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. 

Guest review by John Bowers: THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED by John Bolton

                                           

"This is a President truly addicted to chaos ... ”

After attending state school in Grimsby, John Bowers was called to the Bar in 1979 and took silk in 1998. He has practised primarily in employment law and human rights. He has written or been the co-author of fourteen books on employment law. He has been Principal of Brasenose College Oxford since 2015. He also sits as a Deputy High Court Judge.

John Bolton is a polarising but significant figure. One suspects he could achieve an argument in a paper bag. He is a significant player in the Trump Circus because he was originally lauded by him as a great cold warrior who would make America’s enemies quake (having seen him as a regular commentator on Fox News). Gradually in office, Bolton became disillusioned with surely the most eccentric if not dangerous Commander in Chief in US history. He lasted as National Security Advisor only from 2018 to 2019. He resigned but the President, who is not one to allow people to leave with dignity, claimed that he had dismissed him, ostensibly for being too much of a war-monger. 

A great feature of the book is Bolton’s ability to contrast this Administration with that of George W Bush, where he held the post of US Ambassador to the UN; he had also served Bush Senior and Reagan. Unlike them, this is a President who has no sense of history, does not read much and does little to prepare for significant summit meetings. One does not sleep easily with him as Leader of the Free World. 

The book is the first insider’s account of Trump’s love in with the North Korean dictator. Trump adored a letter written apparently by Kim Jong Un. In fact it was Bolton says written by his underlings “as if the letter had been written by Pavlovians who knew exactly how to touch the nerves enhancing Trump’s self esteem”. Trump clearly wanted to meet Kim for the photo-op but did not read his briefings and was bested by Kim even though Kim had less cards to play and a smaller nuclear button (as Trump had once pointed out). This is at one with a disturbing kow-towing to other dictators or authoritarian figures whether they be Putin, Xi or Erdogan.

Trump’s ignorance as revealed by Bolton is truly extraordinary. As examples he thought Finland was part of Russia and he had no idea that the UK was a nuclear power. It is Trump’s attitude to Russia which is the most troubling, perplexing and difficult to explain. It is hard to understand why he would want to ensure that all but interpreters were absent from a meeting he insisted be held with Putin. As Bolton says “I was not looking forward to leaving him in a room alone with Trump”. Trump’s desire to see everything in terms of his own interest, especially his desire for re election but also commercial, is very worrying.

Bolton’s description of a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China is a classic. Xi read arduously note cards hashed out in advance while Trump ad libbed “with no one on the US side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next”. Xi ingratiated himself with Trump by saying he looked forward to working with him for another six years, at which point Trump said people were saying the two-term limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Trump then asked Xi to help him win the next election by alluding to China’s economic capability to affect the ongoing campaigns. Of course relations have now taken a turn for the worse with mutual allegations now filling the air.

The book also covers in detail the coup to topple Maduro in Venezuela which never quite happened. Iran, the Taliban, G7 meetings and getting Europeans to pay more for their defence are other themes which run through the work. Bolton provides some rare insights such as that he recalls that “Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals” in particular those of Barbara Bush and John McCain, with whom he continued his petty squabble well after his death.

Bolton also sheds some light into the naked and ruthless media management of the Trump team. For example, he rushed out a statement on Saudi Arabia because this will “divert from Ivanka” who had been accused of using her personal e mail for government business.

This is a President truly “addicted to chaos” as the book blurb states. This is a truly dysfunctional White House and it is difficult to see why any rational person would want to work there. The book richly demonstrates how the daily tweets get in the way of developing rational foreign policy. 

The Democrats wanted to call Bolton to appear in the impeachment process. He does not quite deal with why he did not agree to testify and instead saved up his revelations for this no doubt lucrative book although he does aim probably merited criticism at the way the process was handled.

Bolton has few good words to say about anyone and has contempt for the idea that Trump was originally surrounded by an “axis of adults”. He takes aim at the inadequacies as he saw them of Mattis, Pompeo and Tillerson and is scathing about Nicky Haley, the Ambassador to the UN.

Bolton has a racy style and his insight into foreign policy in the past is illuminating. His overall verdict on Trump is “he second-guessed people’s motives, saw conspiracies behind rocks and remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House, let alone the federal government”. It is hard not to agree and the evidence is clearly presented in the book’s 577 pages.

The Room Where It Happened is published by Simon and Schuster.

See also: John Bowers' review of Tribes by David Lammy.

Guest review by Victor Watson: SOUTH RIDING by Winifred Holtby

"I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy." 

Victor Watson began to write children's fiction after a long career as a teacher, both in schools and at Homerton College, Cambridge. He was involved in the setting up of Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle.

He has edited many critical works on children's fiction, including the Cambridge Guide to Children's Books in English (CUP 2001) He is the author of the Paradise Barn quartet and his latest novel is called Operation Blackout. All his fiction is published by Catnip Press. See more at Victor's dedicated website for the Paradise Barn books.

I’d known about South Riding since my undergraduate days, but I didn’t get round to reading it until earlier this year, when I spotted a compact 1949 hardback edition in a charity shop. I bought it – and was immediately hooked. The story unfolds in such a measured and unhurried way that I was able to savour the reading of it over many days. It has a wide cast of characters from all levels of society, the landscape is vividly evoked, and the narrative voice is both compassionate and uncompromising. The dialogue is good too.

On the dustwrapper the author is quoted: ‘there is one fundamental truth about human nature – we are not only single individuals, each face to face with eternity and our separate spritis; we are members one of another.’ It’s one thing to say that, and quite another matter to demonstrate it. But that ‘membership one of another’ is what South Riding creates and acts out – in a rural community, set in the fictional South Riding of Yorkshire, during the depression of the 1930s. Many stories form part of the bigger story, all told with a direct and un-showy realism, effortlessly intertwined in an entirely convincing world. Here, there is no artificial thematic tidiness: people’s lives are muddled and imperfect, randomly affected by their siblings, their love affairs, their weaknesses, their neighbours, their rivals, their own hidden motivation. And – since this is also a novel about local government – the characters’ lives are also shaped by decisions made in council meetings and planning committees about housing conditions and scholarships.

The characterisation is brilliant, from the scheming Alderman Snaith to poor Lily Sawdon dying of cancer; the clever working-class Lydia Holly, whose future life will be shaped by whether or not her social and family situation will allow her to take up the scholarship she’s been awarded; the unhappy Robert Carne, whose daughter is lonely and miserable and whose wife is in a mental home, and whose life-values are as threatened and uncertain as his estate is crumbling. The main character is Miss Sarah Burton who, in chapter 2, is appointed headmistress of Kiplington Girls’ High School, and who encounters setbacks, faces all manner of frustrations, and experiences a bitter and triumphant love. She almost gives up on her conviction that an unmarried woman in her forties can have a fulfilled and fulfilling professional life within and for the sake of the community. But not quite. ‘I was born to be a spinster,’ she tells herself, ‘and by God, I’m going to spin.’

I read this book with a sense of homecoming. This is where I began as a serious novel-reader, with Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, and Hardy. It has a hugeness of scope and conception, inviting comparisons with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It reminded me how far most modern fiction has moved from such imaginative spaciousness. I estimate that South Riding is about 176,000 words long – but it had to be a long novel because it seeks to convey a comprehensive understanding of an entire community. It is a socialist view, as you would expect from an author who was for most of her life a close friend of Vera Brittain. I felt as I read it a determined writerly thrust, a brilliant craftswoman’s purposeful and unhurried faith in her narrative vision, and her belief that – in spite of muddles and failures, setbacks and bad fortune, wickedness and greed – communities are capable of edging imperfectly and cautiously forward to improve the lives of individuals.

That’s what Winifred Holtby believed herself to be, a craftswoman. ‘I have no illusions about my work,’ she wrote. ‘I am primarily a useful, versatile, sensible and fairly careful artisan.’ Perhaps – but South Riding is an intelligent and absorbing novel, in its values, in its style, and in its conception. I loved it.

And it’s written in proper sentences!

South Riding is published by Virago.