Books: "Precipice" By Robert Harris, Set In World War I London

Precipice

By Robert Harris 

Harper/HarperCollins Publishers; hardcover, 464 pages; $30.00; available today, Tuesday, September 17th

Robert Harris has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for London's Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph. He is the author of Act of Oblivion, Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. Most of his fifteen cinematic thrillers have been made into films, including Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rossellini, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow, and it is set to be released this fall. His novels have sold over ten million copies, and have been translated into thirty languages.

Precipice is Harris' new novel, and it is his first book to be set in World War I, specifically 1914 London.

There is a suspicious double drowning on a party boat that hosted the "Coterie," a group of the brightest and most interesting of Britain's young upper class. 

A clandestine affair takes place between Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and Venetia Stanley, a young socialite who is over half his age and is a member of the Coterie. She knew everyone who was anyone, from Nancy Cunard and Iris Tree to the Churchills. Stanley had quite a journey from being a sexy paramour who does not have much agency to a woman who knows her self-worth. 

Meanwhile, due to this affair, Asquith is a powerful leader who is distracted and possibly uninterested in the impending world conflict as well as the domestic affairs of England and Ireland. Relations between the two countries are a powder keg after the Easter Rising in 1916, and the Irish War of Independence a few years after that. Harris characterizes Asquith as an extremely complicated man who is fully human and flawed.

A newly-minted Scotland Yard intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top-secret documents, and what was merely a sexual intrigue has now become a matter of national security that could alter the course of political history. 

BEHIND THE BOOK - THE REAL-LIFE AFFAIR DEPICTED IN PRECIPICE - By Robert Harris

As Britain was sucked into a catastrophic war in the summer of 1914, the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith had other things on his mind. He was in the grip of an obsessive love affair with Venetia Stanley, a young aristocratic woman less than half his age. In all, he wrote more than five hundred letters - up to three a day, sometimes during Cabinet meetings - passionate declarations of love, often including top secret documents.

The existence of the affair was first revealed in the 1960s, when Roy Jenkins was allowed to quote from the letters in his authorized biography of Asquith. In 1982, a scholarly edition of just over half the archive was published by the Oxford University Press.

Venetia Stanley carefully preserved Asquith's letters to her, but he destroyed all hers to him. This has inevitably given a skewed impression of the relationship. So, as I was writing my novel Precipice, my first important task was to construct her side of the correspondence. As I did so, a different picture began to emerge.

For a start, the generally accepted view that the affair was platonic rather than physical, seems to fly in the face of all the circumstantial evidence. Both had passionate natures - Asquith was notorious for pouncing on young women, and Venetia went on to have a series of well-attested affairs. The coupe would take weekly Friday afternoon drives lasting an hour or two, even when the war was at its height. Asquith's car, in which the passengers were enclosed in a large compartment, separated from the driver by a fixed glass screen with a drawn curtain, and with blinds on all the windows, certainly provided ample privacy for physical intimacy. This detail has been overlooked by historians.

Secondly, the affair had important political consequences. By the start of 1915, when Asquith sensed Venetia was trying to bring the relationship to an end, he wrote of feeling suicidal. During the crucial meeting of the War Council in January 1915 which agreed to mount the Dardanelles expedition, he spent half an hour writing to Venetia - a lapse of concentration which may have had tragic consequences. A few weeks later, when the government was confronted by a scandal over a shortage of ammunition on the western front, Asquith blundered by claiming there had never been any such shortage. The crucial memorandum from Lord Kitchener on which he based his assertion was no longer in his possession: he had sent it to Venetia and had misremembered the contexts. 

Finally, in May 1915, when Venetia wrote to him breaking the news that she was going to marry Edwin Montagu, one of his closest friends, his distress seems to have fatally clouded his judgement. Contact between the two ceased. Suffering a loss of nerve when the twin crises of the Dardanelles disaster and the shell shortage broke a couple of days later, he agreed to form a coalition with the Troy opposition. There was never to be a Liberal government again.

In a despairing letter composed just hours afterwards, he wrote to her: 'I am on the eve of the most astounding & world-shaking decisions - such as I would never have taken without your counsel & consent.'  Remarkably, this paragraph is not included in the scholarly edition of the letters.

Venetia was not merely his lover. He asked her constantly for political advice. For example, he regularly showed her decrypted secret telegrams from British ambassadors, and then casually threw the decrypts out of the car window. When members of the public handed the fragments in to the police in August 1914, Scotland Yard informed the Foreign Office and some kind of leak inquiry ensued. It was this episode which inspired the structure of my novel. I have invented an intelligence officer, charged with overseeing the investigation, and I hope this fictional device helps bring to life one of the most remarkable and under-explored chapters in British political history.