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Format: Paperback
ISBN-10: 0786212136
ISBN-13: 9780786212132
Jan 1998
Publisher: Random House Inc
577 pages
Large Print
THORNDIKE PRESS LARGE PRINT BUCKINGHAMS
Language: English |
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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* ML=ships from multiple locations, AE/AP/AA=ships from U.S. Military location.
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Synopsis
John Banville's novel about an Englishman who was recruited to be a spy for the Soviets at Cambridge in the '30s is based on the true story of Sir Anthony Blunt. As in so much of Banville's fiction, the central theme is truth vs. falsehood: the difficulty of distinguishing between them, and the possibility that a person can virtually cease to exist when he becomes too bound up with lies. Victor Maskell, despite his life of duplicity and betrayal, is an immensely appealing and fascinating character.
| Details | | Series: | THORNDIKE PRESS LARGE PRINT BUCKINGHAMS |
| Size | | Length: | 577 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 25.6 oz |
Industry Reviews
"As a slice of history, 'Untouchable' is never less than masterly....[T]he portraits in 'The Untouchable' are notable for their relentlessly skewering brilliance. Phrase after phrase pins a character to the page, summons a sky, a view, a moment out of time, with a breathtaking sureness of touch. Banville's narrator has a fine eye...and paints an astounding word picture, but only the author's genius can account for the music of 'The Untouchable's' prose. Here, in top form, is as remarkable a literary voice as any to have come out of Ireland, Joyce and Beckett notwithstanding....[T]his is Banville's slyest, funniest book, less a historical investigation than a series of comic tours de force, faultless in their period detail."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Carey Harrison (05/04/1997)
"The first thing to be noticed about this enthralling novel is that it is properly written: John Banville's prose is clear, fluent, and possessed of authentic energy....John Banville has pulled off a marvellous series of tricks, leaving us all returned to our own belief or disbelief..."
Spectator - Anita Brookner (04/26/1997)
"Banville manages to convey the coldness and Olympian arrogance that even his friends detected at the heart of Anthony Blunt, yet at the same time graces him with an odd vulnerability and camp charm....After his exposure as a spy, Blunt is said to have written 30,000 words of his memoirs, before abandoning them in disgust. But I doubt they would have told us much more about the mentality of the great British traitor than 'The Untouchable'."
Literary Review - Robert Harris (05/19/1997)
"One of the finest stylists at work in the English language, [Banville] has woven [his] ideas into morally complex stories about violence and passion, guilt and redemption....There is much...to celebrate in this extraordinary book: prose of a glorious verve and originality, in the service of a richly painted portrait of a man and a period and a society and a political order--the whole governed by an exquisite thematic design. Contemporary fiction gets no better than this."
New York Times Book Review - Patrick McGrath (06/07/1997)
"...'The Untouchable' takes as its theme the psychology and the natural history of treachery and the treacherous person....The novel, as a case history, is anticlimactic, and yet just as Joyce is never banal as he explores the dailiness of our daily routines, so Banville is never boring as he leads us from day to day through the dreary corridors of espionage....Banville's books are not only an illumination to read--for they are always packed with information and learning--but a joyful and durable source of aesthetic satisfaction."
New York Review of Books - John Bayley (05/29/1997)
"...Maskell is more than a thinly veiled Blunt..., and the book is much more than a roman à clef....[It] is as much a social history and a comedy of manners as it is a novel of espionage, Jane Austen by way of Quentin Crisp and John le Carre....Victor Maskell is one of the great characters in recent fiction....The ultimate unreliable narrator, he is a brilliant and sophisticated man who devotes his life to lies and betrayals, only to realize much too late just whom he is betraying."
Washington Post Book World - James Hynes (05/04/1997)
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