Thursday, September 5, 2024

Guest Post by Robert Harris Author of Precipice

HarperCollins Let me tell you a bit about the book and The author will give you a bit on the backstory of the book. Thanks for stopping by.

About the Book:

Acclaimed and bestselling author Robert Harris has written fifteen cinematic thrillers published around the world –several of them made into films, most recently Conclave starring Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rosellini, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow, to be released in fall of 2024 by Focus Features. Harris’s last novel Act of Oblivion was beloved by the media and readers alike.

London- 1914 —A suspicious double drowning on a party boat hosting the “Coterie,” a group of the brightest and most interesting of England’s young upper class….A real life clandestine affair between Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and the lovely Venetia Stanley, a young socialite over half his age….Europe on the brink of a world war…England and Ireland a powder keg….And a newly minted intelligence officer with Scotland Yard assigned to investigate a leak of top-secret documents. What was merely a sexual intrigue has become a matter of national security that could alter the course of political history. These are the plotlines of Robert Harris’s propulsive new novel PRECIPICE.

The world is again on the precipice and this new novel speaks to that unease in uncanny ways. Seamlessly weaving fact and fiction in a way that no writer does better, PRECIPICE is the thrilling new novel that will be on all of fall’s best books of the season lists.

GUEST POST:

BEHIND THE BOOK – THE REAL-LIFE AFFAIR DEPICTED IN PRECIPICE

By Robert Harris

As Britain was sucked into a catastrophic war in the summer of 1914, the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith had other things on his mind. He was in the grip of an obsessive love affair with Venetia Stanley, a young aristocratic woman less than half his age. In all, he wrote her more than five hundred letters – up to three a day, sometimes during Cabinet meetings – passionate declarations of love, often including top secret documents.

The existence of the affair was first revealed in the 1960s, when Roy Jenkins was allowed to quote from the letters in his authorized biography of Asquith. In 1982, a scholarly edition of just over half the archive was published by the Oxford University Press.

Venetia Stanley carefully preserved Asquith’s letters to her, but he destroyed all hers to him. This has inevitably given a skewed impression of the relationship. So, as I was writing my novel PRECIPICE, my first important task was to try to construct her side of the correspondence. As I did so, a different picture began to emerge.

For a start, the generally accepted view that the affair was platonic rather than physical, seems to fly in the face of all the circumstantial evidence. Both had passionate natures – Asquith was notorious for pouncing on young women, and Venetia went on to have a series of well-attested affairs. The coupe would take weekly Friday afternoon drives lasting an hour or two, even when the war was at its height. Asquith’s car, in which the passengers were enclosed in a large compartment, separated from the driver by a fixed glass screen with a drawn curtain, and with blinds on all the windows, certainly provided ample privacy for physical intimacy. This detail has been overlooked by historians.

Secondly, the affair had important political consequences. By the start of 1915, when Asquith sensed Venetia was trying to bring the relationship to an end, he wrote of feeling suicidal. During the crucial meeting of the War Council in January 1915 which agreed to mount the Dardanelles expedition, he spent half an hour writing to Venetia – a lapse of concentration which may have had tragic consequences. A few weeks later, when the government was confronted by a scandal over a shortage of ammunition on the western front, Asquith blundered by claiming there had never been any such shortage. The crucial memorandum from Lord Kitchener on which he based his assertion was no longer in his possession: he had sent it to Venetia and had misremembered the contents.

Finally, in May 1915, when Venetia wrote to him breaking the news that she was going to marry Edwin Montagu, one of his closest friends, his distress seems to have fatally clouded his judgement. Contact between the two ceased. Suffering a loss of nerve when the twin crises of the Dardanelles disaster and the shell shortage broke a couple of days later, he agreed to form a coalition with the Tory opposition. There was never to be a Liberal government again.

In a despairing letter composed just hours afterwards, he wrote to her: ‘I am on the eve of the most astounding & world-shaking decisions – such as I would never have taken without your counsel & consent.’ Remarkably, this paragraph is not included in the scholarly edition of the letters.

Venetia was not merely his lover. He asked her constantly for political advice. For example, he regularly showed her decrypted secret telegrams from British ambassadors, and then casually threw the decrypts out of the car window. When members of the public handed the fragments in to the police in August 1914, Scotland Yard informed the Foreign Office and some kind of leak inquiry ensued. It was this episode which inspired the structure of my novel. I have invented an intelligence officer, charged with overseeing the investigation, and I hope this fictional device helps bring to life one of the most remarkable and under-explored chapters in British political history.

About the Author:

Robert Harris is the author of Act of Oblivion, Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for London’s Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.