Work-life balance is important, and it’s crucial to seek light relief. When my children were young, I liked nothing better than to turn them out to play while I curled up with a giant book about the Nazis. These days, as I follow every twist and turn of our elections, with an eye on the circus that is American politics, I’ve made sure to vary the mood. This time, my light bedside reading has been all about the Soviets.
Before he won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea, Irish writer John Banville published The Untouchable, his brilliant fictional portrayal of the Cambridge spies. They were the five Englishmen who spied for the Soviet Union while working for British Intelligence after World War II. It’s a tale that feels relevant to the time, particularly because it involves spectacular demonstrations of mendacity and duplicity.
Banville based his character, Victor Maskell, on Anthony Blunt, adviser on art to the royals (with references to “Mrs W and her Ma”, and blackly laughing asides about their hats and their drinkies). Blunt was eventually outed as a member of the Cambridge spy ring.
There’s a character based on Guy Burgess, who defected to the Soviet Union along with fellow traitor, Donald Maclean. The writer Graham Greene appears as Querelle (a “second-rate novelist”, according to the acidic Victor Maskell), and there’s a figure based on mathematician Alan Turing.
The Untouchable has it all: beautiful prose, dark humour, and an elaborately sustained, imaginative evocation of history and character. Banville develops his own fictional take on unanswered questions, including whether there was a Sixth Man. After Burgess and Maclean defected to Russia, various senior spies drove themselves to insanity and paranoia trying to find out.
The most assiduous mole hunter was James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, who was said to have been traumatised by his association with Cambridge spy Kim Philby. Philby had risen to seniority in MI6 and, in an espionage coup, was responsible for handling operations relating to the Soviet Union.
I had only a vague notion of Philby before I read The Untouchable, and so, in the interests of recreation, I went looking for more detail. His story features in the recent TV drama A Spy Among Friends, which is based on the excellent book by British writer Ben Macintyre.
After Burgess and Maclean defected, Philby came under suspicion as their associate. It helped, he later said, that he was posh – as were most in MI6. Members of MI5, the agency that set out to unmask Philby, were traditionally of a lower social order and so, absurdly, MI6 closed ranks around their man Philby against the oiks in MI5.
At one point, Philby called a press conference in his mother’s flat to protest his innocence, and here’s something really fascinating. If you’re looking for light relief in these political times, you can watch Philby’s press appearance on YouTube. It’s a masterclass in charm, smoothness and barefaced lying. He would soon move to Beirut, acquire a pet fox called Jackie, live a life of soirees and embassy parties, and go on spying for the Russians until he was exposed all over again.
MI6 sent one of its own to interrogate Philby, infuriating MI5, and setting off another mystery when Philby managed to escape. He fled on a Russian freighter, to live out his days in Moscow.
He was recorded giving a guest lecture to the Stasi in East Berlin, and his advice on getting away with it could be useful for some of our politicians. Admit nothing. Stand by the numbers. The big thing is to brazen it out.
