SOURCE: "The Fourth Man," in New York Times Book Review, June 8, 1997, p. 10.

In the following review, McGrath lauds Banville's The Untouchable and concludes, "Contemporary fiction gets no better than this."

A leitmotif in the recent fiction of John Banville has been the elusive and unstable nature of identity. It's apt, then, that in The Untouchable, his 11th novel, he should seize upon the historical figure of Anthony Blunt as his point of departure. Blunt, a homosexual esthete of the 1930's generation at Cambridge, was a distinguished English art historian, an expert on Poussin, curator of the Queen's art collection and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was also a spy. Blunt worked for the Kremlin from the 1930's to the 1960's. In 1979, he was exposed in Parliament by Margaret Thatcher and publicly disgraced as the fourth of the "Cambridge spies" (the others, of course, being Guy...