THE invasion of fiction by real people has a long and distinguished history. It happens in two distinct ways. Novelists and playwrights have always inclined to the practice of recording the aspect of a person that interests the imagination, and inventing the rest. The result is often so little of a portrait that the original source does not recognise himself: there is a great deal more, for instance, to Anthony Powell's Widmerpool than the schoolboy who inspired him.
What is currently a fashionable genre sometimes called faction - is quite different, involving a more complicated reliance on what is real, especially in events and circumstances. It has the drawback of a possibly known outcome the assassin who sets out to kill General de Gaulle is clearly not going to succeed; the one who has President Kennedy in his sights clearly is. Robbed of its tension, in neither case is there much of a story left to tell.
There is, of course, when it's told from the point of view of the victim or the victim's, as in Beryl Bainbridge's recent novel about the sinking of the Titanic. We know what's going to happen, the voyagers don't: every note on the piano, every trivial exchange acquires significance as we, and death, hover. Brian Moore, Thomas Keneally and Alan Bennett have all contributed notably to the genie, but in The Untouchable, it seems to me, John Banville shakes a new kind of life into it.
Banville is already a practised hand, a faultless conjuror with aspects of authenticity, teasing, probing, and possessing what is perhaps the novelist's most precious gift: the courage endlessly to take risks. What is authentic here is the treachery of Anthony Blunt, KCVO, Marlborough and Cambridge, surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, expert on Poussin, professor, spy. He died in 1983 old and disgraced, stripped of his honour, sacked as the Queen's art adviser, no longer a fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, no longer a good chap. One wonders, had he lived, what he'd make of his reconstructed life in this novel.
Certainly he would recognise himself, and that he travels here under another name is a circumstance to which be was no stranger. He might perhaps be taken aback to find himself an Irishman, though still of a clerical family: the real Blunt was as English as he sounded, the son of the Reverend A. S. V. Blunt, vicar of St John's, Paddington. A homosexual since his Marlborough days, Blunt, might also be surprised to find himself supplied with a wife and two children. And assuredly be would take exception to his own voice referring to his lovely home and to his cordroys as "slacks". A stickler for his little snobberies, Blunt was. For correctness, too in his prissy way, he would undoubtedly point out to his alter ego that at Marylebone people get married in a register - not a registry office.
These are not errors. Writers of Mr Banville's calibre do not write careless novels. The different voice is the other part of a double identity in a novel that treats of an obsession with disguise and falsity and deception, that seeks surfaces beneath surfaces and explores the self made flaws in a man's life. Blunt or Victor Maskell, as his pseudonym is in these pages - is the creature of a reality quite alien to what is conventionally meant by the term. As if borrowed from his fascination with Poussin or with the pictures on the royal walls, it is the reality of illusion. Or that of a dream in which one person's presence and appearance are constantly swapped for another's, in which the rooms behind a familiar facade aren't the right rooms, in which the plot is skewed and unstable, pitted with contradictions.
Blunt was a self indulgent chameleon who spied because lies excited him as much as taking a chance with a bit of rough trade did. He had little interest in changing the world, far more in eyeing it through distorted spectacles, his vision now recorded in the journal Victor Maskell keeps for him. Graham Greene - called Querell here, presumably because Greene liked to use that initial letter in a surname - is portrayed as a boor, a secondrate writer of "bleak little novels" with a penchant for child prostitution. Yet Greene was a gentle add compassionate man whose novels are among the best written in this century. The sleaziness and failure with which Blunt, or Maskell, so bitterly imbues him are in fact Blunt's own, the coinage of a twilight realm where nothing is what it seems to be.
This is a complex and ambitious book, put together with quiet authority. Half forgotten words - osseous, oneiric, marmoreal, revelous, ascender decorate the spare prose, images linger. Boy and I went on a pub crawl the day the news came of Hitler's death. It was May Day. We started at the Gryphon and staggered on to the Reform, with an interlude at a public lavatory in Hyde Park, the big one near Speakers Corner, which was to be a favourite hunting ground of mine in later years ... I kept a lookout while Boy and a burly young Guardsman with red hair and extraordinarily pretty ears made noisy and, by the sound of it, not very satisfactory love in one of the stalls.
Boy is Guy Burgess, whose louche lifestyle is particularly well caught; but the greater achievement is that the dessicated, superficially uninteresting Blunt becomes a figure almost of fascination. Weak, pathetic, dreamly resentful of being the person he is, he skulks like a shadow, forever fearful of the truth. A Miss Vandeleur is writing his biography, visiting him regularly after his disgrace to hear him moaning on about his betrayal in the hard done by tones of a Judas Iscariot complaining about the supper time fare. She's wasting her time: mere facts can't tell this story. The lies are what matter.