London in the long hot summer of 1914. A city of gold sovereigns, chaperones and muffin men, but also a place where war looms, paranoia breeds and secret papers mysteriously disappear. The world that Robert Harris brings to life in Precipice is both close to that of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and simultaneously very far away. In place of rugged heroes giving dastardly spies what for, he offers a subtle drama about the distasteful and ultimately destructive love affair between a young aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, and a man 35 years her senior who, not coincidentally, happens to be the prime minister H.H. Asquith.
When the book opens, a few days after the assassination at Sarajevo, we find Asquith preoccupied not with the danger of conflict on the Continent but with the prospect of civil war in Ireland. The outbreak of the Great War temporarily shelves the Irish problem, to Asquith’s relief, even if it generates many far greater challenges too. Harris captures the feverish atmosphere and political manoeuvring of the July crisis neatly. Then, as the war starts and the pressure mounts, Asquith’s romantic obsession with Venetia deepens, even as she begins to see a future of freedom away from the idle life of the rich which bores her so. Will she escape in time? What will happen to him – and the war effort – if she does? Therein lies the drama.
As in much of Harris’s previous work, these are more or less true stories about real people. Fortunately for the historian, and for Harris, Asquith wrote to Venetia at length and in detail, sometimes three times a day, and his side of the correspondence survives. So we can get a good sense of both his daily and his political life. Indeed, he was breathtakingly indiscreet about government business and the progress of the war, even by our own recent low standards. Occasionally Asquith was even writing to Venetia describing cabinet meetings in real time, while they went on around him. Harris has a clever plot device to allow us to read their letters, and uses the theme of betraying confidences to bring Asquith’s personal life and political future back together in a denouement which has, like all good thrillers, both the inevitability of tragedy and a capacity to surprise.
Historical fiction is as little concerned with the past as science fiction is with the future. Both genres are ways of highlighting the preoccupations of the present, and Harris has always been attracted by the continuities of history as much as by the changes. One way to read Precipice is as a book about a self-indulgent Balliol-educated classicist with an eye for women who became prime minister. He suddenly found himself having to lead the national response to an unprecedented global crisis which threatened to kill millions. The time had come to take responsibility and exercise leadership, but he ultimately proved unable, or perhaps unwilling, to do either. Eventually, that cost him his office and his career, but only after others had paid a much higher price. Worse, this was not just an individual failure caused by the weakness of one man, but symptomatic of what happens when a feckless ruling elite, self-absorbed and entitled to the point of moral bankruptcy, forgets its responsibility to govern.
Even if you’re fed up with 21st-century Whitehall farces, though, Precipice still offers a very good thriller which sails through the Downton Abbey test with the grace of a dreadnought cruising down the Channel. It feels realistic enough for us to suspend disbelief over the occasional bit of hokum, and makes us care enough about the characters to keep turning the pages. It’s Harris’s best book since Conclave.
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