the untouchable

So Nick and I walked up Whitehall in the hard-edged spring sunlight, past the statue of Charles I encased in its protective galvanised privy. On all sides were giant mounds of rubble over which ambulance men and Home Guard recruits were scrambling like ragpickers. In the Strand a cascading water main was incongruously suggestive of Versailles. Yet the destruction, however extensive, was curiously disappointing; the street seemed not ruined, but rearranged, as if a vast rebuilding scheme were under way. I had, I realised, put too much hope in the air war; what the newspapers nowadays like to call the fabric of society is depressingly strong.

Whitebait is about three quarters through John Banville's brilliantly written The Untouchable. This quote comes from a section of the book where the narrator, double agent Victor Maskell (strongly based on Anthony Blunt of the Cambridge Five),  has just had his first homosexual experience the night before during one of the most intensive London blitz bombings which, as he has also discovered, has just killed his father-in-law. Maskell is one of those brilliantly contradictory characters in the sense of being utterly repellant in terms of his generally callous disregard for the lives of others, but compelling in his witty descriptions and sleazy charm.