Part literary thriller, part existential roman-à-clef, The Untouchable presents a fictionalised version of the well-known story of Anthony Blunt: art historian to royalty, writer and intellectual and one of the 20th century’s most notorious spies.
Blunt, a homosexual, was educated at Cambridge in the 1930’s. During his career, he was a distinguished English art historian, an expert on Poussin, curator of the Queen’s art collection and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. However, beneath his respected veneer, he was a Communist and Russian spy, working for the Kremlin for over thirty years, as a member of the ‘Cambridge Five’ along with Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. In 1979, he was exposed in Parliament by Margaret Thatcher and publicly disgraced.
The narrator of The Untouchable – Victor Maskell – is clearly Blunt, his biography crossed with that of Irish poet Louis MacNeice. Like Blunt, Maskell is one of the Cambridge Spies, an art historian and homosexual. Unlike Blunt but like MacNeice, he is Irish, the son of a bishop, has a brother with Down’s syndrome, marries, and has children. In a nod to his earlier novels, Banville names Maskell’s brother Freddie (which was Louis MacNeice’s real first name) reminding the reader of Freddie Montgomery, protagonist of The Book of Evidence.
The novel is structured as a journal, a ‘last testament’, written by Maskell following his disgrace at the behest of a young female writer and this allows Banville to muse on some of his favourite themes as Maskell looks back on his life and tries to work out who may have betrayed him to the authorities.
As with Banville’s other novels, he presents a self-deceiving unreliable narrator, who is interested in art, authenticity and duality. His characters are experts in visual artifice and are often concerned with hiding their true selves beneath a respectable veneer. Here he weaves themes of the distinction between what is fake and what is real, the futility of authentication and the idea of guilt and redemption into a compelling character study of a man who is quite literally living two lives.
The instability, the myriadness that the world takes on, is both the attraction and the terror of being a spy. Attraction, because in the midst of such uncertainty you are never required to be yourself, whatever you do there is another, alternative you standing invisibly to one side, observing, evaluating, remembering. This is the secret power of the spy…to be oneself and at the same time another.
The conditions of Banville’s fiction, where he is concerned with mirrored characters, nothing being what it seems and the slipperiness of the truth makes the perfect vehicle to explore the life of one of Britain’s most notorious spies.
Serena Vandeleur, the young woman who claims she wishes to write Maskell’s biography prompts the existence of the journal by asking Maskell what should be a simple question – ‘Why did you do it?’. Maskell’s response is initially flippant – ‘Oh, cowboys and indians, my dear’ he quips – yet the novel circles tantalisingly around this question. As Victor rationalises his actions throughout his life, he comes to not one answer, but many. Or maybe even none.
He compares he self-examination to the restoration of a painting,
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime – the toffee coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling – until I come to the very thing I know it for what it is. My soul, My self.
Yet, as Maskell muses on his time at Cambridge, his initiation into the world of spying, his work for the King, a disenchanting visit to Moscow and his infiltration into Bletchley Park, the picture of his life – and his convictions – becomes only muddier, evading clarity. Maskell’s is a world where nothing is what it seems. Banville’s decision to divest from Blunt’s biography adds to the sense of intrigue and gets to the heart of what the work is trying to achieve. The Untouchable is not just a fictionalisation of one man’s life, but an exploration of the very nature of secrecy and conspiracy.
Being a spy gives Maskell a purpose, a way of convincing himself that he has a depth beyond the surface of his life. Like his homosexuality, his espionage is dangerous but necessary, and both these aspects of his existence form the core of who Maskell is, even as they simultaneously and constantly threaten to implode his life.
As always with a Banville novel, the prose is sublime, and his writing achieves a beauty which cements his reputation as a master stylist.
I wanted to tell her about the blade of sunlight cleaving the velvet shadows of the public urinal that post-war spring afternoon in Regensberg, of the incongruous gaiety of the rain shower that fell on the day of my father’s funeral, of that last night with Boy when I saw the red ship under Blackfriars Bridge and conceived of the tragic significance of my life: in other words, the real things, the true things.
This love of visual beauty and the ability to describe that love, is a gift that Banville gives to many of his characters and makes his novels such a joy to read. What he also does with The Untouchable is write a work that is clearly his own within the tropes of the spy genre. While the novel may (like most of Banville’s novels) be less interested in plot, the ending still manages to being revelations and surprises, reinforcing the idea that nothing in Maskell’s life has been what it seemed.
The title of the novel may well refer to Maskell himself. He may well have been publicly shamed, losing a knighthood in the process, but he remains free to live out his life, untouchable in that respect. He is also untouched by genuine human relationships; from the men he had affairs with, to his wife and ultimately his children.
In my mind though, the title refers to the nature of truth itself and how, no matter how much we think we know, we can never really authenticate the reality of life.
I read The Untouchable as part of my Year With John Baville. This month Kim will be reading Ghosts and next month I will be reading Eclipse.
READ ON: BOOK
NUMBER READ: 468
NUMBER REMAINING: 278
20 BOOKS OF SUMMER: 6/20
