Guest review by David Breakell: PRECIPICE by Robert Harris

 

"Historical fiction is not just a passport to the past. It can also give us a new perspective on our contemporary world: some things don’t really change."

David Breakell, formerly a lawyer in the City of London and now a writer of historical fiction, reviews the latest novel from a titan of the genre, Robert Harris. Earlier this year, David published The Alchemist of Genoa, a novel set in the late 16th century, earlier this year. He is currently working on the sequel. Find out more from his website. 

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L P Hartley’s famous opening line is about memory, the loss of innocence, moral decline. But it could be seen as an explanation for the allure of historical novels, a brand motto even. One writer with a much-stamped passport to that undiscovered country is Robert Harris. His novels cover the broadest sweep of history, from pre-imperial Rome to the present-day Vatican, from feudal England to fin-de-siècle Paris, all without a hint of jet lag.

This time, Harris takes on the much-visited summer of 1914 and finds something new to say. His microscope focuses on a few square yards of Political London and an odd-couple romance between the married 62-year-old Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the young, unmarried, Venetia Stanley.

The affair, mostly conducted by letter and occasionally in the back of the PM’s limousine, proceeds decorously as befits the times, but is nevertheless shocking. Not only in terms of Asquith’s cavalier attitude to sharing state and military secrets with his lover, but also his sense of priorities considering what was in his ministerial red box at the time. These are the PM’s actual letters that Harris quotes from the archive – he recreates Venetia’s letters to the PM, because Asquith burnt them after resigning – and there are hundreds of them. Often, Asquith wrote to her three times a day. How on earth did he find the time?

Harris is a seasoned political observer so the context – Asquith scribbling his gushing love notes in Cabinet just as Churchill is explaining the details of the Gallipoli campaign or arguing with Kitchener – is expertly handled.

Equal prominence is given to Venetia’s side of the story. She is the daughter of an aristocratic, landed family but her perspective is thoroughly modern. We can admire her spirit but wonder at her judgment. Eventually, she realises that the affair must end and engineers it by fairly drastic means. If there is a doubt in this reader’s mind about Harris’ version of Venetia, it relates to her keeping the whole thing secret for so long, even from her closest family. Not so much the affair itself, but the state secrets she has become privy to. These feel like an intolerable burden, especially when her brothers and brothers-in-law are called up to serve and Venetia knows more – through Asquith’s indiscretions – about the military campaigns in which they’re participating than almost anyone in the country. Despite that, she shares none of this knowledge, resolutely protecting Asquith’s reputation.

To raise the stakes, Harris writes a parallel story. Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, a Scotland Yard policeman seconded to the embryonic MI5, is on the hunt for German spies. Deemer is a bachelor whose modest background makes him an outsider in the officer-class security service. Half-way through the book, the two stories collide when Deemer starts to suspect that Asquith and Venetia are exchanging more than endearments. Deemer’s pursuit of them - pure detective work – propels the story at pace and, as importantly, gives us a moral character who points up the somewhat naïve antics of the PM. I was occasionally reminded of J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with its similar period milieu and its eyebrows raised at the self-indulgence of the privileged classes. But Deemer is no avenging angel like Inspector Goole. He passes no judgment, other than a legal one, on Asquith’s indiscretions and even feels uneasy about steaming open the lovers’ correspondence.

The world we left behind in 1914 is skilfully evoked. London, with its twelve postal services a day, a city where Downing Street is an unguarded backwater and a Prime Minister can walk into a large bookshop and not be recognised. But historical fiction is not just a passport to the past. It can also give us a new perspective on our contemporary world: in a novel where leaders are too powerful to prosecute, where the security services collude with media mag
nates, where politicians are playing footsie under the table – or just golf – while presiding over the fate of the world, it reminds us that some things don’t really change.

Precipice is published by Penguin.

See also David's review of Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

David's novel The Alchemist of Genoa is published by Dower House Books - look out for a Q&A early next year.