Quote:
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. ”