Literary The Untouchable by John Banville

[Bookpossum]

Thanks for these great links, Bookworm_Girl. Both fascinating. I hadn't realised that Blunt was a third cousin of the Queen-Mother, which goes some way to understanding how he was protected for so long. And I really enjoyed the Knightley article. So ironic that the spy world is so paranoid that they don't trust even their most valuable assets.

My copy has just arrived at last - hurrah! - so I shall start reading it today.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Thanks for these great links, Bookworm_Girl. Both fascinating. I hadn't realised that Blunt was a third cousin of the Queen-Mother, which goes some way to understanding how he was protected for so long. And I really enjoyed the Knightley article. So ironic that the spy world is so paranoid that they don't trust even their most valuable assets.

My copy has just arrived at last - hurrah! - so I shall start reading it today.

I find this subject extremely fascinating so I am reading A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre since it was available at my library. A light nonfiction read but still interesting.

Bookpossum, your statement reminded me of this quote in Macintyre's book.

The Cambridge spies—Guy Burgess in MI6, Donald Maclean in the Foreign Office, Anthony Blunt in MI5, John Cairncross in Bletchley Park, and Kim Philby in Section V—were producing top-level intelligence. But their very productivity posed a conundrum. In the insanely distrustful world of Soviet espionage, the quality, quantity, and consistency of this information rendered it suspect. A misgiving began to take root in Moscow that British intelligence must be mounting an elaborate, multilayered deception through Philby and his friends; they must all be double agents. Moreover, Philby’s story failed to meet firmly held Soviet preconceptions: MI6 was supposed to be impregnable, yet Philby had practically sauntered into the organization; he had been a left-winger at university, yet supposedly rigorous background checks had failed to pick this up; he had been asked to find evidence that his own father was a spy and had failed to do so. Was Philby a plant?

I also liked this one in relation to how reliable are Victor Maskell's memories in Banville's book.

Spies are particularly skilled at misremembering the past, and the protagonists in this story are all guilty, to some extent, of distorting their own histories.

Macintyre was looking for a different point of view for his book from the numerous others that have been published. He chose to focus on friendship and how they were able to deceive the system for so long. I thought Banville also did a great job of capturing these aspects in his fictional narrative. From the New York Times Book Review about Macintyre's book:

He has written a narrative about that most complex of topics, friendship: Why does it exist, what causes people to seek it and how do we know when it’s real? The world of upper-crust young Englishmen provides a rugged yet rewarding terrain for such an exploration. Taught on the playing fields of Eton to shield themselves from vulnerability, they mask their feelings for one another with jokes, cricket-watching, drinking and “a very distinctive brand of protective dishonesty.”

Macintyre also takes on a related subject: the tribal loyalties of the inbred social class, on the fraying fringe of Britain’s aristocracy, that nurtured such friendships, both real and feigned, and created the boys’ club that populated its foreign, colonial and intelligence services. Members harbored, Macintyre writes, “a shared set of assumptions about the world and their privileged place in it.” While watching the races at Ascot one day, Nick Elliott mentioned to a diplomat friend of his father, who was the headmaster of Eton, that he would like to be a spy. “I am relieved you have asked me for something so easy,” the diplomat replied, and Elliott was soon ensconced at MI6, Britain’s counterpart to the C.I.A.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I find this subject extremely fascinating so I am reading A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre since it was available at my library. A light nonfiction read but still interesting.

Macintyre was looking for a different point of view for his book from the numerous others that have been published. He chose to focus on friendship and how they were able to deceive the system for so long. I thought Banville also did a great job of capturing these aspects in his fictional narrative. From the New York Times Book Re.iew about Macintyre's book:

You have it exactly. I read A Spy Among Friends last year, and that was my main take-away - that Philby got away with it for so long, because of the feeling that it couldn't be him, he's one of us.

Banville expands on that idea with Maskell, who gets into the service because he is a scion of the establishment (son of a Church of Ireland bishop and cousin of the queen) and because his friends are already there to give him a hand up, although there is the sense that Maskell is on the fringe; there is the sense of the tension of never quite fitting-in “...felt keenly the insecurity of being outsiders”.

Maskell revels in the idea of being the insider, being in an inner circle of the inner circle: “We were latter-day Gnostics, keepers of a secret knowledge, for whom the world of appearances was only a gross manifestation of an infinitely subtler, more real reality known only to the chosen few… Thus, for us, everything was itself and at the same time something else. ”

[Bookpossum]

I have just managed to finish this, having taken far too long over it for various reasons, not least our adopting a dog last week!

I enjoyed it very much indeed. I really liked Banville's writing style and I thought the ending was terrific.

I find it hard to get my mind around the apparent fact that these men could go on spying for the USSR when they knew the dreadful things that were happening under Stalin, and the terrible fate that awaited those who were summoned to return after some blunder, real or perceived.

I understand how they could get pulled in back in the 1930s with fascism on the rise and their own country standing by and doing nothing, when the ideals of Communism sounded so wonderful to a socialist. But to have even a slight idea of the horrors being perpetrated and to continue to support the system? It is beyond my comprehension.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I understand how they could get pulled in back in the 1930s with fascism on the rise and their own country standing by and doing nothing, when the ideals of Communism sounded so wonderful to a socialist. But to have even a slight idea of the horrors being perpetrated and to continue to support the system? It is beyond my comprehension.

It was like a religious faith for some people. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn remained a member of the British Communist Party until it dissolved in 1991.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/200...graphy.history

[issybird]

Originally Posted by bfisher

It was like a religious faith for some people. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn remained a member of the British Communist Party until it dissolved in 1991.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/200...graphy.history

This is probably an American thing, but in the ongoing feud between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman (Team Mary, here), both "pink" back in the day, one of McCarthy's charges against Hellman was that she didn't repudiate the Party when the information about the show trials came out.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks for the article link bfisher - interesting to read. Hobsbawm, Thompson and Hill are all good historians IMO, having had occasion to read one or more books by each of them when I was studying history.

Interesting too about Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, issybird. Not something I was aware of, though I remember being impressed by Scoundrel Time when I read it. Maybe Hellman portrayed herself as more heroic than she was, though it read as if it was true.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I have just managed to finish this, having taken far too long over it for various reasons, not least our adopting a dog last week!

I enjoyed it very much indeed. I really liked Banville's writing style and I thought the ending was terrific.

I find it hard to get my mind around the apparent fact that these men could go on spying for the USSR when they knew the dreadful things that were happening under Stalin, and the terrible fate that awaited those who were summoned to return after some blunder, real or perceived.

I understand how they could get pulled in back in the 1930s with fascism on the rise and their own country standing by and doing nothing, when the ideals of Communism sounded so wonderful to a socialist. But to have even a slight idea of the horrors being perpetrated and to continue to support the system? It is beyond my comprehension.

Congratulations on adopting a dog.

I too have just finished this book after taking too long to receive it from the library and then what seemed like an inordinate amount of time to read it as well.

Support of communism as an ideal versus how it panned out in practice are two entirely separate issues. What happened with fascism was not communism really, but that is all I am going to say on this outside of many political and religious systems could work well in an ideal state, but when you add real people, well there's your trouble.

I really enjoyed the writing style and the story. A really nice book club selection.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks HomeInMyShoes! Yes, I agree - the ideals sound great, but in practice ... As they say about democracy, it can be a bit of a shambles, but it's the least worst system we have managed to come up with.

[caleb72]

I didn't comment on this earlier, but one of the things that I found fascinating about this book was how much I received reverberations of Greene's Our Man in Havanna and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Did anyone else feel the tremors?

I got some of that gentlemanly spy element that Greene capitalised on in his portrayals, but also a wistful nostalgia in the relating of Maskell's entry into a new world.

[Bookpossum]

Interesting connections there, caleb72. I must confess I haven't yet read Our Man in Havana but I can certainly see the link to Greene's world of spies. And there are definitely common themes in Brideshead Revisited and The Untouchable. The world of privilege side by side with the dangers of being a homosexual at a time when it was still a crime.

Thanks for the thought and it remind me to get back to reading more Greene!

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by caleb72

I didn't comment on this earlier, but one of the things that I found fascinating about this book was how much I received reverberations of Greene's Our Man in Havanna and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Did anyone else feel the tremors?

I haven't yet read Our Man in Havanna. Like you, I was reminded of Brideshead Revisited when reading The Untouchable. There are a lot of similiarities between Charles Ryder and Victor Maskell - the sense of someone on the fringe of but not quite within the charmed circle, a social climber and a snob.

In both cases, the protagonist is an unlikeable character - particularly vile in the case of Maskell, a man who cannot bear physical contact with his children. That Waugh and Banville can make us interested in their fate says something about their writing ability.

I think there are also some echoes of A Dance To The Music Of Time, especially the repeated references to Poussin.