The Untouchable was published by Picador in 1997. Victor Maskell is a composite figure based primarily on Anthony Blunt — the distinguished art historian who served as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures while secretly working as a Soviet spy from the 1930s until his exposure in 1979. The novel is his memoir, written after disgrace, an attempt to explain how a man of such refined aesthetic sensibility could also betray his country.
Banville’s genius is to recognize that the spy story is fundamentally a story about aesthetics: Blunt and his Cambridge circle were drawn to communism not through working-class solidarity (which they could barely comprehend) but through an intellectual abstraction — a vision of historical necessity that appealed to the same part of the mind that responded to Poussin’s classical compositions. The spy’s double life is also an artist’s life: maintaining surfaces, constructing personas, living in the gap between appearance and reality.
The novel is densely intertextual — Blunt’s scholarship on Poussin, his friendships with Burgess and MacLean, his relationship with the Queen, the moral atmosphere of 1930s Cambridge — and Banville handles the historical material with extraordinary assurance. But The Untouchable is not a historical novel in any conventional sense: it uses history to explore questions about identity, loyalty, and the relationship between beauty and truth that have preoccupied Banville throughout his career.
Collecting The Untouchable
First edition (Picador, London, 1997): Paperback original in the UK, though some hardback copies exist as proofs or special editions.
Market values:
- UK hardback first (if extant), fine/fine: $100–$250
- US first (Knopf, 1997), fine/fine: $30–$75
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
The Fourth Man
The Untouchable (1997) is a fictionalized account of the life of Anthony Blunt, the art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures who was exposed in 1979 as the “fourth man” in the Cambridge spy ring (alongside Philby, Burgess, and Maclean). Banville’s Victor Maskell is a brilliant, closeted gay man whose treachery is inseparable from his aesthetic sensibility — he betrays his country with the same detached connoisseurship with which he judges paintings. The novel is one of the finest spy fictions ever written, and Banville handles the intersection of espionage, art, sexuality, and class with characteristic intelligence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this historically accurate? The broad outlines follow Blunt’s life, but Banville freely invents dialogue, motivations, and relationships. It is a novel, not a biography, and should be read as Banville’s meditation on betrayal and the aesthetics of secrecy.