Robert Harris Precipice
Having just finished Robert Harris’s CONCLAVE and liking it,
what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a copy of his September release of
PRECIPICE at the Marion Library. It is set in London and the English
countryside, which enchants an Anglophile like me. The time was the beginning
of WWI, which is always a fruitful period for generating juicy plots. In this
semi-fictional novel the British Prime Minister Asquith is battling his own
cabinet and the European powers as the war breaks out. There is the scheming Lloyd George and the
raging bluster of a young Churchill to contend with and then there is Asquith
himself, who is having an affair with a young moneyed British woman named
Venetia Stanley. He is sending her lovey-dovey letters topped off with classified
information and actual state documents that he and his lover have been tossing out
of moving car windows. His love letters to Venetia have actually survived, but
Venetia’s responses have not. Harris solves the problem by re-creating them.
This ends up making an interesting spy procedural that shows the British
government at the beginning of WWI engaging in attempts to ferret out German
intelligence agents long embedded in the country. Harris also creates a young Scotland Yard
detective as a lower-class representative, who is assigned to go undercover to
smoke out where the leaks are in both the civilian and political population.
Needless to say, when the evidence begins to point to the Prime Minister
himself, the situation heats up.
It's not a great book, but a pleasant throwaway read all the
same. I give it 3.5 out of 5.
