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Robert Harris’s enthralling new novel could also be one in every of his three greatest, and I write as somebody who has learn nearly all 16 of them. There was 1992’s Fatherland, imagining a world the place the Nazis received the Second World Conflict, and 2022’s Act of Oblivion, an epic set within the aftermath of the regicide of Charles I. And now there’s Precipice, wherein he has discovered one other slam dunk of a plot. It’s primarily based upon the true episode of 60-year-old prime minister HH Asquith’s infatuation with an aristocratic younger girl 35 years his junior, to whom he wrote greater than 700 letters over a three-year interval – generally as many as three letters a day.
What makes the story so extraordinary is that Asquith was prime minister throughout the run-up to the First World Conflict – and all through these first two catastrophic years of fight – however nonetheless discovered time to compose handwritten notes throughout cupboard conferences in Downing Avenue; letters that grew to become more and more obsessive because the Nice Conflict progressed, and that ceaselessly contained probably the most confidential data on British technique and political opinions.
With astonishing recklessness, the married Liberal PM enclosed top-secret dispatches from ambassadors, generals and royals to have interaction his paramour.
The Hon Venetia Stanley, daughter of Lord Sheffield, was an unlikely recipient of his passion: a full of life, barely educated, time-rich socialite, dwelling at residence together with her dad and mom between two stately properties and a Mayfair mansion, awaiting an appropriate husband. At the moment she would in all probability be an Instagram influencer, entitled however engaging.
Remarkably, the letters from Asquith nonetheless survive, and Harris makes use of his precise correspondence all through – dozens of sentimental, craving missives addressed to “My darling love … I like you greater than phrases can say, with each fibre, and no matter I’ve that’s value having and giving”; Venetia’s replies to Asquith don’t survive, since he destroyed all of them on his remaining day in workplace, however Harris does a convincing job of recreating them.
Their passionate correspondence, and the very fact of their friendship, was suspected solely by their innermost circle. Privateness was simpler to keep up in these days. If the prime minister at this time took up with a younger girl lower than half his age, the headlines could be cruel: “Pervy PM’s pash on aristobabe”. Or “Prime minister groomed posh chook with 700 steamy letters”. And very quickly, there could be censorious newspaper columns citing energy imbalance, safeguarding in Downing Avenue, and the remainder.
Harris’s cleverness lies in his psychological sophistication, carrying the reader alongside the twists and turns of this doubtful love story, whereas the higher drama of the warfare within the trenches, huge casualties and the disastrous touchdown at Gallipoli performs off stage. There is a wonderful solid of supporting characters: Winston Churchill, perpetually reckless and hungry for warfare; Lloyd George, ambitiously untrustworthy; the poet Rupert Brooke, relationship an Asquith daughter; the artist John Lavery in war-artist mode; King Edward VII, by whom Asquith is appointed PM at a on line casino within the south of France.
Intriguingly, we’re by no means instructed whether or not the Asquith-Stanley relationship ever grew to become sexual. It was difficult in pre-war Britain for an aristocratic single woman to spend time alone with any man, and once they have been prime minister, tougher nonetheless.
It’s hinted that they could have spent an attractive hour alone in a grassy hole within the woods at Penrhos, the castellated Stanley property close to Holyhead, Wales, however Harris’s novels seldom embrace graphic bed room motion. He implies that their sexual relationship might have stopped at frottage, standard amongst the landed courses on the time, which concerned the girl thrilling the clothed man by way of his trousers, with vigorous friction till he discovered aid; the girl was ceaselessly pleasured in an identical type, thus avoiding the hazard of being pregnant.
Harris is masterful at genuine dialogue, throughout all courses. There’s not a false observe on this novel. He additionally explains the mechanics of covert communication on this pre-email, pre-text, pre-WhatsApp, pre-Paula Vennells world. The Submit Workplace in 1914 offered twelve collections and deliveries of letters per day in London, and customarily three per day within the countryside, and Stanley and her maid spend a lot time hanging in regards to the letterbox, ready for the most recent love bomb from the prime minister.
One of many nice injustices about Harris’s huge oeuvre is that he has received virtually no main literary prizes. Infinitely extra knowledgeable than most Booker winners, and at the least as emotionally perceptive, with a historic gravitas worthy of the Duff Cooper Prize – which matches to superlative non-fiction works, together with historical past – his books slip down a crevice in between: too standard and satisfying for the Booker, too readable and part-fictional for the Duff Cooper. There’s something very British about always inventing new, and ever extra area of interest, literary awards to applaud books that promote modestly, on the expense of massive, high quality blockbusters that shift by the truckload.
If Harris’s novels shaped a part of the college historical past syllabus, they may encourage an entire era for whom historical past is drudgery.
‘Precipice’ by Robert Harris is printed on 29 August by Hutchinson Heinemann