Chris Petit
THE UNTOUCHABLE by John Banville (Picador, R118)
DISSECTING English characteristics of deceit and betrayal, John Banville locates their impulse not in any grand theorising but in a peculiarly English need for amusement and a corresponding fear of boredom.
In one sense, The Untouchable is about dressing up. Victor Maskell – Banville’s fictional version of Anthony Blunt, whose exposure and retrospective memoirs form the spine of the story – confides how great acting lay at the heart of his dissembling, plus the ability to dress the part to perfection.
The Untouchable is an autopsy of a certain kind of Englishness, performed notably by an Irishman unstinting in his use of the scalpel. Although it’s hard to separate Banville’s voice from that of Maskell, one senses a tinge of envy for the subject being dissected, for that English certainty about what – rather than who – one is, and the capacities for supreme selfishness and disingenuous behaviour that turn the world into an adventure story.
Banville, like Maskell, sets out to distinguish between form and content in English life. Given so much class dressing, much remains hidden and in need of explanation. As a guide to the nuances of the upper reaches of the system, with its casual anti-Semitism and irony gone to seed, this is faultless.
Most accounts of English betrayal identify the double life and leave it at that. Banville reckons it quadruple and even quintuple, the attraction being that in the midst of such uncertainty, “you are never required to be yourself”.
A mark of the novel’s greatness is that it can be approached from many angles: as an impeccable act of ventriloquism; as a socio-political novel; as a thesis on camp and stoicism. It also has many amusing sideswipes – in TS Eliot’s “camel-eyed gaze” is seen the mark of a lifelong, obsessive dissembler.
If the book has a villain it is Querell, clearly a portrait of Graham Greene. In the world that lies behind appearances, Querell is the worst thing of all: a fraud.