ROBERT HARRIS
Penguin
£15.99
ISBN
REVIEWED BY
Colum Kenny
Colum Kenny is Professor Emeritus, DCU, and author of Dangerous ambition: the making of Éamon de Valera (Eastwood Books, 2024).
My grand-aunt Josie from Newry would have approved. Robert Harris is unsparing when depicting Winston Churchill in his latest work of ‘fiction’. She too always blamed that future prime minister for the débâcle in the Dardanelles in 1915. That ill-conceived attack on Turkish positions in the eastern Mediterranean resulted in casualties of over half a million, including thousands of Irishmen. Among them was Josie Morgan’s boyfriend, who never returned from the First World War. His death defined her life. She left Ireland and worked into old age in England, recoiling at mentions of Churchill, as I saw. Harris paints an unflattering portrait of the last majority Liberal government of England. Under Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, but at the raging behest of his First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, it blundered into battles in the Dardanelles and at Gallipoli that it could not win.
Harris depicts Asquith as negligent, as a man besotted by a younger woman who wrote frantic love-letters to her even as he sat at cabinet meetings convened to make vital decisions. Asquith enclosed top-secret documents for her to read. The prospect of these falling into the hands of domestic or foreign foes is the central concern of Precipice. Harris records rather than overstates her influence, as expressed by Asquith.
A remarkable aspect of the book is that, as Harris writes, ‘All the letters quoted in the text from the Prime Minister are—the reader may be astonished to learn—authentic’, as are many other key documents cited in it. The letters that Venetia Stanley sent back are not extant, but Harris uses his imagination to fill the gaps plausibly. On both a personal and a political level Asquith’s letters are astonishing, naïve and needy to say the least. Harris keeps one turning the pages to know how the relationship is going to end. SPOILER ALERT! It ends in disaster, although not entirely for the members of the Conservative Party who got ministries in Asquith’s coalition that later in 1915 superseded his all-Liberal cabinet.
Historical novels may contain outright errors of fact or extravagant extrapolations that confuse readers, but Harris has built his reputation on respecting history. For example, his trilogy about life in Pompeii has been much praised. Yet Colm Tóibín’s recent The magician (2021) demonstrates the ultimate problem of ‘biographical fiction’ even when written by a fine author, being criticised in Germany for his creative treatment of Thomas Mann’s family. A Hilary Mantel novel may attract people to study Tudor England, but fictions can also mislead.
W.G. Sebald is one of those praised for successfully interweaving fact and fiction, for example in his Austerlitz. However, an Irish historian is confronted in Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn with a number of ostensibly factual statements about Roger Casement that surely undermine what the publisher of that book claims is Sebald’s ‘evocation of people and cultures past and present’. One is incorrectly informed, for example, that Casement had no legal representation at his trial. And Casement, writes Sebald, ‘could not rid his thoughts of the fact [my italics] that almost half the population of Ireland had been murdered by Cromwell’s soldiers’. The public may well enjoy Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins, despite its factual errors. Does it matter that one character represents Collins rather than Griffith as leading the Treaty delegation? I think it does, because the diminution of Griffith came to suit both sides after the Civil War.
In Colin Murphy’s recent The Treaty, the playwright repeats claims that Griffith agreed to or even signed some kind of secret commitment during negotiations. Taken with Frank Pakenham’s unreliable but still influential account of Griffith’s role—in Peace by ordeal (London, 1935; see History Ireland 30.4, July/August 2022, Platform, for my critique)—this notion has distorted the narrative of the state’s foundation. Having attended a preview of The Treaty, I wrote to Murphy that historical records contradict the version he adopts (as I had demonstrated in my Midnight in London) and asked him to change his text, as it is a ‘cruel falsification’.
Murphy declined. He responded publicly, writing that ‘accuracy and fealty to sources … may make for good history-writing, but it makes for lousy drama’. He added that his job is ‘not to give the audience a full, accurate account of the negotiations but to help them feel [his italics] the different burden carried by protagonists’ (Sunday Independent, 21 November 2021). Is falsehood itself not such a burden? Precipice is a case of the shoe being on the other foot. Robert Harris turns the tables on ‘straight’ historians. He writes that a ‘superbly edited’ Oxford University Press edition of most of the Asquith letters was ‘utterly invaluable to me’ but expresses surprise to have discovered that certain passages and letters were left out of it: ‘It seems incredible, in the literal sense of the word’. It is hard to disagree when one reads omissions that Harris now quotes, from a letter that Asquith wrote from Downing Street to Stanley in which he revealed to her his state of mind when deprived of her counsel during ‘hellish days … on the eve of the most astonishing and world-shaking decisions’.
Men in uniform, including my grand-uncle, Stephen J. Murphy of Tralee, who survived the hell of Gallipoli only to die when confronting Turks at Gaza in Palestine in 1917, deserved better from generals and politicians of the United Kingdom. Precipice makes this point in its own way just as well as ‘straight’ historical works have done.