What I said a few days ago:
I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy recently and thought it was a masterpiece, so I figured I'd continue with a 'repressed English spies' theme. Banville's novel is a fictionalised take on the Cambridge Five, and I've heard good things about it from several people.
What I say now:
Ooh, this one was a corker. In his dotage, Victor Maskell has been exposed as a Soviet spy and had his knighthood revoked. Repulsed by the journalists who camp out on his doorstep (and secretly glad that he can finally spill his secrets), he sets out to tell his own story, beginning a journal. As his reminiscences wander up and down the paths of his covert, secretive life, he comes to finally understand just what part he's been playing, and what he has sacrificed himself for.
Banville's Maskell is a wonderful character, and the perfect narrator for a spy story, for he's a man who lives every facet of his life in a sort of permanent state of duality. He is an Irishman, but grows up Protestant and loyal to the English. He is gay, but married with two children (his wife is the sister of his secret, life-long love). He is a welcome guest at Buckingham Palace, referring to the royal family with touching familiarity, yet he is a Russian spy. He is a brilliant judge of character, but is wilfully blind to so much of what is happening around him. It's that duality, that ingrained rootlessness, that Banville, Irish himself, is so fascinated by. Maskell contorts himself to suit every available ideology, like he's playing the world's hardest game of Twister, and ends up falling on his arse.
Like the narrator of Margaret Atwood's brilliant Cat's Eye, Maskell comes to understand his own story through the act of telling it, piecing together the extent (and the author) of his betrayal only in the novel's final moments. I love that use of a first person narrator, where the author only allows the narrator to piece things together after the audience already has. It's a tightrope, but Banville walks it with aplomb.
Similar in tone to Tinker Tailor, calling The Untouchable a spy story might give you the wrong idea. There are no chases and no 'action' scenes. There is one gun, but it is never fired. If you're thinking Jason Bourne, you've got it wrong. Maskell is simply a pawn, delivering low-level information, never approaching the heart of great intrigues, always a minor player. The novel is about one man's soul, not international politics.
The prose is a bit overbearing, but Maskell is a pompous ass, wielding his impressive vocabulary like a cudgel (this novel had me reaching for a dictionary more than any I've read in years), so the wafty, overly literary style suits him perfectly. Maskell, the character, is a celebrated art historian, and was at Cambridge in the thirties ... how else would he write?
Oh, and speaking of, the brief portrait we get of the heady University days of these characters is absolutely brilliant. Young, insouciant, believing (rightly) that the fate of the world was in their quick, clever hands, it's hard not to fall in love with this troop of merry Marxists, even as they make horrible mistake after horrible mistake. I didn't love Brideshead Revisited when I read it, perhaps because, written too close to those times, it couldn't quite gather the courage to bluntly nail its characters to the wall the way Banville does. With the space of sixty-odd years behind him, Banville's portrait seemed more honest (and was way more fun).
Occasionally a bit of a slog, but nevertheless highly recommended.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: Aboriginal Fables and Legendary Tales, Aboriginal Stories of Australia and Aboriginal Words of Australia by A.W. Reed
books to go: 90
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