The story has its origins in the spy ring which grew out of Cambridge in the 1930s, and came into its own in the 50s and 60s, when everywhere the talk was of ‘reds under the bed’. Victor Maskell, the narrator (‘hero’ would be pushing it a bit too far), seems to be based on an amalgam of Anthony Blunt and Louis MacNiece, who knew each other at Marlborough public school, which Maskell also attends, although admittedly MacNiece was, in ‘real life’ as they call it, an Oxonian, and although he visited Spain with Auden, was never a committed Marxist, nor for that matter, a practising homosexual. Blunt, however, as we know, was both.
Other characters too are drawn from life, with Querell, for example, a thinly disguised Graham Greene. Indeed, Banville seems to indulge in some satiric flourishes at Greene’s expense, when he writes of Querell, ‘He was genuinely curious about people - the sure mark of the second-rate novelist.’ This is probably in revenge for Greene messing Banville around when he judged the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Awards, when the prize money nearly went to an unknown who was not on the shortlist.
As homosexual and as Marxist, Maskell is an Outsider, but as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Art Institute - an occasional guest at Windsor Castle even - he is an Insider. The book builds into a heady brew of political and sexual intrigue, where, as Maskell says, ‘the sex and the spying had sustained a kind of equilibrium, each a cover for the other.’
But, as always with Banville, the story is almost secondary to the sheer beauty of the language in which it is told. He could write about anything and make it interesting. On every page there is an image or an insight to drool over. Try phrases like these for size: ‘anyway, persons of her age are impervious to the tics and twitches by which the old betray the pain of their predicament’; or ‘My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.’
I foresee Booker nominations, glittering prizes. Or maybe it is even too good for those gaudy baubles, which are, after all, only literary lotteries. Whether it is commercially successful and generally recognised or not, The Untouchable expands an already awesome achievement in contemporary fiction, in which Banville reminds us, once again, what writing can do, and what it can be.

First published in The World of Hibernia