The Untouchable (Hardcover)

"Who am I?" art historian Victor Maskell asks himself in this first-person narrative, crafted ostensibly for the benefit of an ersatz amanuensis in a leather skirt. "What do I know? What matters?"

Maskell, an essential outsider, has spent a lifetime using his studied charm, suppressed emotions, closeted homosexuality, and distant family connections to winnow a place for himself in the English establishment. It matters not that his marriage is a failure, that he is estranged from his children. Art, he concludes at one point - even the prized painting, attributed to Poussin, which has hung on his wall for 50 years - has no meaning; it simply is. The same, in his view, might be said of existence itself.

This passive and unexamined life comes apart after Maskell, once an amateur intelligence operative, is publicly disgraced for having passed information of questionable value ("state secrets," the press calls it) to wartime ally the Soviet Union (the "enemy"). Why did he do it? Certainly not for money. Was it for the cause of worldwide socialism? For personal amusement? To put on the mask of a man of action? To avenge the underclass? Or was it simply another form of casual duplicity, no different is substance from the duplicity of proper gentlemen who take mistresses or of friendly governments which destroy villages in order to save them?

Nothing is as it seems in this ambiguous, allusion-stocked, politically savvy, richly imagined life of Victor Maskell and his times. Robert E. Olsen

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"The Untouchable" is the first person narrative of Victor Maskell, Royalist and Marxist, art curator for the English monarchy and spy for the Soviet Union. Maskell's narrative begins in the 1980s, when he is in his seventies, sick with cancer. It is then that his past is suddenly and unexpectedly made public, the prominent, seemingly conservative intellectual revealed to be a man leading a double life, a traitor to his country. The reality, of course, is much more complex, for Maskell's motives, beliefs and actions, like those of all humans, are uncertain, clouded by conflicting memories, versions and perspectives. Married and the father of two children, Maskell is a homosexual. Ostensibly a Marxist and supporter of the great Soviet experiment, he is deeply attached to England and, in very personal ways, to the Royal family. Presumably acting for many years as a spy for the Soviets, the practical value of his activities is largely confined to being a symbolic trophy for his spymasters in the Kremlin, someone who rubs elbows with the highest levels of the British government while providing little in the way of truly useful information.

Drawing on the historical facts surrounding the Cambridge spies, "The Untouchable" is a brilliantly imagined, vividly realistic fictional memoir of the complex and often perplexing life of such a spy. Banville's prose is flawless, his narrative voice is always at perfect pitch, and his characters and story are a masterpiece of verisimilitude.

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