Review: Vivien Horler

Precipice, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann)

The poor news is that Precipice, historical novelist Robert Harris’s latest book, is the first Harris novel I have read; the good news of course is there are 16 novels in his oeuvre and I plan to get going on them.

We’ve all heard of Conclave, now a major film, and for months a friend has been urging me to read Pompeii, so I’m being nudged in a Harris direction.

Precipice tells an extraordinary story of the first year or so of World War 1, when H H Asquith was the Liberal British prime minister. He was the husband of the outspoken Margot Asquith, but had always enjoyed the company of attractive and clever women.

When this novel opens, in July 1914, it is just a few days after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, and at this stage the biggest political crisis facing Asquith and his government is Irish agitation for home rule.  But within a month Britain – and all Europe – is at war.

It emerges Asquith, who is in his 60s, is in a close relationship with the Hon Venetia Stanley, who is 26. Asquith was a prodigious letter writer, at a time when there were several deliveries of post a day, and over the course of their two-year relationship he wrote Venetia 560 letters, sometimes four daily.

In a note at the start of the book, Harris says: “All the letters quoted in the text from the Prime minister are – the reader may be astonished to learn – authentic… However, the letters from Venetia Stanley to the Prime Minister are entirely invented.”

They had to be – in a historical note at the end of the book Harris tells us that on his final day in Downing Street Asquith burnt most of his private correspondence, including all his letters from Venetia.

But Asquith’s letters are kept in eight boxes at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

And they are astonishing. He loved to see her – it is not clear whether their relationship was physical, although Harris hints in the text that it might have been – but Asquith said if he couldn’t see her, writing to her was the next best thing.

Just after they broke up, he wrote to her: “One of the most hellish bits of these most hellish days was that you alone of all the world – to whom I have always gone in every moment of trial & trouble, & from whom I have always come back solaced and healed & inspired – were the one person who could do nothing, & and from whom I could ask nothing. To my dying day, that will be the most bitter memory of my life.

“I am on the eve of the most astounding & world-shaking decisions – such as I wd never have taken without your counsel & and consent. It seems so strange & empty and unnatural…”

As this letter indicates, Asquith told Venetia all sorts of Cabinet business which she was smart enough to keep to herself as, without doubt, Asquith was breaking the Official Secrets Act, passed in 1911.

But this is all in the historical record. What makes the novel so engaging is the weaving of fact and fiction. In the novel, it emerges during their frequent drives together, when they can rely on being alone, Asquith shows her telegrams received from people like the British ambassador to Berlin or Moscow in the days leading to war.

The novel has it that after Venetia has read them, Asquith often crumples them up and tosses them out of the window of his big black car. Several are found, and one of them, spotted by a civic-minded citizen who disapproves of littering, takes it to the local police station from where it is forwarded to the Special Branch.

The citizen has made a note of the car’s registration number, and a top-secret investigation follows.

We read of the tumultuous events of the early days of the war, replete with characters like Lord Kitchener, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, who lobbied so hard for the disastrous assault on Gallipoli.

In his historical note at the end, Harris reminds us of the terrible toll that campaign took: 110 000 dead, of whom 34 000 were British, 10 000 French, 10 000 Australian and New Zealand, and 56 000 Turkish.

There’s a moment in the novel where Asquith is reading The Times during Gallipoli, and he notes that the names of the dead, in small print, fill the whole of page three and spill over on to page four

The Gallipoli campaign, and also a terrible munitions shortage, more or less did for Asquith’s premiership, and in 1915 he was forced to join a coalition with the Conservative and Labour parties.

But the book’s not just about world politics – there is the insight into the lives of the wealthy gentry in the pre-war period, as well as tender moments between Asquith and Venetia, and waspish ones between Asquith and Margot.

It’s a great book, shining a light on a historical love story entirely new to me, and brilliantly written. One of the best books I’ve read in a while.