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The Untouchable

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The Untouchable

By: John Banville
Narrated by: Bill Wallis
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About this listen

Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons, the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his photograph is all over the papers. His disgrace is public, his position as curator of the Queen’s pictures terminated… Maskell writes his own testament, in an act not unlike the restoration of one of his beloved pictures, in order for the process of verification and attribution to begin.

©1997 John Banville (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Espionage Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Fiction Imperialism
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I usually enjoy Banville books but I’ve struggled with this one. It’s well narrated, well written but I just can’t engage with any of the characters or the plot. I realise it’s woven around fact and Blunt, but it’s dull.

Dull

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Bill Wallis's performance is perfect. He manages just the right hint of Irishness in the voice of an Anglo-Irishman of the Anglican ascendency origins educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, with that gentle increase in accent when he's recounting events that occurred in his native island. (This delighted me, it's just so natural for us Scots, too!)
I think I could have got too irritated with the unreliable narration of this deeply unpleasant protagonist if I'd just read the book; Bill Wallis made him human.
The prose, of course, is elegant and witty, the characters as exotic as Waugh's Flyte family, to postwar eyes. Or maybe not, thinking of our present government (no implication they're spying for Putin!).
Oh, what a tangled web we weave...

A nest of gentlefolk who spy

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I haven't come across a Banville novel yet that I didn't like. It was made all the better by the great performance.

Good book, well performed.

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The narrator had a great feel for the moral ambiguity of the main characters. Their cynical approach to betrayal of a system of which they were the main beneficiaries.

The tremendous description of how the upper classes lived and enjoyed the war in their bubble.

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This is one of the best books I've listened to on Audible. It is an astonishing piece of imagination on John Banville's part and it should certainly have won the Booker Prize in 1997 (it went to Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things"). Bill Wallis' narration complements the wonderful prose and brings the various characters to life. Highly recommended.

A Superb Novel

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