If all good novelists are good magicians, able to create terrific characters and scenes out of thin air, then Robert Harris is a Houdini, so versatile in his selection of subject matter and time period that it is hard to believe that the man who wrote the best-selling Fatherland, his first novel about what would have happened if Germany had won World War II, is the same person who wrote a three-volume saga about Cicero and ancient Rome. His new book, Precipice, takes the true story of British prime minister H. H. Asquith and his affair with the much younger socialite Venetia Stanley and spins that fact into a wondrous web of intrigue, love, and treachery during the early days of World War I. Harris fans will be enthralled as usual, and for those for whom Precipice will be their introduction to Harris, well, they now can look forward to reading his dozen previous acts of magic.
Jim Kelly: What is so remarkable about your new novel is that the facts are as compelling as your fictional imaginings. Here is a married prime minister in his 50s so besotted with a comely aristocrat less than half his age that he writes her constantly, sometimes as many as three letters a day, spilling wartime secrets and even including a memo that would prove crucial to his career. She kept the letters he wrote to her, but Asquith destroyed the letters she wrote to him, requiring you to imagine what she might have written. How did you go about the process of creating her side of the correspondence? And why are you so sure their relationship was not just platonic?
