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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?
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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.