In his acknowledgments at the end of his 2013 novel An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris thanked his wife for sharing a home over the years with “successive waves of Nazis, codebreakers, KGB men, hedge fund managers, ghostwriters and assorted ancient Romans.” For that book, Harris gave additional houseroom to the key players in the Dreyfus affair. Since then, the British author has opened his door to a host of other colorful individuals, from cardinals conniving to elect the right pope to V2 rocket scientists targeting London with their “Vengeance Weapons” to English fugitives, or “regicides,” wanted for the murder of King Charles I.
Such a diverse range of characters could only appear in a diverse range of novels. In many of them, Harris fused fact and fiction to recreate true historical events. His new and 16th novel is once again based on a real-life episode, on this occasion the love affair between an older married man and a younger woman. So far, so humdrum. But when the man in question is the British prime minister and the backdrop is a nation teetering perilously on the cusp of war, then the stakes are raised and our interest is piqued. Precipice, whose plot covers several fraught months and charts the onset of a catastrophe, is a brilliant study of political power, personal pain, and human folly.
The book opens with love letters from the two central characters. One day in July 1914, Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord and Lady Sussex, returns to her parents’ London residence to find a familiar envelope addressed to her. Herbert Henry Asquith, the 61-year-old prime minister, writes affectionately to his 26-year-old “darling,” telling her that at the end of his “drab day … including an interview with the King,” he hopes to catch a glimpse of her at a dinner party in the evening. Aware that he expects an immediate reply “and would fret if he didn’t get one” even though nothing of note has happened since she saw him yesterday, Venetia picks up her fountain pen and writes back. She gives some details of her morning swim, assures him that he will find a way through “this Irish tangle,” and closes by letting him down gently: She won’t see him at dinner as she is joining friends on a midnight boat trip on the River Thames. But, she adds, “I’d much rather be with you.”
These two short letters provide revealing outlines of the novel’s two leads and, at the same time, give a hint of how their romance might play out. But before bringing his lovers together on the page, Harris introduces a third protagonist. At the last minute, Venetia drops out of the river cruise, leaving her friends, a smart set of hedonistic bohemians and aristocrats known as the Coterie, to sail off into the night without her. But when two members of the group go overboard and are feared drowned, young and ambitious policeman Paul Deemer is tasked with investigating.
After proving himself, and after war breaks out, Deemer is drafted into a small, clandestine outfit that hunts down and flushes out German spies and saboteurs. Soon he is given a special assignment — to discover who in Asquith’s inner circle is leaking classified documents. We are one step ahead of Deemer. We know Asquith is the guilty party because we have read with disbelief how he writes to Venetia, sometimes as often as three times a day, enclosing sensitive documents and disclosing secrets relating to troop deployments, military tactics, diplomatic developments, and high-level Cabinet discussions.
Asquith shares these revelations with his paramour to seek her advice: She is his sounding board and guiding star. He also believes that sending her confidential material is the greatest proof of his undying love. To begin with, Venetia is flattered and excited to be entrusted with such “life-and-death information.” Later, however, she is burdened by it. As the conflict grinds on and Asquith’s letters become more obsessive, she decides to distance herself from him and contribute to the war effort by working as a nurse.
But Deemer, who has been sifting Venetia’s intercepted mail to ascertain whether she is a German sympathizer, eventually comes face to face with her in a hospital ward where she is tending his soldier brother, wounded in action. He has a choice between walking away and staying in the shadows or blowing his cover and hitting her with three hard truths: “that her correspondence was being read by a government department, that she was under suspicion of breaking the Official Secrets Act, that she and the Prime Minister were on the brink of a scandal that could ruin them.”
Expertly paced and consistently engaging, Precipice is among Harris’s finest novels. The plot strand involving Deemer, the book’s only fictional main character, takes the form of a propulsive police procedural, and we eagerly follow him as he goes about his sleuth work, whether inveigling his way into Venetia’s parents’ stately home in Wales or steaming open envelopes and gasping at the contents. He gets so close to his quarries that, at one point, he feels he has turned into “a secret, silent partner in a dangerous ménage à trois.”
Equally gripping is Harris’s depiction of escalating conflict. One minute, Asquith is wrestling with discontent in Ireland, and the next, he is “on the eve of horrible things” and facing Armageddon in Europe. As the Great War rages and reports come in of industrialized slaughter along the Western Front, Harris dramatizes frantic discussions in corridors of power, often involving a particularly bellicose Winston Churchill.
But the novel’s twin focal points are its unlikely lovers. We view Asquith and Venetia in public together but also when they manage to snatch valuable moments in private, most commonly on chauffeur-driven trips into the countryside, the blinds of the limousine drawn. Their passion is felt in their correspondence. Asquith’s 560 letters to Venetia survive, and Harris draws on them, quoting their bizarre blend of sweet nothings and affairs of state.
Asquith burned Venetia’s replies on his last day in 10 Downing Street, but Harris convincingly invents them. In doing so, he fleshes out a compellingly complex young woman — not a spoilt, vacuous socialite, but rather a dominant force imbued with wit, spirit, and, in the later stages of the book, dogged single-mindedness. It isn’t clear what she gets out of her relationship with the man she calls “Prime,” other than the fact she enjoys “the thrill of it – the secrecy, the illicitness, the risk.”
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Asquith emerges as a tragic and reckless figure, consumed by his infatuation and blind to his indiscretions. In one jaw-dropping scene, he chairs a pivotal meeting of the War Council, but instead of devoting his attention to plans for the Dardanelles campaign, an ill-fated operation during which tens of thousands of Allied troops lost their lives, he surreptitiously pens a letter to Venetia about the more pressing matter of when he can see her next.
Precipice might not be the pulse-pounding, page-turning thriller that Harris is known for, but it is still an enthralling tale that reminds us that all’s fair and frequently foolhardy in love and war. As Deemer puts it, “To share so many state secrets with a young woman less than half his age, to send them through the ordinary post, and to show her decrypted telegrams – that was beyond love, surely? That was a kind of madness.”
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.