Robert Harris delivers in his 16th novel.
FICTION
Precipice
Robert Harris
Hutchinson Heineman, $34.99
It’s 1914 and Herbert Henry Asquith, a brilliant Balliol-educated classicist and barrister, son of a Yorkshire wool merchant, and father of seven, was in his seventh year as prime minister. Two years earlier, a few weeks after a cruise to Sicily with his daughter Violet and her friends, the 61-year-old PM declared his love for one of the friends, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley. And so Robert Harris has a plot for his 16th novel, Precipice.
Venetia was the sort of girl Asquith liked – unlike his strident, voluble yet fiercely devoted second wife, Margot. Venetia was handsome, fun, discreet; from a family of rich, aristocratic Liberals with two country houses and a Mayfair mansion. Eccentric too – she kept a pet penguin and a bear cub. Her father, Lord Sheffield, was an atheist; and of two of his brothers, one was a convert to Islam, the other a Roman Catholic bishop.
Since January 1914, Asquith had faced the suffrage movement, coal miners, the issue of Irish home rule and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Yet, there was always time to write to Venetia, for dinner parties, bridge and brandy, country house weekends as Edwardian England lingered into the reign of George V.
Asquith declared 1914 an “annus mirabilis”. “Without you, I must often have failed, and more than once have gone down. You have sustained and enriched every day of my life … Will you be the same in 1915?”
Well, yes. Was it coincidence that the empire’s fortunes in the Dardanelles seemed to founder with Asquith’s affair? In fact, it was during the critical cabinet meeting with Churchill at his bombastic, persuasive fire-brand best that the government committed the Allies to Gallipoli while a distracted Asquith was writing passionately to Venetia. It was a kind of madness – he was sending two or three letters a day: secret military intelligence with declarations of love; enclosing Foreign Office cables and seeking her advice. “Who should be the next Viceroy of Ireland?”
Robert Harris is the master of the historical novel.Credit: AP
No one can really know the position but no Asquithian scholar believes the relationship progressed from epistolary to missionary, as it were. Yet, Harris is adamant it was physical – during those weekly drives together – behind the glass and curtains of his motor car, a 1908 Napier six-cylinder. Harris is the master of the historical novel, roaming from Ancient Rome (Pompeii, The Cicero Trilogy), to England searching for Charles I’s regicide (Act of Oblivion), to Dreyfus and 19th-century France (An Officer and a Spy) to a modern Vatican (Conclave). His sensational debut, Fatherland, imagined Britain in the aftermath of WWII where the Reich had won.
Precipice is much truer to history. Asquith’s 560 letters to Venetia have survived and thread their way through the narrative. Harris had to invent Venetia’s letters (to “Darling Prime”), which the PM destroyed as he left office.
