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the complete review - fiction

Precipice

by
Robert Harris

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : amazing (factual and documented) premise -- but the reliance on actual historical material also constrains the novel too much

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "What makes Precipice, Harris’s new novel so gripping, is when the love affair takes place and who the couple are. (...) As always, he has done his research to recreate a long-gone world, and yet again he tells a good story. He makes use of the press and of official documents, but the heart of the book is Asquith’s daily letters to Stanley. (...) The novel will leave you wondering whether Stanley had been a useful safety valve for Asquith or a dangerous distraction." - Margaret MacMillan, Financial Times
  
  
• "Robert Harris’s enthralling new novel may be one of his three best, and I write as someone who has read virtually all 16 of them. (...) Harris’s cleverness lies in his psychological sophistication, carrying the reader along the twists and turns of this dubious love story, while the greater drama of the war in the trenches, vast casualties and the disastrous landing at Gallipoli plays off stage. (...) Harris is masterful at authentic dialogue, across all classes. There is not a false note in this novel." - Nicholas Coleridge, The Independent
  
  
• "The novel’s brilliance lies in the way the author has written into the void, giving life and voice to Venetia, bringing her to dazzling life through her imagined letters to Asquith and Harris’s portrait of a bright, unconventional and complex young woman seeking to escape the strictures of her aristocratic upbringing. (...) Asquith is presented with great tenderness and sympathy, as is his hard-edged but vulnerable wife, Margot. It’s the character of Venetia, though, that turns Precipice from a very good novel into a great one." - Alex Preston, The Observer
  
  
• "Historical fiction is as little concerned with the past as science fiction is with the future. Both genres are ways of highlighting the preoccupations of the present, and Harris has always been attracted by the continuities of history as much as by the changes. One way to read Precipice is as a book about a self-indulgent Balliol-educated classicist with an eye for women who became prime minister. (...) Even if you’re fed up with 21st-century Whitehall farces, though, Precipice still offers a very good thriller which sails through the Downton Abbey test with the grace of a dreadnought cruising down the Channel. It feels realistic enough for us to suspend disbelief over the occasional bit of hokum, and makes us care enough about the characters to keep turning the pages." - Jonathan Boff, The Spectator
  
  
• "Asquith was by all accounts a brilliant political operator earlier in his career, but one sees little trace of it in Harris’s portrayal of him as a befuddled old goat. (...) It would take more than a rather colourless male lead to make one of Harris’s novels anything less than compulsively readable, however. (...) The minor characters are sketched in superbly" - Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph
  
  
• "The strength of the novel lies in that central, almost unbelievable, relationship between Asquith and Venetia. (...) Precipice is not quite in the top-tier of Harris’s novels. (...) The historical works more than the fictional in this Harris outing (how can you improve on this stranger-than-fiction details of a love affair?). Precipice is historically literate, politically astute and gripping to the last page." - Antonia Senior, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Precipice is, rather amazingly, based on fact, as British prime minister (from 1908 to 1916) H.H.Asquith did indeed have an affair with Venetia Stanley, constantly exchanging letters with her, sometimes several a day -- and sharing government secrets with her along the way. Asquith's letters are preserved, and author Robert Harris presents may of them, in whole or in part, verbatim, building his novel around them. Harris notes that: "There were twelve deliveries a day in London in 1914", so a near-constant and almost immediate back and forth was, remarkably, possible back then (not so different from today's e-mail exchanges).
       Venetia Stanley is twenty-six when the novel opens, and still unmarried. She comes from a wealthy family -- but:

The Stanleys were an intellectual family, not at all conventional; eccentric even. Lyulph, her father, seventy-five and old enough to be her grandfather, had been a Liberal MP and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, until has announcement that he did not believe in God had obliged him to resign. He had inherited his title unexpectedly on the death of his elder brother, Henry, who had converted to Islam and had sat in the House of Lords as a Muslim peer. His younger brother, Algernon, was a plump and worldly Catholic bishop. Their nephew was the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

     Unfortunately, the system is so intricate that once it starts it's almost impossible to stop. Now it's accelerating the very catastrophe it was designed to prevent.

Edwin, he writes to me three times a day. He sends me all manner of secrets -- documents even. You wouldn't believe it. It frightens me to have such things in my possession, and yet I don't know how to stop it.

He could see why the Prime Minister might be in love with her. But 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.

- M.A.Orthofer, 27 August 2024

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Links:

• Harper publicity page
• Hutchinson Heinemann publicity page
• Heyne publicity page

• i
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Observer
• The Scotsman

• Robert Harris at the British Council

• Archangel
• Conclave
• The Fear Index
• The Ghost
• Imperium
• Pompeii

• See also the Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Robert Harris, born in 1957, achieved international success with his first novel, Fatherland. He has been a correspondent for the BBC, and a columnist for the Sunday Times.

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© 2024 the complete review

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