A Spycatching Novel

...The novel constitutes an apologia pro vita sua and a belated attempt to understand and come to terms with the contradictory qualities in his own character...

...The British appear to see it as a metaphor for national decline, the worm in the bud eating away at the spirit of the intellectual and ruling class that should have acted as England's will and conscience...

...Like Blunt, Maskell is a homosexual...

...Victor Maskell is a disgraced, frail, elderly man...

...It seems to me that there ought to be at least some areas into which the artist's license is not allowed to intrude...

...There is no convincing evidence that Blunt's Marxism was anything but a youthful fad...

...Here is Maskell on George VI: "I wondered if he had any queer leanings—I haven't known a royal yet who did not...

...I shall strip away layer after layer of grime...

...The central enigma of Blunt's life, then, the question of why someone showered with every gift his country had to bestow chose to betray that country, is not really very mystifying...

...His mother's son...

...nevertheless, with the possible exception of Anthony Blunt, they were a seedy, nasty lot...

...Banville opens The Untouchable in the 1970s...

...In Post-Imperial England, always seeking the reasons for its loss of international prestige, few stories have possessed the collective imagination as tenaciously as the saga of the 1930s Cambridge spy ring...

...The reader is made aware of this lack almost from the first page of the narrative when Maskell, allowing that he rather wishes his children would call to commiserate with him in his disgrace, says, "Yet I am not at all sure I would want to hear Blanche sniffing and Julian tightening his lips at me down the line...

...He has always felt, he declares, "a lack of something in me, something perfectly ordinary, the common fellow-feeling that others seem to come by naturally...

...Maskell records only two genuine loves in his life...

...accused of conspiracy, he was ordered to commit suicide...

...It is not difficult to see why, before the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the young believed it was the Soviets, not the dithering and quarrelsome governments of England and France, who would stand up to an increasingly aggressive Hitler...

...It was during his youthful period that the Soviets recruited him, however, and as a result he and his beautifully constructed life were forever at their mercy...

...Still, the figure of the Communist/esthete, the royalist/spy, is a compelling one...

...To what purpose...

...In the meantime he marries and fathers two children, feeling all the while an unnatural disaffection from his own family and from the idea of family life in general...

...England's ongoing romance with the idea of the Cambridge spies has imbued them with a certain glamour...

...In contrast to the down-at-heel Philby or the alcoholic Maclean, Blunt, director of the Courtauld Institute and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, had everything to lose: the work he loved and did so brilliantly, an exalted position at the very top of the academic heap, a knighthood, and an honorary fellowship...

...I realize," he writes, explaining his decision to offer a personal accounting, "that the metaphor is obvious: attribution, verification, restoration...

...This is more than simply a gripping story...

...Banville has the advantage of being able to employ the actual events of a person's life, or of altering them whenever he wants to...

...In fictionalizing Blunt as Victor Maskell, John Banville has changed some of Blunt's circumstances to stress that this spy, on the surface the quintessential insider, is nonetheless an outsider...

...I wonder why, in a legal system where Stephen Spender, alive, could successfully sue an author who made his life the basis for a novel, someone who is dead is considered fair game...

...The art historian correctly recognizes his relationship with Nick as that of Psyche and Narcissus, with Psyche kneeling humbly and holding up the mirror that reveals Narcissus' image for the world's inspection...

...The question of how he could be a Communist as well seems to me a moot one...

...unlike Blunt, he does not face that fact until midlife...

...It happens that Banville treats Blunt quite reasonably...

...posterity will just have to take it on trust...

...How is it possible that this most effete of intellectuals—connoisseur of the beautiful and the rare, expert on 17th-century French painting, unabashed snob who reveled in his connections with the royal family—could be a lifelong committed Communist...

...True, during the '30s he took briefly to writing Marxist art criticism, but those efforts were slightly ridiculous, unconvincing even to his friends...

...It has become one of the great cautionary narratives of the century, a soap opera to which the entire nation remains addicted...

...the search for the elusive "Third Man," finally identified as Kim Philby, a British intelligence officer who was liaison to the CIA...

...Where I believe he becomes truly vindictive—indeed libelous, if the men in question were still alive—is in rendering as Soviet spies two characters clearly based on Graham Greene and Victor Rothschild...

...I was thinking especially of those summer camps for working-class lads of which he was so enthusiastic a supporter...

...Why introduce the real Greene and Rothschild when wholly invented characters could have served in their place...

...I suppose all fathers say that...

...Most readers seem to have no problem accepting the popular practice of turning real people into fictional characters and making them act, feel and speak in ways they never did...

...Though both the real spy and his fictional counterpart are the sons of Protestant clergymen, again unlike Blunt, Maskell is an Irishman...

...He is very clever, too, at getting across the tiniest nuances of behavior that give away the most deeply buried emotions: Although none of Maskell's friends, nor even Maskell himself, would judge the driving force of his life to be rage, the reader is subtly made aware that this is the case...

...Most young people feel disgust at what they view as the "Establishment," and in the Europe of Blunt's youth—an era of Depression and hunger marches, of Fascist thuggery and craven appeasement by democratic governments—it was easy to harbor such disgust...

...No, Anthony Blunt's life was without doubt that of the prototypical esthete and elitist...

...The implied assumption within the system that British amateurs would prove equal to dealing with seasoned foreign professionals tells us far more about the reasons for national decline than does the existence, and the uncovering, of a few well-born traitors...

...The painting is Maskell's lifelong companion, but in the end it proves, no less than Nick, to be a probable fake...

...But no one, not even the capable John Banville, has ever been able to make those who didn't know the dirty and drunken Burgess really believe in the charm he was said to have exerted...

...From the outset Nick accepts his admirer's homage without giving much in return, even when Maskell tries, and fails, to approximate the desired intimacy by marrying Nick's sister...

...I myself am sometimes disturbed by this...

...Here, too, the symbolism is perfectly obvious to him: Seneca, a Spaniard raised in Rome, amassed a fortune while professing to despise material things...

...And his childhood is drawn less from Blunt's than from that of his close school friend Louis MacNeice...

...Despite its instances of artistic and historical dishonesty— and there are quite a few—The Untouchable is a triumph of construction and fine writing...

...Or on the body odor of Boy Bannister, the fictional version of Guy Burgess: "body grime, garlic, a rancid, cheesy something the possible sources of which the mind did not care to seek after...

...The character is already emerging: a man not completely devoid of gentler feelings but blighted by a fatal chilliness...

...Since his treason is public and he has nothing further to lose, he decides to tell his story...

...the unmasking of a fourth man in the person of Sir Anthony Blunt, a central figure of the British Establishment and frequent guest at Buckingham Palace...

...Now, nearly a quarter-century after Blunt's exposure, his life has been fictionalized by Irish novelist John Banville in The Untouchable (Knopf, 368 pp.,S25.00...

...Banville's use of the English language is masterful, and from that perspective the novel is a pleasure to read...

...Probably Blunt, influenced by the antinationalist ethos among the Cambridge Apostles of whom he was a member, and in the thrall of his glamorous and unsavory friend Guy Burgess, became a Marxist, signed on with the Soviets in a moment of derring-do, and spent a lifetime regretting that step...

...Ultimately, their exposure revealed not so much the worm in the bud of the Establishment—for doesn't every generation nurture such worms?—as the amateurishness of the Military Intelligence system in wartime and postwar England...

...An art historian trained to read symbols, Maskell is the first to understand the ironies and metaphors in his own situation...

...It is not surprising that Blunt should prove an irresistible psychological puzzle...

...One is his Cambridge friend Nick Brevoort, a handsome heterosexual, ambitious and unintellectual, who reaches a position of great political eminence by the time of Maskell ? exposure...

...Maskell's second love object is a Poussin painting of the death of Seneca...

...Banville can also be extremely funny...

...As he must have feared would happen if the truth came out, in the end, he was stripped of it all...

...Many documentary studies have been done on the Cambridge spies, and their treasonous escapades have inspired several imaginative works, including the films Another Country and Coral Browne's brilliant An Englishman Abroad, a dramatization of her encounter with the down-but-never-quite-out Burgess chafing in dreary Moscow exile...

...Each detail is simultaneously appalling and delicious: the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean...