There's enough good prose in this novel to recommend it, but the story itself isn't all that engaging. It's a fictionalized, first-person account of the loyalties, politics, and lifestyles of the Cambridge spies in the time before and during World War II, told from present-day perspective by Walter Maskell, a spy just exposed as a double agent for Russia. Maskell is a wonderful narrator at times, especially early and late, but for long stretches he becomes overly dry and removed and too given to uninteresting details, bouts of showy erudition, and overuse of words like truculent and crapulous. He might have set a record for litotes, too, with phrases like, "...but I will not pretend that I was not on the whole content with the arrangement." I wasn't a fan of the cumulative irony of the book, either; it felt emptily obligatory. But there is, as I said, enough good writing to offset those flaws:
- Strange creatures, children. That wary look they have when adults are about, as if they are worrying whether they are doing a convincing enough impersonation of what we expect them to be. The nineteenth century invented childhood and now the world is full of child actors.
- When was the last time I wept? There was Patrick's death, of course, but that does not count—death does not count, when it comes to weeping.
- There was simple delight in it, of course [...] but also a sort of grim, sad triumph, as if he had caught out the Creator in some impressive yet essentially shoddy piece of fakery.
- I suspect he knew how much I hate my name—only bandleaders and petty crooks are called Victor—for he used it at every opportunity.
- Violence by proxy, that is the thing: stimulating, satisfying, safe.
- He had even taught himself the Irish language, and could swear in it—though to my ears, I confess, the language in general sounds like a string of softly vehement oaths strung haphazardly together.
- He is pacing up and down the room, dropping cigarette ash on the threadbare carpet, telling us, as I have heard him tell many times before, of the event that, so he insisted, had made him a homosexual.
"God, it was frightful! There she was, poor Mother, flat on her back with her legs in the air, shrieking, and my huge father lying naked on top of her, dead as a doornail. I had a hell of a job getting him off her. The smells! Twelve years old, I was. Haven't been able to look at a woman since without seeing Mater's big white breasts, colour of a fish's belly. The paps that gave me suck. In dreams those nipples still stare up at me cock-eyed. No Oedipus I, or Hamlet, either, that's certain. When she threw off her widow's weeds and remarried I felt only relief." - Do not imagine, Miss Vandeleur, that Marxists, at least the ones of my variety, are gregarious. Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.
- I confess I derived a certain nasty enjoyment from the task of censoring the men's letters home; a prurient interest in other people's privacy is one of the first requirements for a good spy. But this pleasure soon palled. I have a high regard for the English fighting man—I do, really—but his prose style, I am afraid, is not among his more admirable qualities. ("Dear Mavis, What a crummy place this
Bologne is. Frogs everywhere and not a decent pint to be had. Are you wearing your lacy knickers tonight I wonder? Not a sign of Jerry"—the excisions, of course, are the work of my blue pencil.) - Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.
- More heresy, I know, more apostasy; soon I shall have no beliefs left at all, only a cluster of fiercely held denials.
- The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamoring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear.
- Nick does not really laugh, it is only a noise that he makes which he has learned to imitate from others.
Despite touches like these, and despite how well researched the book seems to be, at certain points I found myself thinking I'd rather be reading a nonfiction account of these spies instead and cut out the middle man.
pixote | | The Untouchable (John Banville, 1997) Grade: B- |