Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Precipice, by Robert Harris.

 

            ‘The Shot That Was Heard Around the World’:  Gavrilo Princip, a young Serbian Nationalist and leader of a rebel group assassinates the heir to the Austro/Hungarian Empire and his wife, thus starting the First World War. Austria’s traditional ally Germany rallies its forces and attacks Belgium and France and their treaty partner Britain reluctantly starts recruiting troops for the war that everyone thinks will be ‘over by Christmas’.

            Meantime, Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith is enjoying a great wave of popularity for his strong leadership and cabinet, not least First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and Secretary for War Lord Kitchener, surely an unbeatable combination. 

            And Asquith is also enjoying – and is happily enslaved by – a passionate affair with 26 year-old Venetia Stanley, a much younger socialite of aristocratic birth with which he shares secret communications from his overseas ambassadors;  Venetia and her common-sense approach to huge military problems helps him to have a more clear-eyed view, especially about other members of his cabinet.  She has become indispensable to him in life and in love.- the only problem being his cavalier treatment of the decrypted telegrams and documents that he shows her on their many drives around London – he does insist on several occasions on screwing up these official state secrets and throwing them out the car window.

            Which is hardly a good look as people, in the first great flush of patriotism, hand the telegrams and state secrets into Scotland Yard, and a discreet investigation is obliged to begin, revealing that the affair is common knowledge among the Great and the Good, in fact it’s nearly last week’s news amongst the aristocracy – except for Margot, Asquith’s strident, social-climber wife:  she has also known about his affairs, but this is the first time he has been so impossibly, uncontrollably smitten.  This whole thing must stop!

            Meantime, the War rages on;  casualty lists are horrific, especially since Germany has started using Poison gas, and a new offensive touted by Winston against the Dardanelles is proving to have the opposite desired effect:  Gallipolli has been an exercise in supreme carnage.  Asquith must pull himself together, Vanessa must marry someone – not quite anyone, for she is an aristocrat, but Asquith’s government musn’t fall:  everything depends on sound leadership to beat the Hun, and distractions like socialites can’t be allowed:  in short, Asquith has to show a bit of Stiff Upper Lip – which he does, at the eleventh hour.

            Robert Harris has written superbly of this fraught time, using all the correspondence from Asquith to his darling Venetia, plus many of the decrypted messages and telegrams which are still in existence, and he has endowed all main players in the drama exciting new life, especially demonstrating that Love doesn’t always Conquer All – sometimes it can produce the opposite effect!  FIVE STARS.