In a spy’s sly smile a book was born. Five days after being exposed in the House of Commons as the Fourth Man in the Cambridge spy ring in November 1979, Anthony Blunt – KCVO, renowned art historian, Surveyor of the Royal Collection and director of the Courtauld Institute – gave a press interview screened on TV. I remember it well: the cadaverous figure in a houndstooth jacket sitting defensively hunched as he attempted to justify his treachery in such patrician tones as further to inflame national outrage. For the public, Blunt was worse than a traitor. He was a traitorous toff.
Among those watching the interview was the writer John Banville. He noted that before questioning began Blunt, unaware he was on camera, allowed himself a quiet smile. Banville said later it was the look of a man with little to fear. For decades, Blunt had deftly handled both his Soviet minders and his MI5 interrogators. What threat could be presented by these journalists feeding on the carcass of his reputation? For Banville, that slip of the mask was the birth of a remarkable roman-à-clef, The Untouchable.
The book, published in 1997, is the memoir of Victor Maskell as he looks back with unsparing candour on a life of duplicity, delusion and emotional desiccation, his only passion the love of art. Like Blunt, his upper middle-class trajectory moves from Marxist enthusiasm at Cambridge in the ’30s, to recruitment by the Soviets, war- time work for MI5 dovetailing with espionage for Stalin, post-war eminence and final disgrace. Like Blunt, too, Maskell is the son of a churchman, gay, distantly related to the Royal Family and a distinguished expert on the seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin.
Banville builds on these parallels, buttressin
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Subscribe now or Sign inIn a spy’s sly smile a book was born. Five days after being exposed in the House of Commons as the Fourth Man in the Cambridge spy ring in November 1979, Anthony Blunt – KCVO, renowned art historian, Surveyor of the Royal Collection and director of the Courtauld Institute – gave a press interview screened on TV. I remember it well: the cadaverous figure in a houndstooth jacket sitting defensively hunched as he attempted to justify his treachery in such patrician tones as further to inflame national outrage. For the public, Blunt was worse than a traitor. He was a traitorous toff.
Among those watching the interview was the writer John Banville. He noted that before questioning began Blunt, unaware he was on camera, allowed himself a quiet smile. Banville said later it was the look of a man with little to fear. For decades, Blunt had deftly handled both his Soviet minders and his MI5 interrogators. What threat could be presented by these journalists feeding on the carcass of his reputation? For Banville, that slip of the mask was the birth of a remarkable roman-à-clef, The Untouchable. The book, published in 1997, is the memoir of Victor Maskell as he looks back with unsparing candour on a life of duplicity, delusion and emotional desiccation, his only passion the love of art. Like Blunt, his upper middle-class trajectory moves from Marxist enthusiasm at Cambridge in the ’30s, to recruitment by the Soviets, war- time work for MI5 dovetailing with espionage for Stalin, post-war eminence and final disgrace. Like Blunt, too, Maskell is the son of a churchman, gay, distantly related to the Royal Family and a distinguished expert on the seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin. Banville builds on these parallels, buttressing them with camouflaged portrayals of Blunt’s contemporaries, to explore guilt and morality, loyalty and betrayal, and, most teasingly of all, identity. However, Maskell’s opaque character presents so many contrary faces – husband, father and homosexual; a Marxist who despises the Soviet Union; a member of the establishment who seeks to undermine it; a distinguished intellectual who cherishes his reputation yet persists in the hazard that will destroy it – that identity is elusive. Following his public shaming, Maskell allows himself to be questioned by a young freelancer, Serena Vandeleur, who wants to write his biography. It does not take long for ‘Miss V’ to blurt out the mystery at the heart of the book: ‘Why did you do it?’ Maskell, for whom ‘there are no simple questions and precious few answers, if any’, tries to fob her off with parables of philosophy and art. But, inevitably, he asks the question of himself. And so, to plumb the enigma of his own multiple identities (‘Did I call it a double life? Quadruple – quintuple more like’), he retraces the steps that led to his fall. The story is told in Banville’s typically fastidious prose adorned with glorious metaphors and similes. Sardonic scepticism mixes with self-mockery, irony and a mordant wit which, incidentally, makes this a very funny book indeed. Maskell’s treachery is hatched at Cambridge where a clutch of youthful intellectuals, contemptuous of establishment complacency in the face of rising fascism in Europe, are seduced by Marxism and the ‘workers’ paradise’ of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Looking back, Maskell marvels at the naïvety and self-interest of these earnest neophytes. Most have only the slimmest grasp of political theory, and preaching the gospel of solidarity with the toiling masses in no way interferes with a seemingly endless round of well-lubricated parties. ‘Behind all our frivolity’, says Maskell, ‘there operated the stern conviction that the world must be changed and that we were the ones that would do it.’ But he is too austere to join the horny-handed on their protest marches, too cynical to trust in the triumph of morality, too deflected from the political struggle by the surface glitter of his brittle Waughian society. Is his youthful fervour for Marxism merely another form of his Anglo-Irish father’s Church of Ireland faith? Is he rebelling against the older generation’s supineness at a time of crisis? The truth, he concludes, is less forgiving: ‘It was all selfishness, of course. We did not care a damn about the world, much as we might shout about freedom and justice and the plight of the masses. All selfishness.’ Despite his corroding scepticism, the young Maskell doggedly clings to his belief in Marxism and in 1936 is introduced to a Soviet handler by a fellow student and mathematician Alastair Sykes, loosely based on Alan Turing. A visit to Mother Russia follows in the company of the louche, drunken and promiscuously gay ‘Boy’ Bannister, a terrifically entertaining portrayal of the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, who defected to Moscow with the diplomat and fellow agent Donald Maclean in 1951. On his last night in Moscow, Maskell is driven to the Kremlin to meet stocky, monoglot comrades in shiny suits who fuel him with vodka, shake him solemnly by the hand, then dispatch him to foment the revolution of the proletariat. It is his imprimatur as a Comintern agent. Appalled by the obvious deprivation and atmosphere of fear, Maskell condemns Stalin’s Russia as a doomed and ‘horrible’ place, ‘a big old dying dog . . . barking its last barks’. He never joins the Communist Party. But, bruised as it is, his political faith persists and on the outbreak of war he loyally supplies his Soviet masters with increasingly valuable information after joining MI5. For his blinkered British recruiters, his establishment pedigree is sufficient proof of his reliability. Disingenuous as ever, Maskell maintains to an incredulous Vandeleur: ‘I did not spy for the Russians. I spied for Europe. A much broader church.’ The deception of his double life, the thrill of risk and fear of discovery, are mirrored in the perils attendant on Maskell’s closet homosexuality at a time when gay sex is illegal. Impetuously, he marries ‘Baby’, the sophisticated, yet fragile sister of his friend Nick Brevoort. Both soon live separate lives. However, we have to wait until three-quarters of the way through the book before ‘Shivershanks’, as Boy mischievously calls him, loses his homosexual virginity to working-class Danny. From the confusion of his fissiparous identity, Maskell plucks the lonely truth that ‘art was the only thing in my life that was untainted’ and Poussin the ‘singular, unchanging wholly authentic thing’. For him, objects are ever more important than people. Aided by wealthy Leo Rothenstein, he buys Poussin’s Death of Seneca (Blunt borrowed money pre-war from Victor Rothschild, on whom Rothenstein is based, to buy the artist’s unattributed Eliezer and Rebecca). In Poussin’s precise and rather icy works, where clarity and order take precedence over the decorative, Maskell sees a pattern of himself, a Stoic with a ‘rage for calm’. Yet he asks if even his own under- standing of art is another piece of fakery; if what he sees in art is not there or, if it is, has he put it there himself? The question reflects his doubts over the reality of his own beliefs. ‘Have I any authenticity at all?’ he wonders. ‘Or have I double dealt for so long that my true self has been forfeit?’ In a further twist of deception, he is told that even his prized Seneca may be a forgery. He refuses to countenance the possibility. With the war over, the comrades have little use for Maskell but keep him in play. Trusted by the Palace through his work with the Royal Collection, he travels to West Germany to retrieve potentially embarrassing documents from distant relations of the Windsors. Maskell successfully obliges – ‘I am a staunch Royalist, as all good Marxists are at heart’ – and on his return is rewarded with the position of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. To his relief, his life as a spy is seemingly over and his position in the establishment is cemented by a knighthood. Then, one summer’s evening, he sees a splurge of crushed chalk on the pavement. It is a signal summoning him to contact his Soviet handler. There is one last service to the great cause to perform: ‘Boy’ and the dour figure of fellow spy Philip MacLeish (Maclean) are in danger of being hauled in by the security services. Maskell drives them to catch the ferry to Dieppe on the first stage of their flight to Moscow and returns to burn incriminating evidence littering Boy’s flat. Soon after, his own interrogation by MI5 begins. In the closing pages, Banville serves up a delicious final betrayal. The Untouchable is an arrestingly clever book; an exquisitely writ ten portrait of an age and a class, a study of shifting realities and the unreliability of belief. Banville cites three books on the Cambridge spies he used in research. Since then, the release of material following the collapse of the Soviet empire and the willingness of the old spook’s friends and colleagues finally to talk more openly about the past, have resulted in Miranda Carter’s 2001 biography, Anthony Blunt: His Lives. It is a tribute to Banville that the enigmatic, many- layered figure portrayed by Carter so closely resembles Maskell in the contradictions and compartmentalizations of his life. As Maskell says: ‘In reality all that I am is all of a piece: all of a piece yet broken up into a myriad selves. Does that make sense?’Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Patrick Welland 2026
About the contributor
Patrick Welland is a retired Fleet Street journalist with a particular fascination for Cold War spooks. He prefers dead-letter drops to email.
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