Precipice (2024) by Robert Harris.
Good Reads meta-data is 464 pages rated 4.21 by 1107 litizens.
Genre: Historical fiction.
DNA: Edwardian England.
Verdict: Not for me.
Tagline: …. (Meh.)
The book is very well written, well researched in keeping with Harris’s other historical fictions, but…. Yes, there is a ‘but’ because, well, the story is depressing and boring. British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928) went sleepwalking into the Great War, daydreaming about his mistress in cabinet meetings, only occasionally noticing what went on, and even more remarkable, throwing secret state papers into the street for the German sympathisers and agents who followed him around to collect, so preoccupied was he with his lady love; this sixty year old man in a teenage hormone haze barely knew what he was doing. When confronted with this fact of the state papers, first he denied it, then, then excused it, and then…continued it.
All in all, he must be a candidate for the Donald Trump Prize for the most vacuous head of government. Yet he was PM for nearly a decade and Liberal Party leader longer. Asquith’s entitlement mentality and monumental incompetence is so tedious that I started flicking pages, and pages.
The woman was far more responsible than he was on this telling. She secreted his nine letters a day, tried to stop his littering with state papers, and finally broke with him to go to France to drive an ambulance. His reaction to the latter was to feel sorry for himself rather than snap out of his stupor.
Bring on Lloyd George!
Grey (sometimes ‘Gray’ in the Kindle text), Kitchener, and Churchill were the only ones in these pages who realised from the off that there would be a long and terrible war. Grey tried to prevent it, while Churchill savoured the thought but was realistic about what had to be done, and Kitchener feared it. None of them got any help from Asquith who drifted.
By the way, Harris claims both in a forward and an afterward that all of this is true. I believe him.