John Banville, _The Untouchable_

 I REALIZED AGAIN, when I heard that John Le Carre had died, that I had yet to read any of his novels, so I picked up a very recent one (Agent Running in the Field) at a nearby branch library, read about fifty pages, then found myself very much wanting to read this instead. Odd. But that’s what I did.

And it certainly worked out—this is the eighth Banville novel I have read and I would say it is now my favorite, dislodging Doctor Copernicus from the top spot it has occupied with me since the late 1980s.

Victor Maskell, the narrator of The Untouchable, a close match for Sir (until he was stripped of his knighthood) Anthony Blunt, art historian, director of the Courtauld Institute, person in charge of the royal family’s picture collection, and, it so happened, a spy for the USSR—the last of the “Cambridge Spies” to be publicly exposed

The novel begins in 1979, with that public exposure having just occurred, and Victor Maskell  deciding to write his memoirs/confessions. He tells of his youth and university days in the 1920s, his political passions and commitment to the Communist cause in the 1930s, his becoming a double agent during WW II, his being caught (but not publicly exposed) in the 1950s. Along the way, we learn of his family, his friends, his marriage, his discovery that he is gay. 

In effect, we have a Brideshead Revisited or Dance to the Music of Time (Banville even seems to allude to those novels occasionally), but from the other side of the tapestry, so to speak, its secret history set in the subterranean world of spy cells and gay cruising. Both activities require secrecy, signals, and codes and both activities were dangerous, with grave penalties for being caught. Banville manages to make each activity the dark mirror of the other.

In revisiting Waugh/Powell territory, Banville manages the feat of recreating a familiar fictional world in a startling new way—a bit like Alan Hollinghurst in The Sparsholt Affair or The Stranger’s Child, but with the difference of adding some classic Irish snark, for Maskell is Irish (as Blunt was not), son of a (Protestant) bishop in Ulster, placing him at one more crucial remove from the society that he both wishes to rise to the top of and demolish.

I still haven’t read Le Carre, but the revelations at the very end of The Untouchable provide the kind of startling-but-inevitable payoff people like about Le Carre, and along the way we get not only Banville’s impeccably textured evocation of an historical period (also a hallmark of Doctor Copernicus) but also his astonishing prose—there’s an arresting figure or turn of phrase on every page. 

And I will continue on with Agent Running in the Field until it mysteriously inspires me to pick up something else.