely that he was a co-conspirator he was ordered to kill himself by Nero (by opening his veins), as did his wife Pompeia Paulina who chose to share his fate. Tacitus gives an account of the suicide in his Annals (Book XV, Chapters 60 through 64). Nero ordered that Seneca's wife be saved. The wounds were bound up, and she did not make a second attempt. Unfortunately for Seneca, his old age and diet caused the blood to flow slowly, thus causing pain instead of a quick death. He then took poison, but it didn't work. He dictated his last words to a scribe, and then jumped into a hot pool. He did not try to drown, but instead, it appears, tried to make the blood flow faster. "stock criticism of Seneca right down the centuries [has been]...the apparent contrast between his philosophical teachings and his practice."

Neostoicism is the name given to a late Renaissance philosophical movement that attempted to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be acceptable to a Christian audience. This involved the rejection or modification of certain parts of the Stoic system, especially physical doctrines such as materialism and determinism. The key text founding this movement was Justus Lipsius’s De Constantia (‘On Constancy’) of 1584. After Lipsius the other key exponent of Neostoicism was Guillaume Du Vair.

The Bloomsbury group: an English collectivity of loving friends and relatives who lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century. Their work deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. Its best known members were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey. Most were members of the Apostles

Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire now part of Milton Keynes, England. During World War II, Bletchley Park was the location of the United Kingdom's main codebreaking establishment. Codes and ciphers of several Axis countries were deciphered there, most famously the German Enigma. The high-level intelligence produced by Bletchley Park, codenamed Ultra, is frequently credited with aiding the Allied war effort and shortening the war, although Ultra's effect on the actual outcome of WWII is debated.

MI5, the British Office of Counter Intelligence (the equivalent of some of the responsibilities of the American FBI)

MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes referred to as the SIS (the equivalent of the American CIA)

Keywords: Betrayal, Seneca, Art, Stoicism, Spying, Intelligence Service ,

Nicely written story about a British double agent enlisted during the buildup to WWII. This is so much more than a standard spy novel. This is a story told in retrospect about the life of a man, his choices, relationships, friends and many forms of treachery. ( )