Robert Harris’ new novel set at the outbreak of World War 1 is more of a love story than a thriller.
By strange coincidence, I had been dipping into historian Max Hasting’s account of the lead-up to World War 1, appropriately titled Catastrophe, shortly before receiving a copy of Harris’ new novel, his 16th, Precipice.
A top-line perspective on Precipice is that it is nowhere near as innovative or gripping as Harris’ first, Fatherland, a fast-paced detective story in an alternative-history setting, the reimagination of Germany having won World War 2.
Fatherland was followed by further, excellent historical fiction page-turners as well as some genuine thrillers set in modern times, such as The Fear Index and Ghost. But other of his works have disappointed (The Second Sleep was aptly titled).
Precipice attempts to weave a detective angle within a pre- and early-World War 1 setting of July 1914 to May 1915, with retouching — rather than reimagination — of the role, personality and priorities of the British prime minister at the time, Herbert Asquith.
Referencing his various biographers, Catastrophe describes Asquith as “lacking imagination ... for all his high intelligence, he failed convincingly to address any of the great crises which overtook Britain during his years of office”.
Interestingly, Harris has rooted the plot of his new novel in what may have been one of the reasons for Asquith’s lack of passion for the issues of the time: his passions lay elsewhere.
Though this was generally tolerated in late-Victorian politics, Asquith was a serial womaniser, and in the crisis years of 1914-1916 he was engaged in a tryst with the aristocrat and socialite, Venetia Stanley. She was in her 20s, and 35 years younger than the prime minister. Asquith wrote more than 600 letters to her, 560 of which have survived and are archived at Oxford University; half of their contents was published by Oxford University Press in 1982.
Harris’ idea is clever: to zoom into these letters as the thread for an unusual story of the relationship and its intersection with British politics and a terrible period in world history.
Massaging complex, nuanced truths into a fictional plot is fine — it’s a novelist’s prerogative. Unfortunately, the plot is staid. Harris has attempted to infuse tension into the story by segueing from the letters to British cabinet meetings as Asquith runs the gamut of internal feuding and politicking even as the prospect of war looms. Later, during the war itself, he captures some of the fraught decision-making, mostly involving the intended strategy of weakening Germany’s ally by attacking the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli.
An element of jeopardy is created through the letters themselves. Bizarrely — but true, as we know from the archives — Asquith blithely writes Stanley details about his political dilemmas, about the negotiations leading up to the outbreak of war, then War Council deliberations, and all sorts of classified and confidential information, and sends them via the post. Were the letters to fall into the wrong hands through interception, or Stanley’s carelessness or indiscretion, they would represent a gold mine for spies.
Through yet further, weird circumstances, a shadowy branch of Britain’s war office becomes aware that the prime minister is also the country’s prime security risk. Young and keen Scotland Yard detective-sergeant Paul Deemer is assigned to the department and tasked with monitoring everything. If this plotline had been thought through the novel may well have transformed into a thriller. Alas, instead of adrenaline readers are rerouted to the beta-blocking love letters: “Do you know how much I love you? No? Just try to multiply the stars by the sands,” Asquith writes in one of his sometimes thrice-daily missives to Stanley.
The letters contain so much love poetry that even she tires of them: “She groaned and briefly bowed her head. First Browning, then Shakespeare, now Tennyson’s Ulysses. This fantasy of his was becoming tedious,” the author writes of Stanley’s shifting feelings. Ditto for us as readers.
The lovers’ dialogue, like their letters, is facile or stilted, as is the dialogue between support characters. When Deemer gets his briefing, the department chief tells him that “we do have one supreme advantage”. Deemer questions what that is, and readers are expected to find it realistic that a cynical spymaster would say, “We’re British, of course.”
Contrary to its dust-cover description, Precipice is not a thriller. Nevertheless, the novel is an unusual lens on British politics and wartime decision-making. Like a parallel lane view of an awful accident, it focuses on something else to undercut the horrific events unfolding across the English channel and in the Balkans.
Despite these criticisms, Precipice is oddly addictive. In this reader’s case, it is the interest factor of the knife-edge political circumstances, and the subsequent disaster, of 1914. Other readers will enjoy the baseline love story with its tinge of scandal. (Knowing in advance that the letters are real also kept me reading.)
Ultimately, Precipice is framed around a curious fragment of a momentous time in history, but it is laboriously paced, and misses opportunities to fully enthral.
Strangely, too, Precipice ends in the air, almost as if Harris realised the dead-end nature of the plot.
For the record, Asquith’s Liberal government, blamed for a general shortage of ammunition and the strategic blunder of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, was forced into a short-lived coalition before his declining degree of authority led him to resign in December 1916.
In his book The Strange Death of Liberal England, the American historian George Dangerfield, noting the tumult Asquith had to navigate in terms of the Irish rebellions, the suffragette movement and labour unrest, then World War 1, believes that “very few prime ministers in history have been afflicted by so many plagues and in so short a space of time”.
Imagination aside, Harris could have created a better book, and more of a thriller, had he weaved more of these crises into the story.
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