Fifty Books Project 2023

 

The Untouchable. By John Banville

 

“Oh, Victor,” she said, and she relaxed her fist and lifted her hand and laid it tenderly along the length of my cheek, as she had so many times before had cause to do.  “Poor, poor Victor.  You’re right, you knew nothing, even less than you thought you did.  He kept it all from you.”

The tea tasted of clay.  In the silence I could clearly hear the pips for the six o’clock news from a wireless set in the house next door,  I had not realized there were so many early risers in Mayfair.  A jade figure of a pot-bellied monk – one of Big Beaver’s pieces – sat smirking to itself on the window sill beside me.  Things, in their silence, endure so much better than people.

Chrysalis.

“He?” I said dully.  “What are you saying?  What he?”

I could not bear her pitying smile.

Don’t you see?” she said.  “It was him.  It was always him . . .”

I really must look out that pistol.

 

 

In the 1930s a group of students at Cambridge University formed a Marxist club called “The Apostles.” While most of them went on to lead the lives of men of their class, successful in their chosen careers in government.  Five of them became spies for the Soviet Union and passed on sensitive information for decades until they were discovered in the late 1960s.  At that point, three of the men defected to the Soviet Union.  One, Anthony Blunt, was related to the royal family, worked in Buckingham Palace and had – in addition to his spying for The Soviets – provided valuable, but embarrassing work for the Crown during the war.  He was granted immunity from prosecution, allowed to keep his job as Keeper of the Crown’s pictures and his knighthood until 1980 when Margaret Thatcher uncovered his history and he was publicly humiliated.

 

The Untouchable is a novelized version of Blunt’s life, with the protagonist’s name changed to Victor Maskell.  One of the key details of what was eventually the Cambridge Five was that the men involved were all gay.  Banville has written a beautiful and moving novel about a man living a double secret – hiding his sexuality and his treason.  The novel is largely centered on that notion of hiding, how little Maskell understands the motives of those around him, how many secrets he has and the ultimate cost of that secrecy.

 

Oddly enough, the spying for The Soviet Union is not treated with great importance.  Maskell has already lost his faith in the Soviets when he is recruited on a trip to Moscow in the late 1930s.   Banville depicts that world as a paranoid, bureaucratic nightmare.  Maskell is honest that the kinds of secrets he finds and passes along are of little help – though he goes out of the way to detail how information about German tanks helped the Soviets in an important battle, a story which undercuts any sense I had that he was soft-pedalling his work.  The portrait of espionage here would be comic if it were not so unimportant.  The job that later saves him from prosecution involves travelling to Germany right after Hitler’s suicide to recover correspondence between the Royal Family and their German relatives before the war that would be embarrassing later.  In general, Britain’s upper-class government is portrayed as a somewhat silly distraction.

 

There is a more specific and interesting portrayal of gay life in England in the middle of the Twentieth Century.  Maskell, as narrator, plays down his emotional life and tries to convince himself and the reader that hanging around public toilets or risking humiliation propositioning men on the street was a great adventure – an alternative to the stultifying married life of the 50s and 60s portrayed here.  However, that attitude is never very convincing and as the book goes on, the portrait of an aging man, preparing to die alone, going back over his affairs and his failed attempt at a family life takes on the weight of tragedy.

 

There are curious details here.  The novel is densely structured in the manner of a 19^th Century counterpart – there are some 20 characters who are important though they disappear for long periods of time.  And while it is part of the technique here to withhold some information early so as to deepen the portrait and the plot later, some of the information that comes out late is curious.  Victor does marry – Vivienne, whose brother Nick he has always been somewhat in love with.  Nick and Vivienne play important roles, especially early in the novel and then again, at the end.  So it is curious that it is only in the last thirty pages that we learn they are Jewish – on their mother’s side, to be sure, but Nick at least, seems to practice his religion.  There is another Jewish character among the group of Marxists, Leo Rothenstein, whose Jewishness and the anti-Semitism he faces are mentioned frequently.