A romantic obsession: Precipice, by Robert Harris, reviewed

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.