The Untouchable.

• Author: Decter, Midge

On the copyright page of John Banville's The Untouchable, its American publisher provides the requisite "Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data" as follows: "Espionage, Soviet - Great Britain - History - Twentieth century - Fiction." The book is a novel, one of several by Mr. Banville, and yet as Knopf's classification suggests (and as it seems, in keeping with the literary rage these days), it is not to be taken as a novel only. For the book purports to be a first-person memoir by an aging gentleman who is beyond any doubt the late Anthony Blunt, prestigious British art historian, familiar at Windsor Castle, one-time official of the British counter-intelligence service, receiver of a knighthood, pederast, and Soviet spy.

In the novel, Blunt's name is Victor Maskell, and to be sure, some elements of his story are fictional. Maskell is, for instance, Irish. He marries and fathers two children, which as far as the world knows Blunt never did, and he provides an account of his homosexual deflowering, so to speak, followed by various sordid sexual escapades that are, as applied to the real Blunt, not necessarily unconvincing yet merely suppositions. But for the rest, Banville is at little pains to disguise who his hero and his hero's friends and associates are intended to be, particularly Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who along with Kim Philby and, many years later, Blunt himself, were to be exposed as having been longtime Soviet espionage agents.

The fact about this particular spy ring that proved so helpfully chastening to some and deeply disconcerting to others - and hence the subject of much speculation and innumerable fascinating books - is that these particular spies, most especially Guy Burgess, had in the first place been able to achieve high positions in British intelligence circles. For, given their taste for drunken dissipation, they might never have made it into positions of trust, and once there might have been far more readily caught, had it not been for the fact that as Cambridge men - gentlemen who, however dissolute and scandalous, maintained their connection to the best circles - they were automatically granted enormous latitude by the establishment. They were not even "vetted" - a process known to Americans as security clearance. (In the United States something of a parallel to this treatment was given to Alger Hiss. But whereas Burgess, Maclean, and Philby made some contribution to British mental health by running off to the Soviet Union when they knew they had been exposed, Hiss insisted on his innocence until the day of his death, thereby making it possible for a certain number of Americans to remain in a continuing state of almost psychotic denial.)

In writing a roman a clef about Blunt and Co., of course, John Banville has engaged in speculation of a very different kind from that of the historians and experts - of whose work, he...