Book review: With Robert Harris, history is mystery, an infinite and flexible source of stories about human achievements and failings. Sometimes, he reshapes the past (Fatherland, in which Germany won World War II) or casts judgment (The Ghost’s shifty Tony Blair-ite character). Sometimes, this best-selling British novelist plays it straight: Enigma, about the race to break the German code at Bletchley Park, or Munich, a thriller about the 1938 Hitler-Chamberlain summit.
Precipice fits in the last category, but it starts out in an atypically cheesy way, featuring a wet-haired young woman striding “long-legged” along Oxford St in London. It’s July 1914, and m’lady – who has been for a swim – is in haste, “tall and slim, her head erect … most people instinctively cleared out of her way”. Yes, haughtiness can be scary.
But all Venetia Stanley is doing is tearing home, hoping to intercept a letter before her mother gets her hands on it. The letter is one of many short missives the striking 26-year-old socialite receives each day from her secret beau, Henry Asquith, who is not just a florid wielder of the pen. At 61, he is a married man, and the Prime Minister of Britain.
Such affairs among members of the political-aristocratic elite in those days were regarded as the norm; as Venetia muses, “they were all at it”. But the context – when Britain was about to plunge into the widening conflict of World War I – shifts the Asquith-Stanley liaison to another level, a brewing national security crisis.
Asquith, a famous political ditherer, so wanted to impress his lover in the lead-up to the war, and what became its early disasters in the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign, that he became reckless, sending her letters that included top-secret information and documents. These love letters, at complete dissonance from the gravity of his duties, provide the running thread of Precipice.
The excerpts from Asquith’s letters in the book are drenched in slush, but they are verbatim, the real thing; Venetia’s responses are the work of Harris’s imagination.
Asquith, who died in 1928, burnt most of his correspondence from Venetia when he was ousted as PM in 1916. However, she kept his letters, which were discovered more than a decade after her death in 1948. A total of 560 of them are now housed in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. Their discovery greatly shocked Asquith’s daughter, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the grandmother of actor Helena Bonham Carter.
With customary aplomb, Harris weaves an intricate tapestry of real-life figures into his fast-moving narrative, including Asquith’s acerbic wife Margot, his most gung-ho war cabinet members, Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener, and the PM’s former private secretary, Edwin Montagu, who played a key role in Venetia’s future.
But one of the most appealing characters is fictional, the sensible young police officer Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, who’s been transferred to a branch of the War Office to track down German spies in London. Little does he know he’s about to investigate the PM, who is oblivious to his own wrongdoing.
Shortly after Asquith informed the House of Commons, on August 5, 1914, that war on Germany had been declared the night before, Deemer is sent to look into classified telegrams found scattered around three London parks. A witness saw the telegrams being thrown from “a very smart motor” – the PM’s Napier limousine.
Deemer speedily tracks down the recipient, leading to a nicely drawn interlude at the Stanleys’ Welsh family seat, where he takes on undercover duties as a gardener. His findings are kept very hush-hush.
As the war stumbles along at enormous cost to life, including the Anzacs at Gallipoli, Harris paints a discomfiting portrait of a distracted, dysfunctional prime minister scribbling increasingly whiny letters to Venetia during meetings as his cabinet fractured around him. Oppressed by her situation, Venetia found a new purpose, “fast-track” training as a nurse and leaving Asquith behind as she sails to France to tend the wounded.
Harris presents Asquith as a well-meaning but feckless leader, though he says in the end-notes that he regards Venetia as “one of the most consequential women in British political history”. Possibly, but only because they were all at it.
Precipice, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann, $38), is out now.
