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It’s a familiar story, even if the details vary: the powerful and successful older man who falls in love with a much younger woman who is flattered and touched by the attention.
In this particular case, he is tired after years in a demanding job, has a difficult wife and drinks too much. She is, at least for a while, dazzled by his eminence, even though she herself is part of the British aristocracy in what will turn out to be its heyday. The older man finds her charming, her slight eccentricities, like her beloved penguin, endearing. Are they having a sexual affair? Opinions remain divided, although Robert Harris takes the novelist’s liberty to imagine it.
What does abyssHarris’ new novel is so gripping when the love affair takes place and who the couple are. Their affair reaches its peak in the summer of 1914, as Europe heads toward World War I, and “he” is Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister of Britain, then the world’s greatest hegemonic power. She is Venetia Stanley, a daughter of the Earl of Sheffield, with connections throughout the ruling classes. Another lover, whom she eventually marries, is Edwin Montagu, Asquith’s wealthy and successful younger colleague.
At the beginning of the summer, when Asquith and Stanley met at parties in London or at country houses and exchanged letters when they were apart, the British government was first preoccupied with a crisis in Ireland. It was not until late June that Asquith mentioned in his letters the more serious crisis looming on the continent and spoke of the possibility of war.
Many Europeans thought they would never again experience a major conflict: Europe was a large continent and a world leader in science and industry, even in civilization itself. But not for the first and not the last time, a turbulent part of the world was engaging foreign powers in a dangerous confrontation.
One of Harris’s many admirable qualities as a novelist is his audacity. He delves into the past to tackle big issues, whether it’s the end of the Roman Republic or the Dreyfus affair, and now one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries, the outbreak of World War I. As always, he has done his research to resurrect a world long gone, and once again he tells a good story. He uses the press and official documents, but the heart of the book is Asquith’s daily letters to Stanley. (Her letters to him have not survived, but Harris finds plausible answers.)
The assassination of the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife on June 28 in Sarajevo, probably with the connivance of Serbian nationalists, set off a chain of events that led to war. Austria was determined to finish off Serbia and Germany supported it in this. Russia supported Serbia and its ally France stood by its side.
As Europe edged ever closer to the title, only one power could have stopped it: Britain could have made it clear to Germany in those last days of peace that it would fight on France’s side and use the full might of the British navy to cripple Germany’s economy. But Asquith’s cabinet was deeply divided, and Asquith himself only gradually came to believe that Britain should intervene.
By early August, when Germany launched its full-scale invasion of neutral Belgium and France, the British found they had little choice but to send ground troops into mainland Europe. Asquith continued to write to Stanley daily, often during Cabinet meetings as his divided ministers tried to decide how to proceed.
In September, as British troops were being driven back, he told Stanley that General Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, had been sent on a secret mission to see if he could salvage the situation. “You had better keep quiet for the time being,” Asquith wrote, adding, “I don’t think you know how much I love you…” To entertain his mistress, he frequently let such details of British policy, as well as actual secret documents, come into play. Did anyone suspect he was being so indiscreet? Harris suggests in a subplot that they did.
As the war became a cruel reality, Asquith wrote more and more letters to Stanley. By 1915, he was often writing twice, even three times a day. While he repeatedly declared his great love for her, he also asked for replies. His obsessive devotion, at a time when the war was going badly for the Allies, bordered on madness, and even she seemed to find it distressing.
On 11 May 1915, she wrote to him about her engagement to Montagu. “As you know,” replied Asquith, “The breaks my heart.” Their correspondence ended, but he found solace in writing lengthy letters to Stanley’s sister Sylvia. The novel makes one ponder whether Stanley was a useful safety valve for Asquith or a dangerous distraction.
abyss by Robert Harris Hutchinson Heinemann £22, 464 pages
Margaret MacMillan is Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford
Robert Harris speaks at the FT Weekend Festival on 7 September
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