Excellent match of narrator and text

Bill Wallis deserves every praise and thanks for his narration of The Untouchable.

His Victor Maskill is simply far more interesting than the Victor Maskill I encountered when reading the book alone; Wallis conveys beautifully the humour, snobbery and tragedy in this most engaging of characters.

If you are a fan of Banville, then I would recommend this without hesitation.

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11 people found this helpful

What a breathtakingly perfect piece of work this is!

Flawless writing and exceptional performance. Such a beautiful description and interpretation of this languid, spoilt, entitled and thoroughly unpleasant character.

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3 people found this helpful

fantastic novel, beautifully read

Simply the best book i have listened to in 5yrs. John Banville’s prose flows with beauty, energy, comedy and is visually perfect. It’s like a wonderful sensitive screenplay. And it is enhanced by the thoughtful nuance and narration by Bill Wallis. This is an absolute gem of a novel.

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3 people found this helpful

Spying

A fictionalised Anthony Blunt is fabulously drawn by Banville’s dark poetic pen.
Beautiful prose, searing insight, I was heartbroken to finish, so I started all over again, easily. Perfect narration also.

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4 people found this helpful

Soothing writing about an alien world

The book seemed familiar to me, as if I’d read it before, although I know I haven’t. Gentlemen spies, Cold War, Oxbridge - the mannered shabby existence of people who don’t really have to worry about impoverishment because they are so well connected to power.

It was written in 2009, which doesn’t seem that long ago, and yet it seemed like writing of another time that is now gone.

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Well told story

Well written story, superb style but rather detached: in the end I wasn’t to bothered at what happened to these people - more of a report than a novel.
Bill Fraser was VERY good with subtle shifts distinguishing the many characters: believable accents and never a caricature.

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The Cambridge Set

A remarkable fiction based on true events in the fifties involving the network of British agents spying for Russia, based in London. It is beautifully, lyrically written but nevertheless I found it distasteful. The characters, masterfully drawn , are repellent in their treachery, their callous, cold-blooded, sneering attitude to others, their constant drunkenness and depravity. While it is a compelling read, it did seem overly long, perhaps because there was so little to admire about these blighted souls. That said, I would read anything else by this author.


Bill Wallis’s performance is a triumph in the art of bringing a book to life. What a happy gift!

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6 people found this helpful

Dull

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.

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A nest of gentlefolk who spy

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...

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12 people found this helpful

Superb narration, but a rambling collection of memories with lacklustre ending

Bill Wallis' narration brings to life this excellently written book. Written as a series of recollections from the life of a Russian spy, in a vaguely chronological order, it fails to deliver the excitement that such a life would be expected to provide. The rambling nature of the narrative and the lack of fully thrashed out explanations could leave the listener disappointed. The story did not earn the tension and drama portrayed in the final scene.

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2 people found this helpful