CANR
WORK TITLE: Precipice
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Kintbury, Berkshire
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: English
LAST VOLUME: CANR 317
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 7, 1957, in Nottingham, England; son of Dennis (a printer) and Audrey Harris; married Gillian Hornby (a journalist), 1988; children: Holly Miranda, Charlie Robert Nicholas, Matilda Felicity, Samuel Orlando Hornby.
EDUCATION:Selwyn College, Cambridge University, B.A. (with honors), 1978.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC-TV), London, England, researcher and film director for Tonight, Nationwide, and Panorama, 1978-81, reporter for Newsnight, 1981-85, and for Panorama, 1985-87; Observer, London, political editor, 1987-89; Thames TV, London, political reporter for This Week, 1988-89; Sunday Times, London, political columnist, 1989-92.
AVOCATIONS:Reading history, walking, fishing, listening to music.
AWARDS:Columnist of the Year, British Press Awards, 2003; Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2025, for Conclave; Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 2025, for services to literature.
POLITICS: “Supporter of the British Labour Party.”WRITINGS
Coauthor of the screenplay D, 2014 (based on An Officer and a Spy).
The Ghost Writer was adapted as a film; Fatherland was adapted as a TV movie for Home Box Office (HBO). Archangel has been adapted for audio cassette; Enigma was adapted as a film in 2001; Conclave was adapted as a screenplay by Peter Straughan in 2024.
SIDELIGHTS
Robert Harris is a British television news reporter and writer of nonfiction and historical fiction. He has served as political editors for the London Observer, as well as columnist for London’s Sunday Times. Harris had written several books of nonfiction during the 1980s before the publication of his popular 1992 novel Fatherland. Constructed around the premise that Adolf Hitler led the Nazis to victory in World War II, with Germany defeating both Great Britain and the Soviet Union and fighting the United States to an uneasy deadlock, Fatherland became a best seller, selling three million copies worldwide. Several of Harris’s previous nonfiction works, such as A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Gotcha! The Media, the Government, and the Falklands Crisis, and V2, also deal with war and its repercussions.
In Selling Hitler, Harris details the 1983 hoax in which a counterfeiter claimed to have discovered the diaries of the dead Nazi leader. A true account of the Hitler diary hoax, Selling Hitler reveals the extent to which greed influenced the publishing industry to overlook the veracity of the (supposedly) newly discovered diaries in favor of their marketability. “One merit of Robert Harris’s thorough and mordantly funny account of the diaries scandal in Selling Hitler is that he lets no one off the hook,” commented New York Times Book Review critic James Markham. The diaries were originally obtained by a reporter for the German magazine Stern; according to Jonathan Alter in Newsweek, “executives at Stern‘s parent company, Gruner and Jahr, smelled money. Not wanting to see the bubble burst, Stern subjected the papers to only the most cursory handwriting examination.” Markham noted in the New York Times Book Review that Harris presents “an unsettling portrait of the press baron, Rupert Murdoch, who aggressively bought up rights to the diaries for his corporation … and then nonchalantly dismissed their fraudulence with an unhappily memorable one-liner: ‘After all, we are in the entertainment business.’” New Statesman reviewer Paul Hallam wrote that Harris tells this “sick saga … with skill and wit.”
The first of Harris’s novels, Fatherland, unfolds in docudrama style. The setting is 1964, on the eve of an important visit by the president of the United States, Joseph P. Kennedy, to the German führer, Adolf Hitler, in a Berlin that is now the site of the grandiose Great Hall. Built to the specifications of Nazi architect Albert Speer, the building can accommodate 180,000 people. The Allies have lost World War II, the wartime British prime minister, Winston Churchill, is in exile in Canada, and Germany now controls all of Europe and a good part of the Soviet Union. Against this background a German police detective, Xavier March, investigates the murder of a Nazi Party official and in the course of his probe unearths a terrible secret with wide-ranging implications. Pursued by the Gestapo, March attempts to publicize a crime of immeasurable dimensions—the systematic murder of millions of European Jews, whom the world believes to have been nonviolently relocated to the East. “March’s inquiries jeopardize the crowning achievement of Hitler’s three decades in office: world peace,” commented Mark Horowitz in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Coming at a time when the American president is making overtures to end the cold war with Germany, “revelations of a Holocaust would make appeasement impossible,” Horowitz explained.
New York Times Book Review critic Newgate Callendar wrote that Fatherland is an “absorbing, expertly written novel. … [It] is a bleak book. But what concerns the author is the indestructibility of the human spirit, as exemplified by Xavier March.” In Time, John Skow stated that Harris’s “brooding, brown-and-black setting of a victorious Nazi regime is believable and troubling, the stuff of long nights of little sleep.” And in the Los Angeles Times Book Review Horowitz remarked that “ Fatherland works fine as a sly and scary page-turner.”
Harris followed Fatherland with his second novel, Enigma. Like its predecessor, Enigma is a World War II thriller, this time set in a secret code-breaking headquarters in England. At the height of the war, brilliant-but-inexperienced researcher Thomas Jericho has managed to crack a Nazi code nicknamed Shark—but the marathon effort has led to his nervous breakdown. Before his recovery is complete, however, Jericho is called back to work on an even tougher Nazi code: Enigma, which is generated on new four-rotor encrypting machines. With a battalion of American warships about to lock horns with German U-boats, it is vital that the code be cracked in time to ensure an Allied victory. Complications further ensue when Jericho suspects his new love, Claire Romilly, of being a spy.
“The second novel is always the most difficult, especially after a big hit,” wrote Clive Ponting in New Statesman & Society. The critic acknowledged Harris’s sophomore effort as an “ultimately … formulaic thriller whose location cannot disguise its rather ordinary plot,” though Ponting added that the author does provide “a good pace.” Skow in Time found more to like in Enigma, saying that the results of Harris’s efforts to portray genius are “worthy and believable, if not luminous.” And to a Publishers Weekly contributor, the novel is “a rare mix of cerebral and visceral thrills that features risky exploits complementing the exhilarating challenge [of] solving daunting puzzles within puzzles.” Apart from being an international best seller, Enigma was the subject of a BBC documentary on the making of a thriller.
The author is “at his best,” wrote Skow, in his third novel, Archangel. In the “what-if” tradition of Fatherland, Archangel takes on modern Russian history, exploring the implications of a pro-Stalinist cult that discovers the long-lost son of the late dictator and seeks to bring the scion to power. Such a premise powers the novel’s theme: “Scratch the surface of post-Soviet Russia,” commented New Statesman contributor Kate Saunders, “and you will find unreconstructed, bloody-minded old commies.” While this over-the-top plot could be the stuff of potboilers, Harris “makes you believe it as it’s happening,” in the words of New York Times writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. To Michael Specter, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the author “has given those of us who retain some literary nostalgia for the Evil Empire exactly what we have been waiting for.” “Building on accurate historical sense,” noted Booklist contributor Gilbert Taylor, Harris describes would-be historical events compellingly enough to “[reward] readers with a thoroughly thrilling tale.”
Harris’s 2003 novel, Pompeii, spins a new twist on an old tale. According to a reviewer for the Economist, “Mr. Harris sticks to the Enigma formula of placing fictional characters … into an authentic setting.” The book takes place in A.D. 79 in the Roman Empire two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The fictional protagonist, civil engineer Marcus Attilus Primus, is elected to investigate the water supply blockage to the aqueduct along the Bay of Naples. His findings lead him to believe bigger problems may be on the horizon, and with the approval of his admiral, Attilus sails to Pompeii to get to the root of the problem, which lies at the base of Mount Vesuvius. Although readers are familiar with the tragic ending of this familiar tale, “the events are handled with a skill that kept me turning the pages,” Jasper Griffin wrote in the Spectator. He concluded that “Harris has done his homework” in depicting the “picture of life” during ancient Rome. The Economist reviewer called Pompeii “an engaging thriller with no small lesson for our own times.”
In a return to Ancient Rome following the success of Pompeii, Harris offers readers the first title in a new Roman series called “Cicero.” Imperium is narrated by Tiro, slave to the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, and ostensibly the inventor of shorthand, due to the necessity of dutifully recording everything that happened to Cicero, both as a statesman in public and over the course of his private life. Tiro looks back on Cicero’s life and his experiences with the orator from the advanced age of ninety, at which point he decides he will write a biography of the statesman based on the records he has maintained. Janet Julian, in a review for Kliatt, commented that “Harris’s book reads like an adventure story, complete with pirate attacks and dirty politics,” concluding the result is “altogether a stellar performance.” Susanne Bardelson, reviewing for School Library Journal, remarked that “the author paints a vivid picture of everyday life, and the courtroom dramas are, at times, riveting.” According to Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan, “Harris spins a crackling good yarn, made all the more powerful by the fact that it is thoroughly grounded in history.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly was of a similar opinion, stating that “Harris’s description of Rome’s labyrinthine, and sometimes deadly, political scene is fascinating and instructive.”
Taking a break from his Roman theme, Harris’s next novel, The Ghost, is a thinly veiled criticism of former British prime minister Tony Blair, a man whom Harris once considered a friend but with whom he suffered a fairly public falling out, both over the firing of Harris’s best friend and the outright cooperation with U.S. president George W. Bush regarding the war in Iraq and foreign policy in general, which flew in the face of Harris’s firm antiwar beliefs. The book tells the story of a British prime minister who seems to make all of his decisions based on what would best assist the United States, rather than looking to his own country’s interests. A second featured character is serving as a ghostwriter for the prime minister as he attempts to put together his memoirs. The ghostwriter is the second person in the job, following the death of the first one, and rumors as to that individual’s demise are running rampant, creating a mystery within the novel that holds up separately from the barely concealed facts of the situation. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews found the book “very slick, rather tense, sophisticated, and amusing.” Jonathan Freedland, in a contribution for the New York Times Book Review, wrote: “The plot is unfussy and perhaps too linear for those thriller readers fond of pyrotechnics, but it unfolds with clarity and panache—and with a classy twist on the very last page.” He concludes, however, that the ending of the novel “works as a thriller, but it reduces somewhat the novel’s power as a political critique.”
Harris offers readers a fictionalized version of the Dreyfus Affair in An Officer and a Spy, detailing the wrongful conviction and continued imprisonment of French army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The novel is narrated by army officer Major Georges Picquart, who witnesses Dreyfus’s conviction for treason. Shortly afterward, Picquart is promoted to colonel, and he heads up the army’s espionage unit. Under his new command, he learns that Dreyfus is innocent, and that the real culprit is Walsin Esterhazy. Picquart insists on clearing Dreyfus’s name, bringing him to freedom, and ensuring that Esterhazy is tried instead. He faces resistance from the French government at every turn, even in light of growing and insurmountable evidence.
“An Officer and a Spy is more than a thriller but inevitably such a taut narrative fails to convey why the turmoil caused by the Dreyfus Affair brought France to the brink of civil war,” Piers Paul Read remarked in his Spectator assessment. “But what we lose in in-depth understanding, we gain in excitement, as the spy becomes spied upon, the investigator becomes the suspect, and the full force of the state’s sinister apparatus of espionage and dirty tricks is directed against its own chief.” Bradley Scott, writing in Library Journal, was even more impressed, asserting: “This is an atmospheric and tense historical thriller, with a flawed but honorable protagonist fighting against entrenched complacence and bigotry.” As Booklist correspondent Christine Tran pointed out, “Harris combats the predictability that can haunt fictional accounts of well-known events by teasing out the tale.” New Statesman contributor Douglas Hurd commended Harris’s entire career in light of An Officer and a Spy, explaining: “Harris is a novelist of range and depth—he moves from the Soviet Union to the politics of ancient Rome through a prime minister manufacturing his memoirs and now to France of the Third Republic convulsed by the Dreyfus case. In each book, Harris has found a way of marrying history with intelligent fiction to produce thrillers that are both insightful and gripping.”
Dictator, the third novel in the “Cicero” series, was published in 2015. Cicero has been exiled and removed from power. After making peace with Julius Caesar, he is permitted to return to Rome. However, when Caesar is assassinated and he is returned to power, the challenges of the day prove too much for his political mind.
In a review in Financial Times, Sam Leith noted that, because the story sticks to the historical record, “there are no spoilers in saying that it charts the collapse of the triumvirate, the end of the republic and the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination.” Leith admitted that “the pleasure” in writing historical fiction of this variety “is in the filling-in of the detail. Harris cleverly frames the story as a book written by Cicero’s batman Tiro … many years after the events it describes. It’s a lateral move in a book full of them.” Reviewing the novel in the London Observer, Stephanie Merritt commented that “Harris’s style is a curious blend of contemporary idiom … with Latin vocabulary so precise it requires a separate glossary; while the modern language may jar with historical purists, the research underpinning it is so meticulous that the reader feels wholly absorbed into Cicero’s world, and this is Harris’s real achievement. Dictator is a fitting finale.” Booklist contributor Sarah Johnson reasoned that the novel’s “plotting is brisk, and Harris never loses sight of his themes, or his protagonist’s relevance for today.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked that “the book is charming as well as engrossing, largely due to the immensely likable person of Cicero, who is wise but not pedantic, moral but not sanctimonious.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly concluded that “ Dictator is not easy reading. Yet its gripping dramas and powerful themes … richly illuminate the conflicts of its era and our own.”
(open new)In Conclave, the pope dies suddenly, bringing the Vatican into a conclave to choose his successor. Cardinal Lomeli, who serves as Dean of the College of Cardinals, decides to investigate rumors that the pope had planned to fire certain cardinals. Several of the top contenders were possibly among those he wished to remove from the possibility of becoming the next pope.
In an interview in Publishers Weekly, Harris talked with Lenny Picker about how Conclave was similar to his other novels. He admitted that “a conclave is, in essence, albeit cloaked in sacred ritual, a struggle for power, and all my books are about power, in one form or another. Often they are centered on small groups in which there is a struggle for control.”
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Vanessa Friedman remarked that the plot “moves forward vote after vote with so much momentum it’s easy to forget that faith of a deep and visceral kind is involved; the characters are more like chessmen being moved around a board in a complex game of strategy than figures who have devoted their lives to a religious belief system. Though prayer is often invoked, and a tantalizing distinction made between the church and God.” Friedman concluded that “Harris has written a gripping, smart book. The only quibble, ironically enough, is that it could have used a touch more soul.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “an illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.”
With Munich, Oxford friends Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann begin careers in public service in their countries as World War II draws near. Legat became a private secretary of the British prime minister, while Hartmann joined the German diplomatic corps. Hartmann is among those who wish to remove Hitler from power before tensions escalate ever further. When Hitler threatens to invade the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, Legat and Hartmann begin working together to end the conflict before Neville Chamberlain convinces enough countries to allow Hitler to annex it.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor found the novel to be “engaging, informative, and quietly suspenseful.” Booklist contributor David Pitt labelled this novel “another surefire best-seller from a consistently fine author of historical fiction.” Writing in National Review, John Fund noted that “Harris has taken on a herculean task in trying to rehabilitate Chamberlain, and he makes a valiant attempt.” Fund also wrote that the novel is “bathed in shades of gray, in stark contrast to most World War II thrillers. On one hand, it’s no surprise his book will be turned into a movie…. But it’s also almost certain that the film version will stress the thriller aspects of the Harris book and downplay its attempt to inject historical nuance into the Munich conference. The popular perception of those times will inevitably draw far more from Gary Oldman than from Robert Harris.”
The Second Sleep is set in 15th-century England. Assigned to officiate a funeral for a parish priest who fell to his death, Father Christopher Fairfax begins to ask questions after finding suspicious circumstances. Fairfax notices the priest owned many heretical texts, and the funeral was interrupted. The longer he stays, the stranger the situation becomes, indicating that the priest was involved in something shocking.
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Nicola Griffith lamented that “there is a surprising lack of narrative tension, the internal inconsistencies are confounding and we have guessed the denouement long before it arrives. In the end, even Harris seems to give up, and all fades to black in a shower of cold, wet dirt.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly suggested that “few readers will pick up on the fairly-planted clues. This is a clever complement to Harris’s debut mystery.”
In V2, the Germans have developed the Vergeltungswaffen Zwei (V2) pilotless drone bomb as they realize they are losing World War II. Although they are unreliable, the Nazis hope that it will unsettle civilian populations in England. British intelligence could track the V2 in flight on the way to their intended English targets but had difficulty tracing their origins. Meanwhile, German engineers struggled to mass produce the V2, while potato crops were requisitioned for use in rocket fuel out of desperation.
A Kirkus Reviews contributor found it to be “a short, enjoyable thriller with plenty of well-researched historical nuggets.” Booklist contributor Bill Ott recognized that “Harris’ novel combines fascinating technical detail with a wartime drama that finds human ambiguity on both sides of the battlefield.” In a review in the New York Times Book Review, Ben Macintyre claimed: “In the hands of a lesser writer, this damp squib of history might be an impediment, but in the course of this gripping novel Harris captures something of the real nature of war: good ideas that fail, perverted science, grandiosity, lies and unintended consequences.”
Act of Oblivion begins in the mid-1600s as King Charles II is restored to the throne of England. Richard Nayler is hired to find those responsible for beheading his father, Charles I. There are thirteen individuals who signed the death warrant, leaving Nayler travelling to New England to capture the last of them.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly called Harris a “talented author.” The same reviewer noted that he “humanizes the hunter and the hunted, and brings to life an obscure chapter in colonial American history” in this novel. A Kirkus Reviews contributor insisted that the novel is “thoroughly enjoyable with some cringeworthy descriptions. Readers will not pine for days of yore.” Booklist contributor Pitt labelled it “another top-flight effort from a master storyteller.”
In Precipice, elderly British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith is having an affair with a much younger woman, Venetia Stanley. Asquith obsesses over Stanley and does not hide his closeness to her among those in his circle. DS Paul Deemer is assigned to investigate the drowning death of Asquith’s son. However, some encourage Deemer to investigate Asquith’s relationship with Stanley as a means to gain political leverage as war draws near.
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Alida Becker acknowledged that “there’s plenty of historical drama.” In a review in Spectator, Jonathan Boff remarked that the novel “offers a very good thriller which sails through the ‘Downton Abbey’ test with the grace of a dreadnought cruising down the Channel. It feels realistic enough for us to suspend disbelief over the occasional bit of hokum, and makes us care enough about the characters to keep turning the pages. It’s Harris’s best book since Conclave.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor described it as “a foolish affair and a horrible war that will grab and hold readers’ attention.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 15, 1995, Gilbert Taylor, review of Enigma, p. 142; November 1, 1998, Gilbert Taylor, review of Archangel, p. 451; October 15, 2003, Kristine Huntley, review of Pompeii, p. 390; September 15, 2006, Margaret Flanagan, review of Imperium, p. 27; December 1, 2013, Christine Tran, review of An Officer and a Spy, p. 28; December 15, 2015, Sarah Johnson, review of Dictator, p. 34; November 15, 2017, David Pitt, review of Munich, p. 27; September 1, 2020, Bill Ott, review of V2, p. 49; September 1, 2022, David Pitt, review of Act of Oblivion, p. 37.
BookPage, December 1, 2019, Bruce Tierney, review of The Second Sleep, p. 14.
Books, September 22, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 20.
Bookseller, May 23, 2003, “Death of a Boom Town: Robert Harris Explores the Final Hours of Pompeii,” p. 30.
Economist (U.S.), November 28, 1998, review of Archangel, p. 89; September 6, 2003, review of Pompeii, p. 76.
Entertainment Weekly, October 20, 1995, Michael Giltz, review of Enigma, p. 58; February 5, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 64; November 21, 2003, Jennifer Reese, “Blast from the Past: Robert Harris’s Pompeii Vividly Imagines the Two Days before the Vesuvius Blew Its Top,” p. 88.
Europe, March 1, 2000, Robert Guttman, review of Archangel, p. 36.
Financial Times, October 16, 2015, Sam Leith, review of Dictator.
Guardian (London, England), September 5, 1995, Roy Ackerman, “First among Sequels,” p. 12; July 3, 2021, Alex Preston, “Robert Harris: ‘My Method Is Usually to Start a Book on 15 January and Finish It on 15 June.’”
History of War, January 1, 2022, Martyn Conterio, “Munich: The Edge of War Interview with Robert Harris & Christian Schwochow,” p. 66.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1995, review of Enigma, p. 1130; November 1, 1998, review of Archangel, p. 1552; September 15, 2003, review of Pompeii, p. 1145; September 15, 2007, review of The Ghost; November 15, 2013, review of An Officer and a Spy; December 1, 2015, review of Dictator; September 15, 2016, review of Conclave; November 15, 2017, review of Munich; September 1, 2020, review of V2; September 1, 2022, review of Act of Oblivion; August 15, 2024, review of Precipice.
Kliatt, September 1, 2007, Janet Julian, review of Imperium, p. 44.
Library Journal, October 1, 1995, Dawn Anderson, review of Enigma, p. 119; January, 1999, Roland Person, review of Archangel, p. 150; October 15, 2003, Jane Baird, review of Pompeii, p. 98; January 1, 2014, Bradley Scott, review of An Officer and a Spy, p. 96.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 5, 1992, Mark Horowitz, review of Fatherland, pp. 2, 9; February 1, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 9.
National Post, November 26, 2024, Jamie Portman, “Author Interview: Robert Harris on His Thriller Precipice.”
National Review, February 22, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 51; February 19, 2018, John Fund, review of Munich, p. 39.
New Statesman, May 1, 1987, Paul Hallam, review of Selling Hitler; October 16, 1998, Kate Saunders, review of Archangel, p. 57; November 8, 2013, Douglas Hurd, review of An Officer and a Spy, p. 43; August 28, 2024, Pippa Bailey, “Robert Harris: ‘Great Politicians Are Like Novelists;'” September 18, 2020, Michael Prodger, “‘We Have Moved into the Age of Irrationality’: Robert Harris on Why Politics Has Become a Grim Comedy,” p. 20; August 30, 2024, Pippa Bailey, review of Precipice, p. 32.
New Statesman & Society, September 1, 1995, Clive Ponting, review of Enigma, p. 33; September 15, 2003, Philip Kerr, review of Pompeii, p. 48.
Newsweek, May 26, 1986, Jonathan Alter, review of Selling Hitler, p. 70; February 1, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 66.
New York Times, October 11, 1995, Alan Riding, “An Enigma Wrapped in a Mystery,” p. C17; January 21, 1999, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Archangel, p. E9.
New York Times Book Review, April 13, 1986, James Markham, review of Selling Hitler, p. 28; June 28, 1992, Newgate Callendar, review of Fatherland, pp. 11-12; October 22, 1995, Peter Vansittart, review of Enigma, p. 46; February 14, 1999, Michael Specter, review of Archangel, p. 10; November 4, 2007, Jonathan Freedland, “Yes, Minister,” p. 25; January 31, 2014, Louis Begley, review of An Officer and a Spy; December 4, 2016, Vanessa Friedman, review of Conclave, p. 65; February 4, 2018, Joshua Hammer, review of Munich, p. 10; December 8, 2019, Nicola Griffith, review of The Second Sleep, p. 51; December 6, 2020, Ben Macintyre, review of V2, p. 14; December 8, 2024, Alida Becker, review of Precipice, p. 11; January 26, 2025, “Robert Harris,” p. 6.
Observer (London, England), June 9, 1996, review of Enigma, p. 16; September 27, 1998, review of Archangel, p. 14; October 3, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 16; October 18, 2015, Stephanie Merritt, review of Dictator.
People, October 30, 1995, J.D. Reed, review of Enigma, p. 42.
Publishers Weekly, September 11, 1995, review of Enigma, p. 74; November 30, 1998, review of Archangel, p. 49; October 27, 2003, review of Pompeii, p. 45; November 18, 2013, review of An Officer and a Spy, p. 35; November 30, 2015, review of Dictator, p. 36; September 26, 2016, Lenny Picker, “PW Talks with Robert Harris: A Complex Conclave,” p. 66; September 2, 2019, review of The Second Sleep, p. 86; July 25, 2022, review of Act of Oblivion, p. 52.
School Library Journal, June 1, 1996, Carol Beall, review of Enigma, p. 168.
Spectator, August 26, 1995, Kingsley Amis, review of Enigma, p. 26; September 26, 1998, Douglas Hurd, review of Archangel, p. 45; November 21, 1998, review of Archangel, p. 43; November 28, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 46; October 4, 2003, Jasper Griffin, “Fire from Heaven,” p. 53; December, 2006, Susanne Bardelson, review of Imperium, p. 172; October 5, 2013, Piers Paul Read, review of An Officer and a Spy, p. 45; August 24, 2024, Jonathan Boff, review of Precipice, p. 38.
Sunday Times (London, England), September 13, 1998, Norman Stone, “Stalin and Me, a Bit of a Thriller,” p. N4.
Time, July 6, 1992, John Skow, review of Fatherland, pp. 75-76; October 23, 1995, John Skow, review of Enigma, p. 102; February 15, 1999, John Skow, review of Archangel, p. 80.
Times Educational Supplement, July 19, 1996, review of Enigma, p. R6.
Times Literary Supplement, September 22, 1995, Keith Jeffrey, review of Enigma, p. 22; September 25, 1998, Richard Overy, review of Archangel, p. 21.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 19, 1995, review of Enigma, p. 6.
Virginia Quarterly Review, September 22, 1999, review of Archangel, p. 131.
Washington Post Book World, October 15, 1995, review of Enigma, p. 4.
ONLINE
Associated Press, https://apnews.com/ (February 28, 2025), Hilary Fox, “Author Robert Harris on ‘Conclave’ Success ahead of Sunday’s Oscars.”
National Public Radio website, http://www.npr.org/ (January 30, 2014), Alan Cheuse, review of An Officer and a Spy.
Robert Harris
UK flag (b.1957)
Robert Harris was born in Nottingham in 1957 and is a graduate of Cambridge University. He has been a reporter on the BBC's Newsnight and Panorama programmes, Political Editor of the Observer, and a columnist on The Sunday Times. He is the author of five non-fiction books in addition to his bestselling fiction.
Awards: Walter Scott (2014), CWA (2014), ITW (2008) see all
Genres: Historical, Thriller
Series
Cicero
1. Imperium (2006)
2. Conspirata (2009)
3. Dictator (2015)
thumbthumbthumb
Novels
Fatherland (1992)
Enigma (1995)
Archangel (1998)
Pompeii (2003)
The Ghost Writer (2007)
aka The Ghost
The Fear Index (2011)
An Officer and a Spy (2013)
Conclave (2016)
Munich (2017)
The Second Sleep (2019)
V2 (2020)
Act of Oblivion (2022)
Precipice (2024)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumb
Non fiction hide
A Higher Form of Killing (1982) (with Jeremy Paxman)
Gotcha (1983)
The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984)
Good and Faithful Servant (1990)
Selling Hitler (1996)
thumbthumbthumbthumb
thumb
Omnibus editions hide
Enigma / Archangel (2007)
Robert Harris (novelist)
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Appearance hide
Text
Small
Standard
Large
Width
Standard
Wide
Color (beta)
Automatic
Light
Dark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Harris
CBE
Harris in November 2024
Harris in November 2024
Born Robert Dennis Harris
7 March 1957 (age 68)
Nottingham, England
Occupation Novelist
Education Selwyn College, Cambridge (BA)
Period 1982–present
Genre Fiction
Subject Historical fiction
thriller
Notable works Fatherland (1992), The Ghost (2007), An Officer and a Spy (2013)
Notable awards British Press Award Columnist of the Year (2003)
César Award for Best Adaptation (2011, 2020)
Spouse Gill Hornby
Children 4
Relatives Nick Hornby (brother-in-law)
Signature
Harris's voice
Duration: 35 seconds.0:35
from the BBC programme Desert Island Discs, 28 November 2010.[1]
Robert Dennis Harris CBE (born 7 March 1957) is a British novelist and former journalist. Although he began his career in journalism and non-fiction, he is best known for his works of historical fiction. Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome. His later works are varied in settings but are mostly set after 1870.
Several of Harris's novels have been adapted into films, including The Ghost Writer (2010) and An Officer and a Spy (2019), for which he co-wrote the screenplays with director Roman Polanski, and Conclave (2024).
Early life and education
Robert Harris spent his childhood in a small rented house on a Nottingham council estate. His ambition to become a writer arose at an early age, from visits to the local printing plant where his father worked. Harris went to Belvoir High School in Bottesford, Leicestershire,[2] and then King Edward VII School, Melton Mowbray, where a hall was later named after him. There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine. He lived at 17 Fleming Avenue.[3]
Harris read English literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was elected president of the Cambridge Union and editor of Varsity, the oldest student newspaper at Cambridge University.
Selwyn College, Cambridge
Career
Early career
After leaving Cambridge, Harris joined the BBC and worked on news and current affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. In 1987, at the age of 30, he became political editor of the newspaper The Observer. He later wrote regular columns for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph.
Non-fiction (1982–1990)
Harris co-wrote his first book, A Higher Form of Killing (1982), with fellow BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman: this was a study of chemical and biological warfare. Other non-fiction works followed: Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis (1983) covering the Falklands War; The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984), a profile of Kinnock just after he became leader of the Opposition; Selling Hitler (1986), an investigation of the Hitler Diaries scandal; and Good and Faithful Servant (1990), a study of Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher while she was prime minister.
Fiction
Part of a series on
Alternate history
People
Elements
Related topics
icon Speculative fiction portal
History portal
vte
Fatherland (1992)
Harris's bestselling first novel, the alternative-history Fatherland (1992), has as its setting a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist. It was adapted as a television film by HBO in 1994.[4]
Harris has stated that the proceeds from the book enabled him to buy a former vicarage in Berkshire that he jokingly dubbed "the house that Hitler built", where he still lives.[5]
Enigma (1995)
His second novel, Enigma, portrayed the breaking of the German Enigma cipher during the Second World War at Cambridge University and Bletchley Park. It was adapted as a film by writer Tom Stoppard, starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, in 2001.[6]
Archangel (1998)
Archangel was another international best seller. It follows a British historian in contemporary Russia as he hunts for a secret notebook, believed to be Stalin's diary. It was adapted as a television film by the BBC, starring Daniel Craig, in 2005.[7]
Pompeii (2003)
In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with Pompeii. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realises the volcano is shifting the ground beneath and is near eruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going.
Imperium (2006)
In 2006, Harris followed up on Pompeii with another Roman-era work, Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy centred on the life of the great Roman orator and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero.
The Ghost (2007)
Harris was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Tony Blair (a personal acquaintance) and a donor to New Labour, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm.[8] "We had our ups and downs, but we didn't really fall out until the invasion of Iraq, which made no sense to me," Harris has said.[9]
In 2007, after Blair resigned, Harris dropped his other work to write The Ghost. The title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in gruesome and mysterious circumstances. The dead man has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister called Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair.[10] The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. Harris told The Guardian before publication: "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him."[11]
Harris said in a U.S. National Public Radio interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook. When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter.[12]
Harris hinted at a third, far less obvious, allusion hidden in the novel's title, and, more significantly, at a possible motive for having written the book in the first place. Blair, he said, had himself been ghostwriter, in effect, to President Bush when giving public reasons for invading Iraq: he had argued the case better than had the President himself.[13]
The New York Observer, headlining its otherwise hostile review The Blair Snitch Project, commented that the book's "shock-horror revelation" was "so shocking it simply can't be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain."[8]
Roman Polanski and Harris adapted the novel as the film The Ghost Writer (2010).[14]
Lustrum (2009)
The second novel in the Cicero trilogy, Lustrum, was published in October 2009. It was released in February 2010 in the US under the alternative title of Conspirata.[15]
The Fear Index (2011)
The Fear Index was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. It focuses on the 2010 Flash Crash and follows an American expat hedge fund operator living in Geneva who activates a new system of computer algorithms that he names VIXAL-4, which is designed to operate faster than human beings, but which begins to become uncontrollable by its human operators. It was adapted by Sky Atlantic in 2022 as a 4-part limited series starring Josh Hartnett.[16]
An Officer and a Spy (2013)
An Officer and a Spy is the story of French officer Georges Picquart, a historical character, who is promoted in 1895 to run France's Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realises that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth. Harris was inspired to write the novel by his friend Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a film in 2019.[17]
Dictator (2015)
Dictator was the long-promised conclusion to the Harris Cicero trilogy.[18] It was published by Hutchinson on 8 October 2015.[19]
Conclave (2016)
Conclave, published in 2016,[20] is a novel "set over 72 hours in the Vatican", leading up to "the election of a fictional Pope".[21] The film adaptation, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci and directed by Edward Berger, was released in the US by Focus Features[22] on 1 November 2024.[23]
Munich (2017)
Munich, published on 21 September 2017, is a thriller set during the negotiations for the 1938 Munich Agreement between Hitler and UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The story is told through the eyes of two young civil servants – one German, Hartmann, and one English, Legat, who reunite at the fateful summit, six years after they were friends at university. It was adapted for Netflix as Munich – The Edge of War, starring Jeremy Irons and George MacKay in 2022.[24]
The Second Sleep (2019)
The Second Sleep[25][26] is set in the small English village of Addicott St. George in Wessex in the year 1468 (but it is not "our" 1468; it's 800 years later than the 2020s) and follows the events of a priest, Christopher Fairfax, sent there to bury the previous priest, and the secrets he discovers: about the priest, the village, and the society in which they live.
V2 (2020)
V2[27] is a thriller set in November 1944 which follows the parallel stories of a German V-2 rocket scientist, Rudi Graf, and a British WAAF, Kay Caton-Walsh.
Act of Oblivion (2022)
Act of Oblivion[28] is set in 1660 and follows Richard Nayler of the Privy Council who is tasked with tracking down the regicides Edward Whalley and William Goffe. The book is notable for featuring only real figures as named characters, with the sole exception of Nayler.[29]
Precipice (2024)
Precipice follows a young British intelligence officer on the eve of World War I who is assigned to investigate the disappearance of top-secret documents during Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's affair with Venetia Stanley.[30]
Work with Roman Polanski
In 2007, Harris wrote a screenplay of his novel Pompeii for director Roman Polanski. Harris acknowledged in many interviews that the plot of his novel was inspired by Polanski's film Chinatown, and Polanski said it was precisely that similarity that had attracted him to Pompeii.[31] The film, to be produced by Summit Entertainment, was announced at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 as potentially the most expensive European film ever made, set to be shot in Spain. Media reports suggested Polanski wanted Orlando Bloom and Scarlett Johansson to play the two leads. The film was cancelled in September 2007 as a result of a looming actors' strike.[32]
Polanski and Harris then turned to Harris's bestseller, The Ghost. They co-wrote a script and Polanski announced filming for early 2008, with Nicolas Cage, Pierce Brosnan, Tilda Swinton and Kim Cattrall starring. The film was then postponed by a year, with Ewan McGregor and Olivia Williams replacing Cage and Swinton. The film, titled The Ghost Writer in all territories except the UK, was shot in early 2009 in Berlin and on the island of Sylt in the North Sea, which stood in for London and Martha's Vineyard respectively, owing to Polanski's inability to travel legally to those places. In spite of his later incarceration in Switzerland, he oversaw post-production while under house arrest and the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2010.
Harris was inspired to write his novel An Officer and a Spy by Polanski's longtime interest in the Dreyfus affair.[33] He also wrote a screenplay based on the story, which Polanski was to direct in 2012.[34] The screenplay was first titled D, after the initial written on the secret file that secured Dreyfus' conviction. After many years of production difficulties, it was filmed in 2018, starring Jean Dujardin. It was produced by Alain Goldman and released by Gaumont in 2019.[35]
In June 2018 Harris reiterated his support for Polanski, and branded criticisms of Polanski's crimes as being a problem of culture and fashion. "The culture has completely changed....And so the question is: "Do you then say, OK fine, I follow the culture.' Or do I say: 'Well, he hasn't done anything since then. He won the Oscar, he got a standing ovation in Los Angeles.' The zeitgeist has changed. Do you change with it? I don't know, to be honest with you. Morally, I don't see why I should change my position because the fashion has changed."[36]
TV appearances and radio broadcasts
Harris has appeared on the BBC satirical panel game Have I Got News for You in episode three of the first series in 1990, and in episode four of the second series a year later. In the first he appeared as a last-minute replacement for the politician Roy Hattersley. In 1991 he played a supporting role as a reporter in the television series Selling Hitler, which was based on his non-fiction book of the same name. On 12 October 2007, he made a third appearance on the programme, 17 years, to the day, after his first appearance. Since the gap between his second and third appearance was nearly 16 years, Harris enjoyed the distinction of the longest gap between two successive appearances in the show's history until Eddie Izzard appeared on 22 April 2016,[37] just under 20 years after his last appearance on Episode 5 of Series 11 (17 May 1996).
On 2 December 2010, Harris appeared on the radio programme Desert Island Discs, when he spoke about his childhood and his friendships with Tony Blair and Roman Polanski.
Harris appeared on the American PBS show Charlie Rose (2012). Harris discussed his novel The Fear Index which he likened to a modern-day Gothic novel along the lines of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Harris also discussed the adaptation of his novel, The Ghost that came out as the movie, The Ghost Writer directed by Roman Polanski.[38]
Columnist
Harris was a columnist for The Sunday Times, but gave it up in 1997. He returned to journalism in 2001, writing for The Daily Telegraph.[39] He was named "Columnist of the Year" at the 2003 British Press Awards.[40]
Personal life
Harris lives in a former vicarage in Kintbury, near Hungerford in Berkshire, with his wife, Gill Hornby, herself a writer and sister of best-selling novelist Nick Hornby. They have four children. Harris is good friends with Peter Mandelson, who is godfather to one of his children.
Harris contributed a short story, "PMQ", to Hornby's 2000 collection Speaking with the Angel.
Formerly a donor to the Labour Party, he renounced his support for the party after the appointment of Guardian journalist Seumas Milne as its communications director by leader Jeremy Corbyn.[41] He now supports the Liberal Democrats.[42]
Harris considers Graham Greene, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh his "literary heroes". Some of his favourite books include Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1918, a series of diary entries from Harry von Kessler, edited by Laird M. Easton, and Great Expectations, a novel by Charles Dickens that he describes as a "supreme example" of how plot, characters, and language can all work in tandem.[43]
Works
Fiction
Stand-alone works
Fatherland (1992)
Enigma (1995)
Archangel (1998)
Pompeii (2003)
The Ghost (2007)
The Fear Index (2011)
An Officer and a Spy (2013)
Conclave (2016)
Munich (2017)
The Second Sleep (2019)
V2 (2020)
Act of Oblivion (2022)
Precipice (2024)
The Cicero Trilogy
Imperium (2006)
Lustrum[a] (2009)
Dictator (2015)
Short fiction
"PMQ" (in the Nick Hornby-edited anthology Speaking with the Angel)
Screenplays
The Ghost Writer (2010) (with Roman Polanski)
An Officer and a Spy (2019) (with Roman Polanski)
Non-fiction
A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (with Jeremy Paxman). London: Chatto & Windus, March 1982 ISBN 978-0-7011-2585-1
Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis. London: Faber and Faber, January 1983 ISBN 978-0-571-13052-8
The Making of Neil Kinnock. London: Faber and Faber, 17 September 1984 ISBN 978-0-571-13267-6
Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries. London: Faber and Faber, 17 February 1986 ISBN 978-0-571-13557-8
Good and Faithful Servant: The Unauthorized Biography of Bernard Ingham. London: Faber and Faber, December 1990 ISBN 978-0-571-16108-9
Awards and nominations
Year Award Category Work Result Ref.
2011 César Awards Best Adaptation The Ghost Writer Won [44]
2020 An Officer and a Spy Won [45]
2010 European Film Awards Best Screenwriter The Ghost Writer Won [46]
2019 An Officer and a Spy Nominated [47]
2011 Lumières Awards Best Screenplay The Ghost Writer Won [48]
2020 An Officer and a Spy Nominated [49]
2010 Walter Scott Prize Lustrum
Shortlisted
2014 An Officer and a Spy Won [50]
2023 Act of Oblivion
Shortlisted
[51]
2025 USC Scripter Awards Film Conclave Won [52]
Honours
He was awarded the Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (D.Litt) by the University of Leicester on 22 July 2022.
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2025 New Year Honours List for services to Literature.
Interview
Robert Harris: ‘My method is usually to start a book on 15 January and finish it on 15 June’
This article is more than 3 years old
Alex Preston
The bestselling author on the dearth of top-quality politicians, his regard for diaries and letters, and his disciplined writing approach
Sat 3 Jul 2021 13.00 EDT
Share
Robert Harris is the author of 14 novels, including the bestselling Fatherland, the Cicero trilogy and Enigma. He also wrote the screenplays for the films of his novels The Ghost (filmed as The Ghost Writer) and An Officer and a Spy. His latest book, V2, weaves together two narratives, linked by the development of Wernher von Braun’s rocket just as the tide turned in the second world war. Dr Rudi Graf is a German rocket scientist, deeply conflicted in his job and troubled by the views of his superiors. Kay Caton-Walsh of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force is a cool-headed analyst who works first in England, then in Belgium, looking for the location of secret V2 launch bases. Harris was previously a journalist, serving as political editor of the Observer. He now lives in Berkshire with his wife. He has four children.
Your novels are always very different. How did you settle on the subject of this one?There is no plan. I just go from day to day and something pops up. In the case of V2 it was an obituary in the Times about five or six years ago about a woman who’d had to plot the trajectory of rockets in newly liberated Belgium. I thought she sounded like an interesting character, no more than that. I was attracted to the story because of Brexit, funnily enough. The idea that one European power had occupied another to fire ballistic missiles at a third struck me as amazing. I was going to have a coda at the end of the book reflecting on that. But in the end the link felt somehow extraneous.
How do you choose which characters to focus on in your stories?
Have a character whom you’re interested in, and in whom your reader is interested, and have something interesting happen to them in this world you’ve created. That’s how you start the novel. Now, the events I’m interested in are political events and the universality of political impulses, from Cicero’s Rome to 19th-century France to Russia, Germany, wherever – the same quest for power is there. Most of my characters are peripheral – a ghost writer, a secretary – they are observers of power.
It’s disgraceful, but I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume
Neither the German rocket scientists, nor indeed the British spies, have much success in the novel…
I read a book by Eileen Younghusband, who was one of those looking for rocket bases. She claimed that at the end of their first shift they’d identified two bases that had been destroyed by the RAF, and that their operation beat the V2s. Now it didn’t take more than half an hour’s research to discover that no launch site was ever hit. So the sort of book I thought I was going to write became something else, a book about futility, and perhaps more interesting because of that. The V2 was a failure. It caused great terror and distress, but it was the biggest waste of money in the whole of the war.
Did lockdown change how you wrote?
My working method is usually to start a book on the 15th of January and finish it on the 15th of June or thereabouts. I’m such an old journalist I need this kind of pressure. So lockdown hit about halfway through writing this. It made it hard to write the book. I’ve realised over the years that a lot of writing is done in the subconscious. And to stimulate the subconscious you need to relax. You need to see friends, go out, go to the theatre. When you can’t do that, the mind becomes a very strange place. I couldn’t work for more than three or four hours a day. I had to stop at noon. And what Stephen King calls the “boys in the basement” – the subconscious – they weren’t there to call on in lockdown. I think it gave the book a particular flavour – it’s a very tight book, airless to some degree.
Would you want to be a political editor now? What in the political landscape has changed most since you were?
I realise now that I was always a novelist earning a living as journalist, rather than a journalist who one day happened to write a novel. So I wouldn’t want to be a political editor again, although I’m grateful for the experience and I draw on it all the time, whether the novel is set in ancient Rome or 19th-century France.
What has changed the most – and I’m sorry if this makes me sound an old fart – is the quality of the politicians. For example, I got to know Roy Jenkins very well, and no one can tell me that Priti Patel is an adequate replacement. The bigger picture of politics is always fascinating, but the day-to-day of Westminster, especially the quality of speeches and debates, is perhaps the most dispiriting in our history. So I’m glad to be out of it.
What did you miss most during lockdown?
We had two of our children here but two away, so I missed those two. I missed restaurants and pubs. I found it very claustrophobic. I watched a lot of television and I dreamed very vividly. I now understand that if you don’t do anything, time passes extremely quickly and your dreams are lurid. God knows what it would be like to be in prison, but I can sort of begin to imagine – the nights full of strange visions.
What books are on your bedside table?
I’m writing a novel about the English civil war, so I’m reading Pepys’s diary and the speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Also Carlyle’s letters are there.
What was the last great book that you read?
It’s disgraceful, but I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume. My most pleasurable reading experiences are diaries and letters. History unfiltered, not refracted through a historian’s imagination. The Chips Channon diaries bring alive a section of society in the 20s and 30s with great vividness.
How do you organise books on your shelves?
I’m sitting here with biography. Literary biography and history are in the hall. Military history and Nazis are on the landing outside the bedroom – a rather sinister wall, it has to be said, but they paid for the house. Fiction in the drawing room and in our bedroom. There’s no point in having an awful lot of books if you can’t more or less find something when you want to read it, so they’re reasonably alphabetic in those sections.
Would book would you give to a 12-year-old?
My own reading when I was younger was the Just William books, Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells. The first proper book I read was Great Expectations. I must have been about 12 and I thought it was a marvellous book. So I’d recommend that.
V2 by Robert Harris is published in paperback by Hutchinson (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
The Weekend Interview
28 August 2024
Robert Harris: “Great politicians are like novelists”
The writer on Keir Starmer, Labour’s “grim” inheritance and his desire to reinvent the past.
By Pippa Bailey
Photographed for The New Statesman by Cian Oba Smith
Robert Harris considers himself a lucky man. “I’ve been very fortunate in life,” he told me, gesturing as if to tap his head, then thinking better of it and instead reaching for the floorboards by his feet. “I got to Cambridge in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to do now – I mean, I hardly got any O-levels. I got to the BBC before John Birt started wrecking it. I got into Fleet Street when it was still the old days. And I got into novel writing when you could take time. There was no pressure on me to keep producing, which was wonderful, because I could easily have burned out.”
Instead, 32 years after the release of his bestselling first novel, Fatherland, set in an alternative universe in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War, Harris has produced his 16th work of fiction. Precipice begins in the summer of 1914, when Europe is on the brink of war and the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, is having an affair with Venetia Stanley, a socialite half his age. Asquith wrote to her obsessively, several times a day (there were 12 postal deliveries a day in 1914 London), even from key cabinet meetings.
“It’s a pretty extreme example of the kind of obsessions that politicians do often get,” Harris told me at his house in west London in early August. (He has another, in Berkshire, jokingly called “the house that Hitler built” because he bought it with the proceeds from Fatherland.) “One sees this again and again: the people who hold power and their curious drives – the thing that gets them to the top is often damage.”
Asquith shared with Stanley secret government documents, sending them in the post or showing them to her during their regular long drives out of London. These journeys were one reason Harris chose to imply in the novel that their relationship was physical. He looked up the model of the premier’s car, a 1908 Napier six-cylinder: “You sat in an enclosed compartment and you communicated with the driver through a push-button console. There were curtains and blinds everywhere. And I thought, well, this is why they went for an hour and a half drive every Friday afternoon…”
More extraordinary a breach of security was his habit of screwing up classified papers and throwing them from the car window once Stanley had seen them. The real-life discovery by members of the public of five such telegrams during the early months of the war gave Harris the idea for Precipice’s third, fictitious protagonist, a young intelligence officer, Paul Deemer. Looking at the letter in which Asquith told Stanley the discarded documents had been discovered, Harris thought: “I could invent that character; there must have been a leak inquiry. That would be my way in.”
When Asquith left Downing Street in December 1916, replaced as prime minister by David Lloyd George, he burned most of his private correspondence, including his letters from Stanley. “One of the attractions of writing this was I did want to write a novel with a strong female protagonist,” Harris said. Precipice is only the second novel in a 30-year career in which Harris has written one (the other was 2020’s V2, which featured a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force member). “It’s not that one has a kind of bucket list – ‘Oh, I must do this and that’ – but I thought the justification, in a way, for writing the novel was to give her a voice. He destroyed her letters. She has been rather forgotten and overlooked.”
Asquith’s letters to Stanley were preserved, and resurfaced around 15 years after her death. Precipice is constructed partly from Asquith’s own words, and partly from Stanley’s imagined replies. “Once I found myself inventing her replies, the relationship shifted. Suddenly, there were two people in it.” It was, Harris told me, the first time he cried finishing a novel. “I got very caught up… I found them both fascinating. This sort of tragic, doomed affair I found rather haunting.”
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Subscribe
Harris does not see their relationship as significant enough to have changed the course of the war, but said Asquith was “certainly distracted at key moments”, such as during the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, from which the Entente powers withdrew after eight months and which took the lives of nearly 200,000 British soldiers. (Harris compares it to the war in Vietnam: “The constant attempt to keep sending men. You couldn’t wind back… because of loss of prestige.”) Another “huge mistake” was Asquith’s decision to send Stanley a letter from the war secretary, Lord Kitchener, about the shell shortage of 1915. Precipice recounts a rousing speech the prime minister gave in Newcastle in which he claimed, based on his reading of the letter, that there was no shortage at all. By the time he was challenged on his claims, his evidence was gone in the post.
But Stanley “clearly did give him political advice. If she had said to him, ‘You shouldn’t bring the Tories into the coalition government,’ he might well not have done that. And that was the last Liberal government.” By the time Asquith permitted the Tories to enter Downing Street, Stanley had ended their affair; Asquith’s last letters to her are full of despair, even notions of suicide. “It’s hard to believe, looking at the letters, that her absence from his life wasn’t a big factor [in his political fate]. He lost his nerve, I think.”
Since Fatherland, Harris’s novels have roamed from Ancient Rome (Pompeii, the Cicero trilogy) to 19th-century France at the time of the Dreyfus affair (An Officer and a Spy) to a modern Vatican (Conclave, a film adaptation of which is due in November), but the First and Second World Wars keep drawing him back. The novelist was born 12 years after the end of the Second World War – “So, what’s that? The equivalent of 2012. It seemed at the time a huge gulf, but now I see it was nothing” – and believes we still “live in its shadow”.
“I think 1914 is the pivotal year in modern history. There’s a world before that and then a world after that. It was a breakdown of international order that had been preceded by upheavals intellectually, socially, after a long period of peace. It’s not hard to feel one’s living in that kind of period now.”
Robert Harris was born in Nottingham in 1957. His father worked at a local printworks, and one of his earliest memories is of accompanying him. “I used to sit beside these huge printing presses, and he used to give me a pile of paper – not the sort you’d get in the shop; big sheets of paper – that I’d scrawl on. The smell of the ink and the paper I can remember now.” His desire to be a writer had begun. He first wanted to be a playwright, then moved on to writing “imaginary newspapers”. He edited the school paper, Memograms (a play on the school’s name, Melton Mowbray Grammar), with which he “caused a lot of trouble – I’ve always liked causing trouble”.
At Cambridge University he worked on the student paper and on graduating applied for a BBC trainee scheme. He chose television over print because at that time the National Union of Journalists ruled that newcomers had to work on a provincial paper before graduating to a national. “Well, I’d had enough of the provinces having grown up in the Midlands!” After eight years in TV, including as a reporter on Panorama, he moved to the Observer to be political editor, and later also wrote for the Sunday Times and the Telegraph.
Political journalism has changed almost beyond recognition since Harris left it to become a novelist, primarily because of the advent of social media and the 24/7 news cycle. He lamented that political positions have become far more entrenched. “[People] now tailor the news that they receive to suit their prejudices – they don’t want to be disturbed. That sense that you could write a column and argue someone round to a different point of view was probably quite mythical, but I certainly think it would be very hard to do that now.”
He became close to Tony Blair in 1997 when the Labour leader invited Harris to join him on the campaign trail, but they fell out over the Iraq War. It was one of the few times Harris signed a letter of protest; the journalist Paul Foot rang him up and said: “Come on, sign it, man.” In 2007, the year Blair left No 10, Harris published The Ghost, which featured a former prime minister, Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair, investigated by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Harris believes Blair’s readiness to go to war in 2003 came in part because he wasn’t of a generation with living memory of the world wars. “I think it was the generation that had fought in the war… [who] had a healthy respect for peace, and they desired to avoid war. Blair purposefully engaged and manoeuvred the country into a war we should never have fought. That’s not just hindsight: one knew at the time this was folly.”
Harris is keen to “lay [the] canard to rest” that he supported the Lib Dems during the Corbyn years. “The thing you can never rely on is a Wikipedia page!” (In my defence, I’d read it in the Telegraph.) “My politics is essentially the centre left, and within that boundary I’m ecumenical. I will vote to get the Tories out” – as he did this July. He has been a member of Labour for three brief spells, one in the Seventies, another after Blair’s 1997 win and the last to vote in the 2016 leadership election. Corbyn survived; Harris left soon after.
What does he make of the comparisons between Labour’s 1997 landslide and this year’s victory? “When you look back on it, that was quite a formidable Tory government that fell [in 1997] – Major, Heseltine, Clarke – and the economy was starting to boom. So it [was] a more significant victory, in a way.” There is nothing close to the Blair-mania of ’97 around Keir Starmer, and the mood around Labour in the 1990s was far more positive. “This was just anyone but the Tories… a sort of surgical strike on the Conservative Party… so it is different, and the inheritance is, frankly, grim.” Among the “intractable problems” facing Starmer’s government Harris counts the high burden of debt, creating growth outside the single market and an ageing population.
The Tories “seem to be heading to a very dark place ideologically and it’ll take them some time to pull back from it”. Does he see a route to recovery for the party? “One of the benefits of getting old and having studied politics is I remember that after Thatcher in the Eighties they said the Labour Party would never hold office again, and after Blair had his landslide, they said the Tories would never hold office again… They will revive, but the way it’s going, it’s going to take at least two terms, I would have thought.” Compared to our contemporary politicians, Harris told me, Asquith and his cabinet – Churchill, Lloyd George, Haldane – were of a different quality. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t flawed, but they operated on a much bigger stage… There are very few politicians like that these days.” Harris dislikes certainty in people, preferring what he calls “keep-the-show-on-the-road politicians” over “conviction politicians”. He sees Starmer as the former.
“The best politicians construct a narrative. They tell a story. They make us all participants in their story. The most gifted was probably Churchill, who convinced the British that they were heroes with immense courage in 1940 and everybody played along.” Thatcher was a storyteller, he said, and Blair, too, to a degree. “Those are the great politicians, they’re like artists. They’re like novelists. Does Starmer have that gift? We’ll see…”
“Precipice” is published by Hutchinson Heinemann
Reddit
X
Share on Linkedin
Open more share options
Author interview: Robert Harris on his thriller Precipice
“I felt for the first time that I fully understood what was happening in 1914 and 1915,” he says
Author of the article:By Jamie Portman, Postmedia News
Published Nov 26, 2024
5 minute read
Join the conversation
Writer Robert Harris
Writer Robert Harris
Article content
Precipice
Article content
Loading...
Up Next - Liverpool's Virgil van Dijk Replies To Fans Online
Article content
Robert Harris
Article content
Random House
Article content
The two lovers would meet every week for an after-hours drive in a chauffeured automobile whose curtained interior guaranteed them privacy. He was in his 60s, she was young enough to be his daughter. He wrote letters to her incessantly — sometimes two or three a day — and they reveal a man besotted.
Article content
But here’s the catch. This was all happening on the threshold of the First World War. The elderly lover was the Liberal prime mister of Great Britain — Herbert Henry Asquith. The object of his affection was 26-year-old Venetia Stanley, a child of the aristocracy and young woman of intelligence and determination. So did Asquith’s infatuation in any way alter the course of history?
Article content
Advertisement 1
Story continues below
Article content
That’s a question that novelist Robert Harris kept asking himself during the writing of Precipice, a thriller that immediately shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was initially published in the United Kingdom. What is clear is that Stanley was not only an obsession for Asquith but also a dangerous distraction — and the evidence is there in the aging prime minister’s fevered letters to her. It’s from them, for example, that we learn of Asquith’s determination at a time of crisis to flee London and spend time with her in North Wales.
Article content
“It’s absolutely extraordinary, isn’t it?” Harris says. “Here he is, looking at railway timetables less than a week before war breaks out. It’s quite astonishing that he could do that. I think it just shows you that our statesmen had no idea what they were getting into in 1914.”
Article content
Robert Harris
Article content
In today’s climate of tight security protection for major political figures, Asquith’s freedom to do what he wanted seems unimaginable. But that’s how it was. The prime minister could take a stroll along the embankment or board a train without anyone really taking notice. “There was no bodyguard. He didn’t even take a private secretary.” The thought still leaves Harris incredulous. “When the whole country is being mobilized, he can slink off on a Friday through to Monday. It’s quite an extraordinary situation to be out of touch that long from the central government — and all because of an obsession for this young woman.”
Article content
Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content
The novel is not only a riveting account of an intense but blighted love affair. It also explains with unusual clarity why the 1914 assassination of an Austrian archduke led to a catastrophic European conflict. The novel’s supporting cast of real-life players — including Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George — are necessary components in the story Harris tells. For him, writing about Asquith and Venetia opened a window to wider issues that he could not disregard.
Article content
“When I started to write the book I found that I could clear away a lot of the fog of war,” he says. “I felt for the first time that I fully understood what was happening in 1914 and 1915.”
Article content
Harris is on the phone from his home in rural England, taking a breather after a major European book tour as well as a massive publicity campaign on behalf of Conclave, the hit movie version of his best-selling novel about power politics within the Vatican.
Article content
“I think it’s a brilliant film, and I’m immensely proud to have provided the source material for it,” the 67-year-old writer says. Harris, an ex-journalist turned best selling novelist, has a fascination for how systems work and what happens to them under stress. That fascination is a driving force in Conclave, as it is in Precipice.
Advertisement 1
Trending
Pierre Poilievre didn't just lose his seat. He also likely lost his home
Pierre Poilievre is joined by his wife Anaida Poilievre
Terry Newman: On election night, CBC shamelessly cheered on Mark Carney
At Issue
Canada Post could go on strike again. Here's what we know about where things stand
A Canada Post mail carrier walks past a mailbox.
What are 'cortisol bellies' and 'cortisol faces'? Everything we know about the stress hormone
A stressed woman.
Randall Denley: Attacking Poilievre's Conservatives will come back to bite Doug Ford
Doug Ford.
Advertisement 2
Advertisement
Article content
This new novel may be a fictional recreation, but it’s anchored in the reality of Prime Minister Asquith’s letters to Venetia Stanley. Venetia’s replies were destroyed, but the Asquith side of the correspondence, provided solid clues to the nature and content of her responses which in this book are products of Harris’s own imagination.
Article content
When an early selection of Asquith’s letters was published a few decades ago, Harris was willing to accept a “consensus” that the affair was no more than a “platonic diversion.” Later access to the full body of letters changed his mind.
Article content
“Once I set myself the task of composing her replies and began working out from his letters where the two of them were when written and the daily details of it all, the whole thing shot into much larger focus. You begin to see for the first time how much of a preoccupation she was for Asquith, how much of an obsession.”
Article content
The novel even hints that this obsession contributed to the allies’ disastrous Gallipoli campaign, a pet project of Winston Churchill who at that time was First Lord Of The Admiralty.
Article content
“The evidence is inescapable from Asquith’s own letter,” Harris says. “During the crucial meeting when Churchill first proposed the idea, Asquith spent the best part of hall an hour in correspondence with Venetia. So I think we can say that if Asquith had been paying more attention, he might have examined Churchill’s ideas more forensically and concluded they had not been properly thought through.”
Article content
Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content
Asquith’s letters weren’t just expressions of lovesick rapture. They were also notoriously indiscreet about top-secret meetings and the inner workings of government. When they met, Asquith thought nothing of showing her confidential dispatches and soliciting her opinions on government policy.
Article content
“Up until 1914, he was the dominant political personality in Britain,” Harris says. “He was so intellectually able and such a powerful debater that he could control a government that included people like Churchill and Lloyd George. He was a significant figure but was overwhelmed by the First World War, as many others were. So I think he increasingly sought refuge in Venetia’s company and advice.”
Article content
Harris feels sympathy for Asquith but he doesn’t subscribe to the view of some commentators that there was nothing physical in his relationship with Venetia.
Article content
“He wrote her 560 letters — and she kept them all. She must have written more than 300, and he read them all. I think the notion that there wasn’t a physical element to the romance is absurd when one gets to examine all the evidence.
Article content
Advertisement 4
Story continues below
Article content
“First of all, we know that Asquith was notorious for making advances to young women. Secondly Venetia also had a lot of affairs with married men, including Lord Beaverbrook, in later life.
Article content
“Asquith is a Victorian gentleman. He’s not going to write in detail about a physical relationship, but the hints are there. The temperament was there. The opportunity was there. I think it’s naive to pretend there was not a sexual element to it.”
Article content
Harris was determined to write about Asquith — in many ways a “decent man” — with compassion.
Article content
” It would have been easy to have written a sort of me too book about a young woman and a much older predatory man. But I don’t think that would have been historically accurate, I think Vanessa was a formidable character and not without power herself. So there was something tragically doomed about his love for her. His in a way was the tragedy of a man brought down by his own folly. I wanted to convey that.”
Author Robert Harris on ‘Conclave’ success ahead of Sunday’s Oscars
By HILARY FOX
Updated 10:15 AM EDT, February 28, 2025
Share
LONDON (AP) — “Conclave” author Robert Harris isn’t planning to stay up and watch the Oscars.
The British writer will be in a different time zone. Plus, Harris would rather wait to see how the movie, which is up for eight Academy Awards including best picture, does Sunday night.
“These things are a bit of a strain anyway, and I don’t want to sit up all night and hear them say and the winner is... ‘Anora’ at four in the morning,” he said, laughing. “I hope that ‘Conclave’ wins and it’s certainly in with a chance. It’s not the favorite, but it’s probably started to creep up to become a second favorite. So who knows.”
Sitting in his study — a converted church office at his home in southeast England — Harris writes in the morning and tinkers in the afternoon, surrounded by books. He’s in the early stages of a new novel.
These days it’s his 2016 papal thriller that everyone wants to talk about.
“I’ve always written about politics and power. It greatly interests me what it does to people, the kind of people who seek it and so on,” explains Harris. “This is in many ways the ultimate election, for God’s representative on Earth, the spiritual leader of one and a third billion people. It doesn’t get much bigger than that, quite frankly.”
Related Stories
Ralph Fiennes will make his opera directing debut
Ralph Fiennes will make his opera directing debut
What 'Conclave' gets right — and wrong — about electing a pope
What 'Conclave' gets right — and wrong — about electing a pope
Disgraced Cardinal Becciu withdraws from participation in conclave
Disgraced Cardinal Becciu withdraws from participation in conclave
Inspired by the conclave of 2005, which elected Pope Benedict XVI, the novel was adapted into a screenplay by Peter Straughan, and brought to life by director Edward Berger, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini.
Harris talked The Associated Press about Fiennes’ portrayal of inner turmoil on screen, visiting a fake Sistine Chapel set and that twist.
Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.
AP: How have you felt about all the love that the film has had during the awards season?
HARRIS: Obviously I’m absolutely delighted. I think that they did a brilliant job, in every department. The direction, the production, the acting, the whole thing and music. The screenplay is very, very fine. Very closely follows the book, which of course makes me pleased. But I think that’s a sign of Peter Straughan’s talent. It makes a bit of a change of the quiet life of the novelist.
AP: Does it mean that you get a boost as well, sales wise?
HARRIS: Yes, it has sold quite a lot actually since October and got a particular boost after the BAFTAs last week. It has done well in America as well where it got into the top 20 on Amazon, which is surprising for a book that old.
AP: Do you think in general that people should read the book first before they see a film?
HARRIS: Yes, I think that that is the way to approach it. But I’m quite happy if lots of people are doing it the other way around. I’ve always had a particular fondness for this novel and I’d like people to read it.
There’s a lot more about the cardinal’s crisis of faith, for instance, and the details of other members of the College of Cardinals and the story of past conclaves. So I think if you enjoyed the film, then this is like further reading and will fill in, maybe, some questions people have.
AP: You talk about his crisis of faith. When you’re reading the book, you know the inner turmoil the lead character is going through. (Lomeli in the novel, Lawrence in the movie.) What was it like for you seeing Ralph portray that just with his face?
HARRIS: That’s why he’s so brilliant. The great difference between a novel and the film is what we would call, technically, interior monologue, that you have the character’s thoughts. A lot of films actually fail, from books, because they can’t convey that. But when you’ve got an actor of Ralph’s quality, then his face does register every twist and turn. You can feel his pain and his anguish and his humor and his humility and intelligence. It all flits across his face. He’s on screen pretty well, nonstop for two hours. It’s an extraordinary feat.
AP: Did you visit? Did you see this happening in real life?
HARRIS: I went to once to Rome to see them when they were in the studios there, Cinecitta. They’d got a set of the Sistine Chapel. And it was staggering, actually, to walk in and then suddenly see this and with all the rows of cardinals, it was just like you’d stepped into the real thing. It was astonishing.
AP: What was your relationship with the production? Did you have any say at all?
HARRIS: I was certainly very much involved early on. I met (Straughan). Ralph Fiennes and Edward Berger came down here to lunch to tell me they wanted to change the nationality of the central character, which I thought, well, if that’s the price of having Ralph Fiennes play him, then I’m willing to pay it, quite frankly. I kept in touch in particular with the screenwriter. We got on very well and we had a couple of very nice long lunches.
AP: You’re not going to the Oscars?
HARRIS: Not invited (laughs.) But I don’t mind that, I can’t say that I would have particularly wanted to go.
AP: More people know the ending now. Has the response to the twist changed at all?
HARRIS: It’s always divided opinion. I didn’t just sort of tag it on at the end, the whole book leads up to it and it’s embedded in the themes of the story. I knew when I came up with it that it was a risk. I wanted to really do something startling and ask a big question of the church.
I should think the reaction to the twist in the film is roughly the same as the reaction to the twist in the book. Some people say, I really love this book until I got to the final 20 pages and I threw it across the room. But a lot of other people really like it. I mean, they gasp, they’re startled. It makes them talk. It challenges. And that’s what I want to do.
I write with some sympathy for the Catholic Church, but I want to question some of its assumptions.
AP: Many people’s knowledge of what happens in a conclave is now down to your storytelling.
HARRIS: I tried to be accurate. I’m a sort of slave to facts really. All the processes of a conclave are laid out like canon law. What happens every day and what the rules are, how many votes have to be achieved and how they’re counted and then burned and so on. I read a lot of accounts of past conclaves. It’s all supposed to be secret. But of course, people gossip and things leak out. So one knows roughly how the politics of it work, and I hope it is a fairly accurate portrayal.
AP: Have you been following the news of Pope Francis’ health this week?
HARRIS: Yes, I have. I feel very sorry to hear it. I’ve been refusing all requests to talk about it and a future conclave because I think that’s in extreme bad taste. I don’t want to get any publicity or to be seen to be trying to get anything out of it. The death of anyone is a tragedy and I really hope he’s got some more years yet.
CONCLAVEBy Robert Harris286 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
In any genre, an author could probably pick no better time to write about factionalism or the tensions between hard-line conservatives and liberal reformers, between those who reject wealth and those who embrace its trappings, between globalization and isolationism. For a thriller writer, these conflicts must seem irresistible: Suddenly, what is often dismissed as escapism and fantasy has taken on an eerily prescient, resonant cast.
Enter Robert Harris, a writer who has made the study of power, with all its potential for corruption and intrigue, his subject of choice, from power in Western democracies (''The Ghost,'' a thriller about an amoral, easily manipulated former prime minister, whom many reviewers saw as a thinly described doppelgänger of Tony Blair) to power in ancient Rome (the Cicero trilogy).
The latest volume in his canon is ''Conclave,'' a tightly woven tale about power machinations at the top of the Roman Catholic Church. The pope, a reformist figure with echoes of the current Pope Francis in his antipathy for pomp and circumstance, has just died, and more than 100 cardinals from around the world are gathering to elect his successor.
Taking place over only 72 hours, within the barricaded, claustrophobic confines of the back rooms of Vatican City -- which is to say: the Sistine Chapel and the Casa Santa Marta -- the book imagines the secret process from the inside, culminating in a denouement that to many will seem so provocatively scandalous this could become a Catholic version of ''The Satanic Verses'' (though presumably without the same consequences for its author).
Sequestered there and led by Cardinal Lomeli, who as dean of the College of Cardinals will administer the vote, they must choose between four apparent contenders for the job: Joseph Tremblay, a mediagenic Canadian with a good head of hair and a talent for spin; Joshua Adeyemi, a charismatic Nigerian who represents diversity as well as a hard-line attitude toward homosexuality; Goffredo Tedesco, an archconservative Italian who would bring Latin back to the liturgy; and Aldo Bellini, an intellectual Italian with reformist tendencies. Each has his supporters, and his all-too-human -- which is to say, somewhat facile -- hidden flaws, turning the election into a marathon of negotiating, horse trading and odds making.
Into this comes a wild card: an unknown Filipino cardinal from Iraq who has been raised to his position in pectore -- that is, in secret, with only the pope and God knowing his name. And then the voting begins. Needless to say, spiritual discussion is only part of the proceedings.
Lomeli learns that the former pope, before his death, had been secretly investigating Cardinal Tremblay. So he reluctantly begins to play detective, piecing together timelines and motivations to see what he can uncover. Gradually the temptations of man are exposed to -- well, not the world, since what happens in the Vatican appears to stay in the Vatican, but at least the light of Lomeli, who must wrestle with his own ambitions and expectations. Not surprisingly, the great sins of sexual dalliance, bribery and hubris all play a part, and the choice gets winnowed down.
The politics of pope-picking clearly captivates Harris, a former political reporter, as it indubitably captivates many of us. The book is filled with procedural and historical detail -- from the rules of the Apostolic Constitution to the rituals around voting and the dormlike building in which the cardinals are housed for the duration of the vote: ''Arranged over two blocks, each 14 windows wide,'' containing ''128 bedrooms with en suite bathrooms.'' Harris has done his research, and it shows, though he is also careful to situate his story in the contemporary world. That tension adds to the ambience.
During their conclave, for example, the cardinals have to wrestle with reports of a suicide bomber in a public square outside Vatican City who shouted ''Allahu akbar'' around the same time there was a mass shooting at, what else, a Mass. (The simultaneous attacks are not a coincidence.) And while the vote in the Sistine Chapel is conducted by pencil and tabulated by hand, jamming devices are still necessary to prevent electronic eavesdropping on the decision. Contemporary concerns also intrude when the pope dies: The argument for announcing his death immediately is that ''we cannot allow ourselves to fall behind the news cycle.''
However, such hints of the current climate all pale in comparison to the twist at the end, which is about as dramatic an incorporation of the modern cultural conversation about gender and sexuality as can be imagined.
The story moves forward vote after vote with so much momentum it's easy to forget that faith of a deep and visceral kind is involved; the characters are more like chessmen being moved around a board in a complex game of strategy than figures who have devoted their lives to a religious belief system. Though prayer is often invoked, and a tantalizing distinction made between the church and God (as opposed to the church and the state), when described in practice it is more intellectual than emotional. This probably serves to make the story more accessible, especially to non-Catholics, but it gives these men (and the very few women who serve them) less depth on the page.
Harris has written a gripping, smart book. The only quibble, ironically enough, is that it could have used a touch more soul.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Friedman, Vanessa. "Cardinal Sins." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Dec. 2016, p. 65(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A472545757/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=adad1390. Accessed 1 May 2025.
In Conclave (Knopf; pub month, Nov.; Reviews, Sept. 5), Harris takes readers behind the scenes at the Vatican for the selection of a new pope.
Where did the idea for Conclave come from?
When I watched Pope Benedict step out onto the balcony of St. Peter's after his election as pope in 2005, and again when Pope Francis appeared in 2013, I wondered each time what process had occurred behind the scenes to elevate them to this supreme office. That planted the seed, and as soon as I had some free time, I began to research how conclaves operate. Immediately I saw it was a wonderful subject for a novel.
How did you get such detailed information about the process?
I read everything I could lay my hands on. The best single source was a so-called secret diary kept by a cardinal who was present during the 2005 conclave. It was published in a South American magazine and is clearly genuine and accurate. I wrote to the Vatican and asked if I could have access to the places where a conclave happens--in particular, the guest house within the walls of the Holy See called the Casa Santa Marta, where the cardinals live during the election and where all the politics takes place between the ballots. They kindly said yes. I also spent time in the pope's private chapel, the Pauline, and saw the Room of Tears, the sacristy off the Sistine Chapel where the new pope is robed. That access was hugely important.
Is the political horse trading you describe in the book inevitable?
Yes. A candidate needs two-thirds of the votes to be elected. The cardinals are locked into the Sistine Chapel and are required to hold four secret ballots per day until a winner emerges. It is between the ballots, in the lunch breaks and in the evenings, that the politics happens. The cardinals gather in one another's rooms, in the corridors and in the dining rooms. There are factions. They switch their votes, trying to rally the maximum support behind the candidate who best represents their view. It's nothing new. This has been going on for seven centuries.
Does this novel share any themes with your other works of fiction?
Yes, very much so. A conclave is, in essence, albeit cloaked in sacred ritual, a struggle for power, and all my books are about power, in one form or another. Often they are centered on small groups in which there is a struggle for control. I also like to write novels with a very tight time frame and location. In a sense, Conclave is my apotheosis: the most absolute, the oldest, the most concentrated electoral process in the world.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Picker, Lenny. "PW talks with Robert Harris: a complex conclave." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 39, 26 Sept. 2016, p. 66. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A465558199/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=80f2ecd0. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Robert Harris CONCLAVE Knopf (Adult Fiction) 26.95 11, 22 ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.” An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Robert Harris: CONCLAVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A463216149/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=84112c99. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Harris, Robert MUNICH Knopf (Adult Fiction) $27.95 1, 16 ISBN: 978-0-525-52026-9
Old friends reunite in hopes of derailing Hitler's war machine.
Harris (Conclave, 2016, etc.) returns to familiar territory in his 12th novel. Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann became friends as students at pre-World War II Oxford, where Hartmann, a German national, was a Rhodes scholar. Then each went into the service of his country--Legat is the British prime minister's most junior private secretary, and Hartmann is a member of the German diplomatic corps and one of a group of conspirators who would oust Hitler. The Führer's 1938 announcement that he intends to annex the Sudetenland, a German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia, brings the two together again. A German invasion of Czechoslovakia would cause a response from France, and a Franco-German war would necessarily involve the U.K. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, determined to avoid such a war, calls for a diplomatic solution, and thus Legat and Hartmann become participants in the Conference of Munich. Chamberlain, pursuing a policy of appeasement, advocates the cession of the Sudetenland. Legat and Hartmann join together to try to avert the appeasement--Legat because he believes no accommodation will deflect Hitler, and Hartmann because he hopes that if Hitler attempts war the army will move against him. Legat and Hartmann move among real historical characters, and Harris skillfully interpolates them into vivid and accurate settings and situations. In particular the portrayal of Chamberlain, often reviled as the man who brought "peace in our time" while Hitler's forges roared, is humane and sympathetic--and the sly suggestion that he may have known full well what he was doing brightens an ending that is, after all, predetermined.
Engaging, informative, and quietly suspenseful.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Harris, Robert: MUNICH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A514267861/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=78d4fd29. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Munich.
By Robert Harris.
Jan. 2018. 320p. Knopf, 527.95 (9780525520269).
September 1938. Adolf Hitler has announced that he will cross the Czechoslovakian border in the coming days and seize the Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, is desperate to negotiate a peaceful surrender of the Sudeten territory and avoid an all-out war. Harris, the author of such first-rate historical thrillers as Fatherland (1992) and An Officer and a Spy (2014), tells this gripping story mostly through the eyes of two men: Hugh Legat, the prime minister's private secretary, and Paul von Hartmann, a German diplomat. Legat and Hartmann were friends once, several years ago; now their shared interest in peace may bring them together again, but stopping Hitler is a dangerous undertaking. Harris is a splendid storyteller whose ability to blend reality and fiction seamlessly is virtually unmatched. We know how Chamberlain's efforts to prevent war turned out, of course, but that doesn't stop us from being absolutely riveted to this tautly constructed, compellingly written story. Another surefire best-seller from a consistently fine author of historical fiction.--David Pitt
[HD] HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Expect to M be seeing or hearing Harris pretty much everywhere in the new year, from national print and broadcast media to all manner of devices displaying bytes and pixels.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Pitt, David. "Munich." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 6, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A517441747/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=04c2e2b9. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Munich, by Robert Harris (Knopf, 320 pp., $27.95)
MANY schools no longer teach history, so it's no surprise that young people today have to absorb the lessons of World War II through books and movies. Gary Oldman might win a Best Actor Oscar for his extraordinary performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, which is set in the few weeks in May 1940 between Churchill's becoming prime minister and the mass evacuation of Dunkirk. But there is another event, a couple of years earlier, that could be cast as a "darkest hour." It goes by a single word: "Munich."
In its broad outlines, the story is familiar. In September 1938, Adolf Hitler demands that he be allowed to annex the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia. German troops are poised to invade. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain tries to broker a compromise. He persuades Benito Mussolini to use his influence, and Hitler gives Britain and France barely a day to come to terms. There is incredible tension, with Europe poised on the brink of war.
The denouement: At a conference in Munich, Chamberlain agrees to immediate German occupation of the region, the Czechs retreat to their truncated state, and the dogs of war remain temporarily on a leash. Chamberlain succumbs to vanity and returns to London proclaiming the agreement as "peace in our time"; he brandishes a scrap of paper bearing Hitler's signature and declares that it is "symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again."
Robert Harris, a former political columnist for the London Sunday Times, has written a dozen thrillers to great acclaim. Especially noteworthy was Fatherland (1992), a fascinating piece of alternative history in which Hitler wins World War II but in the early 1960s desperately seeks to maintain the illusion that there was no Holocaust. If he fails, the revelation will blow up a critical summit meeting with newly elected U.S. president Joseph P. Kennedy, the appeasement-minded father of John F. Kennedy.
Harris has long been fascinated by the policy of appeasement and its culmination at the Munich conference. In the late 1980s, he did a documentary on the subject for the BBC. Now he returns to the crime scene with a new thriller that layers in his own interpretation of Munich with a fictional plot centered on a German diplomat's plan to assassinate Hitler. The book wrestles with issues of treason, conscience, loyalty, and betrayal, on a historical stage peopled by the Big Four of Munich--Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini, and France's Edouard Daladier.
This is rich material to draw on, and Harris does a competent job of weaving in his characters with the historical players. As in many of his novels, he creates two interconnected characters whose past catches up with them at a historically critical point.
The British protagonist is 28-year-old Hugh Legat, a private secretary to Chamberlain. He implausibly finds himself on a bumpy plane ride heading with his boss to the Munich conference. His diplomatic counterpart on the German side is 29-year-old Paul Hartmann, a Nazi by day but by night a member of the anti-Fascist resistance movement. Both men oppose Hitler, and they knew each other at Oxford in the 1920s, but they haven't seen each other since they were last in Munich six years earlier. Their private torments from that period play a role, as fate brings them back together in Munich to prevent the outbreak of war.
The tension builds as Legat mysteriously receives a copy of a year-old German Foreign Office document detailing a speech Hitler gave outlining his plans to dominate Europe by force while first pretending to seek peace. Meanwhile, Hartmann's fellow anti-Hitler conspirators meet and decide that, if the Munich conference fails, they will be able to use the prospect of imminent war to launch a coup, overthrow Hitler, and install a more benign military government. The key is to get the incriminating Hitler document into the hands of Chamberlain before he brokers a deal with Hitler.
The plot is interesting enough to engage the reader, but it's clear that Harris has a dual purpose in his novel. He wants the book to serve as a vehicle for his alternative view of Neville Chamberlain and the Munich conference.
History is written by the victors, and Churchill partisans and many others have successfully painted Chamberlain's policy of appeasement as a spineless surrender to the demands of a dictator. But in Harris's novel, Chamberlain is heroic, and thoroughly devoted to making sure that Europe avoids a new world war. He believes that Britain is ill prepared for an immediate conflict and that it must take the chance of trusting that Hitler is telling the truth that he has no desire to dominate non-Germans, while it rearms in case Hitler is lying about his intentions.
"It's not simply that this country is militarily and psychologically unprepared for war--that can be remedied--we are remedying it," Chamberlain tells Legat. "It's rather that I truly fear for the spiritual health of our people if they don't see their leaders doing absolutely everything they can to prevent a second great conflict. Because of one thing I can assure you: If it comes, the next war will be infinitely worse than the last, and they will require great fortitude to survive it."
Harris has taken on a herculean task in trying to rehabilitate Chamberlain, and he makes a valiant attempt. In interviews promoting the book, he has said that his "slightly rebellious nature" led him to challenge some sacred tablets about World War II. He said that when he was growing up in post-war Britain, it was rarely mentioned that four-fifths of the war occurred on the Eastern Front, that Stalin had killed far more people than Hitler, and that Britain had ten times the number of planes during the Battle of Britain that it had had at the time of Munich two years earlier. Harris said that these contradictions "have really infected my writing career ever since, starting with Fatherland and the idea that we could have been on the side of Hitler against Stalin, one totalitarian regime or another."
Harris's book is thus bathed in shades of gray, in stark contrast to most World War II thrillers. On one hand, it's no surprise his book will be turned into a movie: Britain's Euston Films has already announced it will co-produce an adaptation of Munich with Germany's UFA film
studio. But it's also almost certain that the film version will stress the thriller aspects of the Harris book and downplay its attempt to inject historical nuance into the Munich conference. The popular perception of those times will inevitably draw far more from Gary Oldman than from Robert Harris.
Caption: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini (third and fourth from left) with Neville Chamberlain (left) at the Munich Peace Conference, Germany, October 1938
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Fund, John. "Thirties Thriller." National Review, vol. 70, no. 3, 19 Feb. 2018, pp. 39+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526117551/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b965be06. Accessed 1 May 2025.
MUNICH By Robert Harris 303 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
In the countdown to World War II, no event more aptly symbolized false hopes and Nazi duplicity than the Munich accord. In September 1938, Adolf Hitler threatened to send Wehrmacht troops into Czechoslovakia to seize the ethnic-German border regions known as the Sudetenland. Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to the birthplace of the Third Reich to meet Hitler and try to stave off a conflict. Twenty-four hours later, Chamberlain returned to London, where he brandished an agreement permitting Nazi Germany to occupy the territory and pronounced four words that would forever be linked with naA vetA@ and appeasement: ''Peace for our time.''
Robert Harris's meticulously researched and expertly paced thriller, ''Munich,'' recounts the days leading up to the ill-fated agreement. As in most of his historical novels, Harris relegates major figures to the background, focusing on two marginal characters with intimate views of the event. Hugh Legat, a junior Foreign Service officer with an Oxford degree and fluency in German, wins Chamberlain's confidence and secures a place among the inner circle at 10 Downing Street. His fellow Oxford alumnus Paul von Hartmann, a well-bred third secretary at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, despises Hitler and plots with a handful of diplomats and officers to kill the Nazi leader. Hartmann and his co-conspirators hope to scuttle the looming Munich accord, force France and Britain to declare war on the still-unprepared Third Reich, and persuade the Wehrmacht generals to rally to their side.
When Hartmann obtains a secret memorandum outlining Hitler's plans to seize all of Czechoslovakia and much of Europe, he alerts his fellow Oxonian through an intermediary. British intelligence enlists Legat to travel to Munich with Chamberlain to meet Hartmann, get the secret document and expose Hitler's duplicity. This sets off a dangerous game played by both Legat and Hartmann as they head to their rendezvous in Munich -- where they risk exposure and, in the case of Hartmann, arrest and execution.
Harris steeps his tale in vivid descriptions of Europe on the brink of conflict. Londoners dig slit trenches in Green Park, fit their children with gas masks and raise barrage balloons to protect against aerial attack -- ''tiny silver torpedoes, some already thousands of feet high.'' The prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street reflects the fustiness of a weakened empire: dowdy furnishings, corridors lined in linoleum, a cramped attic for advisers stranded overnight. It was, Harris writes, like ''some gentlemen's club that was no longer fashionable.'' Berlin, in contrast, brims with sinister glitz: ''The dome of the Haus Vaterland, with its UFA-cinema and its giant cafe, was lit by traceries of 4,000 electric bulbs,'' he writes of Potsdamer Platz, the main square in the Nazi capital. ''Opposite it, an illuminated billboard showed a movie star with glistening jet-black hair, his face at least 10 meters high, smoking a Makedon cigarette -- 'Perfekt!'''
Harris takes a sympathetic view of Chamberlain, written off by many historians -- including his successor, Winston Churchill -- as Hitler's dupe. Aging yet still forceful, he prowls the corridors of 10 Downing Street in a fog of cigar smoke, bitterly cognizant of the folly of placating Hitler yet knowing that he has no choice: Britain has only 20 fighter planes that work at high altitude, and Chamberlain desperately needs to buy time to allow his country to rearm. By contrast, the FA hrer, idol of millions, is an ill-tempered and nondescript figure with a bad case of body odor. ''He looked like a lodger who always kept himself to himself,'' Legat observes after being in the same room with him for the first time, ''or a night watchman who disappeared in the morning as soon as the day shift arrived.''
Like his breakthrough novel, ''Fatherland,'' set in a Nazified Germany 20 years after the Third Reich defeated the Allies in World War II, Harris's new novel initially seems headed into the realm of fantasy. But it quickly becomes clear that Harris isn't out to create an alternate history. ''Munich'' sticks close to the facts -- even as it holds out the tantalizing hope of a different outcome. There's a roundelay of diplomatic meetings in smoke-filled chambers, as well as a speech before the House of Commons and letters delivered to embassies and other corridors of power. The suspense begins to build as the British diplomats and their Nazi counterparts head toward their destiny in Munich. Hartmann's train ride to Berlin is a tour de force, complete with a tightly guarded, vital document, a gun secreted beneath a bathroom sink and a menacing SS SturmbannfA hrer who keeps his eye fixed on the young diplomat.
The last third of the book unfolds in Munich -- turned by Hitler and his architects into a monstrous shrine to Nazism. The FA hrerbau, built for Hitler the year before as a ''monarch's court,'' is a white-stone monolith adorned with ''bronze eagles, wings outstretched, swastikas in their talons.'' As Hitler and Chamberlain, joined by their Italian and French counterparts, gather to seal the fate of Czechoslovakia, Legat stumbles into two Czech diplomats being held captive by the SS in their hotel room. He leads them to a meeting with members of the British delegation, who unroll a map showing them the new reality: ''Three large chunks along the border ... had been excised, like bites from a piece of meat.'' Like the captive diplomats, Legat and Hartmann are fated to remain on the sidelines, powerless against the tide of history.
Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), and sign up for our newsletter.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY DANIEL ZENDER)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hammer, Joshua. "On the Brink." The New York Times Book Review, 4 Feb. 2018, p. 10(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526170382/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cfcda554. Accessed 1 May 2025.
THE SECOND SLEEP By Robert Harris
As a novelist, Robert Harris has a gift of immersing readers in an unfamiliar milieu, and thrilling them with the subsequent emotional, physical and ethical challenges faced by the protagonist as he (and it is always he) navigates mounting obstacles to a supposedly routine task -- and, in the process, unearths unexpected truths.
Those who are familiar with such classic Harris historical thrillers as ''Imperium'' will, then, settle into the opening pages of ''The Second Sleep'' alert for clues. April 1468: The arrogant, newly ordained Christopher Fairfax is journeying to the remote Wessex village of Addicott St. George to perform a burial service, that of the village's priest, Father Lacy. The reader nods knowingly as the bishop of Exeter instructs Fairfax to be quick about the trip and to use utmost discretion. As the young priest and his ancient mare plod through the gray, mist-sodden landscape, his arrogance turns to uneasiness. And as clues flick past -- the emerald flash of a parakeet, a church that has ''stood square on this land for at least a thousand years, more likely fifteen hundred'' -- we begin to share that unease.
At the parsonage the dissonance swells alarmingly -- a long-case clock, spectacles -- until, on Page 22, Fairfax stumbles over the dead priest's secret, a stash of forbidden ancient artifacts that includes 21st-century pound notes and an iPhone. The heart of the matter is revealed: We are not in the Wessex of 550 years ago but 850 years into the future. This is not a historical thriller but a ruined-earth novel, set in a world reborn after a long-ago apocalypse.
[ Read an excerpt from ''The Second Sleep.'' ]
Harris leaves the specifics of the apocalypse open to interpretation: perhaps climate change (those parakeets, olive groves, tobacco grown locally), perhaps technological collapse. The church seems to lean toward the latter, and as a result has banned scientism and any unhealthy interest in ancients' technology. Harris seems to be saying that churches, with their enduring stone buildings, would make natural nexus points for the survivors. And this is where readers familiar with ruined-earth novels and their rigorous logical extrapolation might begin to have difficulties.
We may wonder whether village pubs, also old, made of stone, and centrally located in rural communities -- with the added bonus of running water and fireplaces -- might not have been more likely gathering places. Or we may ask why, of the vast multicultural population of pre-apocalyptic Britain, only straight, white, able-bodied people appear to have survived. (All physical character descriptions are relentlessly Caucasian, we encounter only one chronically ill person and the single character who may be gay is definitely a traitorous wretch.) Most damningly, we want to know how a Britain depleted of easily accessible natural resources, such as coal and iron ore, could claw its way back to an apparently late-18th-century level of industry -- with precisely the same cultural mores.
Best then not to approach the novel from this perspective. The closest match might be to an 18th-century Gothic romance: the alluring lady of the manor, the hard-driving bull of a mill owner, the conscience-stricken young priest, the final drama played out in the drenching rain and stormlight. But there is a surprising lack of narrative tension, the internal inconsistencies are confounding and we have guessed the denouement long before it arrives. In the end, even Harris seems to give up, and all fades to black in a shower of cold, wet dirt.
Nicola Griffith is the author, most recently, of ''Hild'' and ''So Lucky.'' THE SECOND SLEEP By Robert Harris 298 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Robert Harris (PHOTOGRAPH BY KT BRUCE PHOTOGRAPHY)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Griffith, Nicola. "Let's Do the Time Warp." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Dec. 2019, p. 51(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A607828566/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=912c120d. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Robert Harris. Knopf, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-525-65669-2
Thriller Award-winner Harris (Munich) does a masterly job playing with readers' expectations in this mystery set in 15th-century England. Fr. Christopher Fairfax has been dispatched by his bishop to Wessex to officiate at the funeral of Fr. Thomas Lacy, a parish priest who died in a fall. The assignment seems routine enough, but on reaching the town of Addicott St. George, he finds unexpected questions to answer. When he visits Lacy's library, he learns that the man he's about to inter in consecrated ground possessed numerous heretical volumes relating to an antiquarian society proscribed by the church. Eager to keep things uncomplicated, Fairfax proceeds with the funeral service as if he'd never seen the books, only to have the rites disrupted by an attendee who yells that Lacy's death was not the result of "evil chance." When foul weather delays Fairfax's departure, he finds even more oddities, including the disappearance of the church register and an unsettling letter by a Cambridge professor found in a mass grave, which supports his suspicion that Lacy's interest in the past was more than innocent scholarly curiosity. Few readers will pick up on the fairly planted clues. This is a clever complement to Harris's debut mystery, Fatherland. 75,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Second Sleep." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 35, 2 Sept. 2019, p. 86. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599443562/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=925a3a73. Accessed 1 May 2025.
We go 350-odd years further back in time for Robert Harris' thriller The Second Sleep (Knopf, $26.95, 9780525656692)--to 1468, to be precise. Consider other terrific medieval mysteries as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Ross King's Ex-Libris, and get ready for an exceptionally intricate tale that will take you in unexpected directions and then pummel you when you get there. Cleric Christopher Fairfax is called upon to officiate at the interment of a parish priest. It's a simple enough task: Write a few words of banal praise and read the appropriate scriptures to usher the man to his final resting place. But Fairfax doesn't sleep well the night before and instead visits the dead man's library, where he happens upon all manner of heretical books that have been banned by church and state alike. Contrary to his upbringing, training and better judgment, Fairfax begins to read. At this point in the review, I am torn between revealing any more or just letting the reader unearth surprise after surprise until they begin to get a glimmering of what is really transpiring here. So, after some consideration, I will just leave you with this quote: "the ultimate symbol of the ancients' hubris and blasphemy, an apple with a bite taken out of it." Chew on that for a while...
by bruce tierney
Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Tierney, Bruce. "The Second Sleep." BookPage, Dec. 2019, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A606751233/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=150965f1. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Harris, Robert V2 Knopf (Fiction None) $28.95 11, 17 ISBN: 978-0-525-65671-5
A veteran historical novelist homes in on one of Hitler’s last desperate hopes.
In 1944, the Nazis know they're losing the war. They’d developed the V1, a pilotless drone bomb its targets could hear coming, and now its successor, which strikes without warning. The Nazis call it Vergeltungswaffen Zwei, Vengeance Weapon Two. The V2 rockets are notoriously unreliable, though. Although they're aimed at Charing Cross Station in the heart of London, any strike within five miles is considered a success. Many hit English neighborhoods, killing dozens of civilians, while others explode at launch or veer off into the sea. Chapters of the novel alternate between the two sides, specifically between German engineers and British intelligence. Twenty-four-year-old intelligence analyst Kay Caton-Walsh is in a married man’s bed and survives a direct hit as floors of the building collapse around her. A half dozen people are killed and almost 300 injured. Meanwhile, German engineers work furiously to prepare missiles for launch from Belgium. Despite severe technical problems, they are under great pressure to produce the weapons in the thousands and rush them into service. The story has plenty of interesting details—for example, the bulk of Germany’s potato crop that year had been requisitioned to be distilled into alcohol for use as rocket fuel. British radar can spot the V2s in flight, but “where exactly were they coming from? That was the mystery.” If only the Brits could look at a rocket’s parabola and calculate its point of origin....Caton-Walsh volunteers to help find out: “I’m good at maths. I know how to use a slide rule.” She joins a team of women working on the problem. Readers may recognize Germany’s main rocket engineer, Wernher von Braun. Though he shows necessary fealty to the Nazi cause, his secret dream is to send a rocket to the moon. And if he has to do that from America, that’s another story.
A short, enjoyable thriller with plenty of well-researched historical nuggets.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Harris, Robert: V2." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bc490728. Accessed 1 May 2025.
V2. By Robert Harris. Dec. 2020. 348p. Knopf, $28.95 (9780525656715); e-book, $13.99 (9780525656722).
After a side trip to the fifteenth century (The Second Sleep, 2019), historical-fiction master Harris returns to one of his favorite eras: WWII. In November 1944, with the German army in retreat, Londoners are beginning to relax. Until the German V2s, the world's first long-range guided ballistic missiles, start soundlessly raining down on the city. Harris tells the story of the V2 in alternating narratives starring a German engineer, Willi Graf, who assisted his friend, Wernher von Braun, in designing the rocket, and Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in Britain's Women's Auxiliary Air Force, who is part of a team attempting to track the movable launch sites used to deploy the V2s. Crosscutting between those launching the rockets and those on the receiving end proves to be a superb narrative device, as Harris juxtaposes the engineers at work (scientists more than warriors) against their targets on the ground, "entirely unaware that the mathematics of the parabolic curve have already condemned them." Meanwhile, Caton-Walsh wields her slide rule to calculate in a matter of minutes the location from which a rocket was launched based on its flight pattern: "bearing, height, speed, and position--the integers of death." Reminiscent of the multiple stories about the Bletchley Park code breakers, Harris' novel combines fascinating technical detail with a wartime drama that finds human ambiguity on both sides of the battlefield.--Bill Ott
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Ott, Bill. "V2." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 1-2, 1 Sept. 2020, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A637433416/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6651dbb. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Robert Harris had a good lockdown. When it started in late March he was 20,000 words into his latest book, and by the time it eased in June he had a fully fledged novel in his hand.
V2 was written in strange times, and chronicles strange times. It is a cat-and-mouse thriller set in the dying days of the Second World War as Hitler sought to regain the ascendancy by pummelling London with a "vengeance weapon" in the form of a supersonic ballistic missile--essentially a repurposed space rocket.
Harris, now 63 and despite being a former Fleet Street political editor, columnist and author of 13 novels, was not sure at first if he could finish the book. Given the circumstances, he asked himself: "Who is going to be interested in this?" He managed just too words a day. "I did seriously think that I wouldn't be able to do it," he told me over Zoom. But then, after a series of dream-filled nights, he gave it a concerted go and worked four hours a day, although "at noon I would reach for a drink".
The novel sits alongside Harris's other Second World War fictions, such as the million-selling Fatherland (1992) and the Bletchley Park spy tale Enigma (1995). Like them, V2 combines detailed research (into such niceties as missile payloads, movable launch sites, and the distillation by German soldiers of the V2's fuel into schnapps) with atmospheric descriptions of a cowering London and the forests on the Dutch coast where the rockets were launched.
His characters meanwhile are, as is the way in his books, driven as much by their flaws as their convictions: in this instance, Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in Britain's Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) who distances herself from an affair with a married airman by crossing the Channel into danger; and Dr Rudi Graf, a fictional colleague of the real-life rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who oversees the rocket launches from Holland.
The genesis of the novel came in 2016 when Harris read an obituary of Eileen Younghusband, a WAAF officer who had been sent to the town of Mechelen in Belgium during the winter of 1944 to help track down the V2 launch sites. From Eileen grew Kay, who is one of eight young women sequestered for safety in a bank vault shortly after the Allies liberate Mechelen from the occupying Germans.
Armed with a slide rule, her job is to use the launch time and detonation time of the missiles to calculate the parabola of their flight paths and so pinpoint where they were launched. The women have only six minutes to complete their calculations and give the RAF time to scramble aircraft to bomb the positions before they are cleared.
"My initial thought was this is a great story--eight women take on the might of the German army," Harris said, "but it ended up being a book about the futility of war." Younghusband was told that her work had led to the destruction of two launch sites, though, in fact, none were ever hit.
Nevertheless, "the V2 was a pointless weapon in a way, yet it was unstoppable". From September 1944 more than 3,000 were launched, primarily at London, Antwerp and Liege (but also at Norwich and Ipswich). They killed an estimated 2,700 civilians in London; one of the worst losses of life came when the Woolworths store in New Cross, south London, was flattened, killing 160. The V2s caused death and terror but they didn't change the war.
They did, however, change the peace. Part of the book is situated at Peenemunde on Germany's Baltic coast. It was there that a huge technical and research facility was built by the Nazis to develop the rockets. When von Braun and his team started their experiments in the early 1930s their aim was to develop a rocket for space ("The first man to walk on the moon has already been born," says von Braun in the novel). But they needed funding, and when Hitler supplied it an idealistic project became a military one.
"If a state gets behind an idea and resources are unlimited and you crowd into a space all the experts, then you get a kind of quantum leap in technology," noted Harris.
This happened in three specific places during the war--Peenemunde, Bletchley Park and Los Alamos, New Mexico. "Our modern world was forged in these three places," he says. "They gave us rockets, computers and atomic power." What's more, he believes, "we are still dealing with the consequences of these wartime advances. There were no moral qualms at Bletchley but obviously there were moral qualms about what was going on at Peenemunde and Los Alamos."
Technological developments in Silicon Valley today, which build on "the breakthroughs made at Bletchley", bring their own disquiet. This is part of the reason Harris finds it hard to be optimistic about the world: "Things that should have made things better are having the paradoxical effect of making them worse. Things that should have been so liberating about the internet and social media, interconnectedness and bringing us all together, in fact are driving us apart."
We should, he thinks, have reached "the epitome of the age of reason, of us being able to sit anywhere and with our phones have access to all the world's knowledge. We should be moving into a new era of enlightenment and what do we find? It's conspiracy theories and cranks. We've moved into an age of irrationality. We are punch-drunk with it."
When I asked Harris if these febrile political times ever tempt him to return to political journalism (he covered politics at the BBC and the Observer), he was clear. "I'm so glad to be out of it. When I was writing a column, which I often did for Conservative newspapers, there was a sense that you could have a dialogue with people who didn't agree with you. You could almost think you were changing someone's mind. Now I don't feel that anyone's mind is changed." Today's readership, he reckons, is all about affirmation: "You read columnists who you agree with and they reinforce your belief in yourself and you shy away from columnists who are just going to annoy you. I am as guilty of this as anyone. I don't want to hear that Brexit is going to be wonderful or that Dominic Cummings has a plan."
For Harris, the point of writing political comment has gone. "About 18 years ago I finally went through the looking glass and became a novelist"--and he's not going back.
Nor will he admit to screaming at the television news. "I did up until about a year ago," he said. "Everything changed for me with the general election last year. It was a crazy election, given the choice we had. Up to that point I couldn't help but think people would change their minds on Brexit or something sensible would happen. But when the country gave Boris Johnson an 80-seat majority I thought, you know what, I'm in my early sixties and if this is what people want then fine. So I regard it now with cynical, amused detachment."
He has yet to become a copper-bottomed stoic--a philosophy he knows well from his trio of novels about Cicero and the Roman republic. "I'm just stunned that the country has ended up with Johnson as prime minister. That is something I simply didn't think would happen." Political life, thinks Harris, "has become a grim comedy". "I have voted in 12 general elections--and only been on the winning side three times and I felt after every time I lost that there was a sort of wisdom in what the British electorate had decided, a wisdom of the crowd. I have rather lost that."
Harris was a prominent New Labour supporter and advocate of Tony Blair until the Iraq War. Then he began to disengage from the party and skewered Blair in The Ghost (2007), by casting him diaphanously veiled--as Adam Lang, a preternaturally smooth, entitled and doubt-free former prime minister with a serpentine wife. Nevertheless, there is a touch of nostalgia when he talks about pre-2016 centrist politics. "We used to complain when it was just Blair, Major, Cameron, Clinton, Bush--everything was sort of the same, it was boring. Well, beware of what you wish for. Now every day you wake up and it's like living in a fantastical novel."
Could Keir Starmer be the corrective? He might have been, thinks Harris, "if the game were being played under the old rules; my worry is that the old rules no longer apply. For the left, the moment we moved into the culture wars things became tricky because there aren't enough votes, not enough peopled fired up by the culture wars. They make the right appear more attractive to centrist voters, so Starmer has a big problem there."
I wondered if he might turn the current imbroglios to profit by writing a version of The Ghost with Johnson as the central figure? "It's a cliche to say it but when the politicians have become such extraordinary figures fiction withers and dies in the face of them. The sort of novel I write depends on plausibility: if I tried to write a novel in which Donald Trump became president and carried on in the way he has or where Johnson would be PM everyone would say no, this doesn't obey any plausible rules."
Plausibility is another reason Harris will stick with historical fiction. He acknowledges, "historical novels are always about the contemporary world"--a malign Europe lobbing projectiles at a solitary and dauntless Britain is certainly how some see things --but earlier times offer other consolations. "The moral issues are clearer in the past quite often," he said. "You escape people's prejudices and preconceptions. There's a great satisfaction, a frisson, in thinking the past might have been like this--being in the woods as the Germans launch these missiles, being in London as they fell."
For Harris, the appeal of this alternative sense of order is no dereliction of duty to living in the present. "As Martin Amis--I think--once said: 'How can you live with unmediated reality?' In fiction certain laws of plausibility, logic, morals can apply--that's what people turn to fiction for. We have lost that in reality." It is what he will continue to provide, for himself even more than for his readers.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Prodger, Michael. "'We have moved into the age of irrationality': Robert Harris on why politics has become a grim comedy." New Statesman, vol. 149, no. 5538, 18 Sept. 2020, pp. 20+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A638300564/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d17b048a. Accessed 1 May 2025.
V2By Robert Harris
On the evening of Sept. 8, 1944, a rocket hurtled into the sky from a mobile launchpad in Nazi-occupied Holland, carrying with it a one-ton warhead and Hitler's last, desperate hopes of victory. It reached a height of 58 miles and a speed of 3,500 miles per hour, emitted a terrifying crack as it broke the sound barrier over London, and then slammed into Staveley Road in the suburb of Chiswick, killing three people: an old woman, a toddler and a soldier visiting his girlfriend.
The V-2 rocket was the Nazis' last secret weapon and the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, the harbinger of a new science that would eventually land Americans on the moon. The V stood for Vergeltungswaffe, or vengeance weapon, and was intended as retaliation for the Allied bombing of Germany. With this powerful new armament, Hitler believed he could finally bomb Britain into submission, but the very name seemed to presage defeat: Only the vanquished seek vengeance.
The science and story of the V-2 furnish the backdrop for the latest novel by Robert Harris, his 14th. Like ''Enigma,'' ''Munich'' and ''Fatherland,'' ''V2'' is another swiftly paced thriller that blends fiction with the facts of World War II. Running alongside the well-known history of the German rocket is the hidden tale of Britain's attempt to stymie the rocket attacks -- with algebra.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of November. See the full list . ]
British mathematicians believed that by using radar to track the path of each rocket, and working back from the point of impact, they could calculate exactly where it had been launched from. If this was done fast enough, they could in theory locate the position of the launchpads before the Germans dismantled them, scramble R.A.F. bombers from Britain and destroy them.
Thus a team of female air force officers was dispatched to newly liberated Belgium, armed with slide rules and graph paper, to try to confound the Fuhrer's rocket program using the theorem of the parabolic curve. Each calculation had to be completed in under six minutes.
On opposite sides of this strange military equation Harris places Kay Caton-Walsh, a young woman who survives a rocket attack in London and joins the team of officers racing to calculate the coordinates of the launch sites, and Rudi Graf, a German civilian engineer sent to supervise the rocket launches from Holland. The figure of Graf may be familiar to readers of Harris's fiction: a good man in a bad world, seeking to reconcile his work with his conscience.
Behind Graf lurks the enigmatic character of Wernher von Braun, the real-life space scientist, Nazi of convenience, sometime SS officer and the charming, politically agile head of the V-2 program who would throw his lot in with America at war's end and play a key role in the U.S. space program.
''V2'' was written, Harris explains, during the coronavirus lockdown, and it has the intensity of a book produced under abnormal pressure: Some of the strain we have all felt in recent months seems to be reflected in his characters as they struggle toward the end of an exhausting war. This is a book written fast, and it hurtles along, following its own, less predictable emotional trajectory.
No novelist is better at evoking the gray resilience of wartime Britain, the moral confusion as the Third Reich staggered toward collapse, and the aroma of a bacon sandwich served in a steamy army canteen. The research, as with all of Harris's books, is impeccable, but worn lightly.
At a mass funeral for members of a V-2 launch crew, killed when one of the rockets explodes, an SS general declares: ''There is not a building standing within 500 meters of Leicester Square. ... We are the Vengeance Division! We will prevail!'' His lie captures the combination of bombast and mendacity that marked the final days of the Nazi regime. Equally true to history is the subdued assessment made by a British officer of the V-2 campaign: ''a bloody nuisance.''
The rockets killed about 2,700 Londoners and destroyed 20,000 homes. But of the missiles aimed at London, only 517 hit the capital while 598 fell short, detonated in flight or otherwise failed. They caused widespread anxiety, but had little impact on the course of the war, and may even have hastened the end for Hitler by soaking up vast resources at a crucial moment: Germany was running out of food, but the alcohol to fuel each rocket had to be brewed from 30 tons of potatoes.
The ingenious mathematical effort to stop the rockets did not work either. Not a single launch site was hit. The bombers simply could not be deployed with sufficient speed and accuracy to pinpoint the other end of a 200-mile ballistic curve.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this damp squib of history might be an impediment, but in the course of this gripping novel Harris captures something of the real nature of war: good ideas that fail, perverted science, grandiosity, lies and unintended consequences.
Hitler had hoped to defy fate with a last dramatic bang. In the end, the V-2 campaign and the attempt to stop it, despite the brainpower, planning and sacrifice on both sides, were failures. After the war, von Braun was among the 1,600 German scientists and engineers who were recruited to the United States as government employees in a secret program called Operation Paperclip. By 1960, his V-2 team had been incorporated into NASA. In 1975, he received the National Medal of Honor. History can sometimes take unexpected trajectories, with incalculable outcomes.
Ben Macintyre's most recent book is ''Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy.'' V2 By Robert Harris 320 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: A ''bloody nuisance'': V-2 rockets in Germany. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ROGER VIOLLET, VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Macintyre, Ben. "Flight Tracker." The New York Times Book Review, 6 Dec. 2020, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643880681/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d0d5aa42. Accessed 1 May 2025.
In late September 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain met German dictator Adolf Hitler in Munich. As the film title Munich: The Edge of War suggests, this conference occurred when the Nazi ruler threatened a large-scale conflict in Europe due to his aggressive policy known as Lebensraum (Living Space), where the Germans sought to colonise territories to the east. Billed by Chamberlain as "peace for our time"--words criticised almost as soon as he'd uttered them--the Munich Agreement might as well have been written in disappearing ink, because it took less than a year for the Nazi regime to break its word and invade Poland, on 1 September 1939.
What if, though, the prime minister's infamous appeasement of Hitler actually bought valuable time for Britain and its allies At the Corinthia Hotel in central London, just off Whitehall and a stone's throw from Downing Street itself, Robert Harris, upon whose 2017 novel the new film by Netflix is based, tells History of War he always thought Chamberlain deserved more respect for believing in political solutions before rushing into war. "I don't want to whitewash him, because in the end the policy failed and he had too much faith in his own ability," says Harris. "He made a mistake saying 'peace for our time' but I don't know what else a British prime minster at that time could have done."
The film's director, Christian Schwochow, a German national, takes the same view as Harris. "I am for a man who believed in peace and who tried very hard not to waste so many lives [by going to war]," he explains later that day during a telephone interview. "Hitler was a difficult man to make deals with and he [Chamberlain] knew Hitler wasn't a man to rely on. I have sympathy for a man who believed in politics and diplomacy."
Harris undertook extensive research on the topic, including reading Cabinet papers and delving into various archives, and had a long-standing interest in the event, having presented a documentary for the BBC in 1988 to mark the 50th anniversary. He also began writing a version of his novel some 30 years ago, even before his bestselling alternate history nightmare Fatherland (1992)--where Hitler wins the war--was published to acclaim. He set it aside as he couldn't break the spine of the story. "I'd always thought [about] writing a novel about a private secretary to Chamberlain flying on the plane to Munich, but I could never really get beyond that [initial idea]," he says.
Munich: The Edge of War crafts a fictional story around real-life events. It involves a German-speaking English translator, Hugh Legat (George McKay), and an old Oxford friend of his, the English-speaking German translator on Hitler's team, Paul von Hartman (Jannis Niewohner), attempting to warn the British delegation of Hitler's warmongering plans via a top-secret document purloined from Nazi top brass. Was creating the story a challenge, given the audience knows in advance the meeting is doomed to failure? "It's funny, you know, because the basis of Greek drama was you always knew what was going to happen in the end," says Harris. "It's rather like the Titanic: it's riveting because you know what's going to happen and I think it's the same [here]. We know the Munich Agreement is going to fail but, oddly enough, knowing that doesn't detract from the enjoyment [of watching the film]."
One element of Munich: The Edge of War many might be less familiar with is the Oster conspiracy. Led by Oberstleutnant Hans Oster, he and a select coterie of military officers were convinced Hitler was dragging the country into a war it was unprepared for. Harris was never convinced the plot was as serious as the better-known Operation Valkyrie, though. "It was only in the beginning of 1938, when Hitler started to commission plans for an attack against Czechoslovakia, that it started to crystalise into something a bit more serious," he explains. "Chiefly around the German Foreign Ministry, they were anti-Nazi elements. I personally don't think the conspiracy in the autumn of 1938 was particularly serious. They met and talked, but I can't see how they thought with 50 men they could take down Hitler." Schwochow says he had heard of the Oster conspiracy but "not the exact details" before learning more during the pre-production phase of the film.
Shot mainly in the UK, including around Liverpool, the filmmaker and his team also spent time in Munich, Berlin and Dresden. Shooting in Germany was problematic however, as Schwochow points out: "It was difficult in Germany because many places were destroyed in the Second World War." Fortuitously, one very important building in particular survived and they were able to shoot there: Munich's Fuhrerbau (Fuhrer's Building), where the film recreates the conference in the very same rooms as they occurred in real life. "I was very happy to shoot at the Fuhrerbau," reveals Schwochow. "It's not a set, it's the interior and exterior of the place where it all happened. The moment where they sign the agreement--it's the room in which they signed the agreement. That was magical to all of us and very... deep, in a way. To recreate that, and we felt a lot of weight and responsibility."
Harris was impressed by the strong production values and use of props, such as Hermann Goring's private train (which was used to represent Hitler's train). "They worked hard to make [period details] accurate and the film benefits hugely from that," he says, genuinely full of praise for what the art design crews achieved. "You really get a sense of what the conference was like."
As ever with historical films, they resonant with the present and remind us of our past mistakes. Harris sums up: "There's a moral responsibility on democracies to try everything they can for peace. If you do that, when a war comes you have the moral strength to believe your cause is just. What I take from Munich is it's right to keep on talking and to try to find some means of agreement, even with people that you detest."
WORDS MARTYN CONTERIO
Munich: The Edge of War is released by Netflix on 22 January, 2022
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Future B2B LLC
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Conterio, Martyn. "MUNICH: THE EDGE OF WAR INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT HARRIS & CHRISTIAN SCHWOCHOW: Novelist Robert Harris and director Christian Schwochow discuss the upcoming thriller about the 1938 Munich Agreement and plead sympathy for tarnished British PM Neville Chamberlain." History of War, no. 103, Jan. 2022, pp. 66+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690493439/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=18171b6f. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Robert Harris. Harper, $28.99 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-324800-7
Harris (Munich) again turns a historical event into a canny page-turner. Following the restoration of the Stuart Dynasty to the throne of England, King Charles II and his court seek revenge for the execution of the monarch's father, Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649. The task of identifying and locating those involved falls to Richard Nayler, "one of those shadows who move, anonymous, along the private passages and through the council chambers of every nation in every age." Nayler has a personal grudge against his quarry; his wife died giving birth to their stillborn son after Cromwell's soldiers arrested him for participating in an illegal prayer service. After Nayler tracks down the death warrant ordering Charles I's beheading, he devotes himself to finding the 13 signatories still at large. The bulk of the narrative focuses on his Javertlike search for Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe. The fugitives live desperate lives in New England, constantly fearful of betrayal even from those who shelter them. Harris humanizes the hunter and the hunted, and brings to life an obscure chapter in colonial American history. Harris further burnishes his reputation as a talented author of historical suspense. Agent: Suzanne Gluck. WME. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Act of Oblivion." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 31, 25 July 2022, p. 52. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713172919/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2b092b0f. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Harris, Robert ACT OF OBLIVION Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $28.99 9, 13 ISBN: 978-0-06-324-800-7
This gripping historical thriller reimagines the manhunt of two killers of an English king.
In 1660, two fugitives arrive in New England. Years earlier, they had helped plot the trial and execution of King Charles I on charges of high treason. Oliver Cromwell had subsequently taken power as Lord Protector, but now he and most of the regicides have been tracked down and executed, and a new king is on the throne. The remaining fugitives are Col. Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Col. William Goffe, and Richard Nayler's job is to hunt them down. Nayler, says the author, is the only important fictional character in the book, and his obsession with the hunt drives the story. This is an era when all misfortune is put down to God's will, and folks clearly believe in a vengeful creator. England suffers plague, war with the Dutch, famine, and a horrible fire in London almost contemporaneously--surely they are the four horsemen foretold in the book of Revelation. Condemned prisoners who are lucky are merely beheaded--the unlucky are subjected to deaths so ghastly that it takes 11 lines to describe. Think red-hot tongs. And if you think escaping to America is easy, remember that red worms infest the ship's biscuits--and just try to ignore the slop and slime and stink you'll be slipping and sliding in. Nayler is relentless in tracking down the traitors to his beloved king--are they still in England? In France? In New England? He is clever in finding clues that finally point him in the right direction. Meanwhile, Whalley and Goffe are separated from their families across the ocean. Will they ever be able to see them again? Or will Nayler find both men and kill them? The deeply researched story is the author's brilliant reimagining of real historical events, with sympathetic characters and a compelling plot.
Thoroughly enjoyable with some cringeworthy descriptions. Readers will not pine for days of yore.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Harris, Robert: ACT OF OBLIVION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A715353004/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2eb81305. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Act of Oblivion. By Robert Harris. Sept. 2022.304P. Harper, $28.99 (9780063248007); e-book, $14.99 (9780063248021).
The latest novel by the author of V2 (2020) and Imperium (2006), among many others, is set in Massachusetts in 1660. It's been 11 years since King Charles I was executed during the Civil War of 1642-51. Several of the people behind the king's murder are still free. Richard Nayler, an officer of the Privy Council, is determined to bring them to justice. Harris focuses on two of the "regicides," Edward Whalley and William Goffe, who fled to Massachusetts. Like most of the characters in the book, Whalley and Goffe are real people, and, as he usually does, Harris sticks closely to the known facts as much as he can (Nayler, the manhunter, is fictional, as is the story of his pursuit of the two regicides). It will come as no surprise to readers familiar with Harris' work that this is a splendidly written historical novel. Harris really is a joy to read, and it's interesting to see how he adjusts his writing style with each book to reflect the story's time period (this one is less ornate than his books set in ancient Rome but more ornate than his WWII novels). Another top-flight effort from a master storyteller.--David Pitt
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Pitt, David. "Act of Oblivion." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2022, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A718452211/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ce612b5b. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Precipice
By Robert Harris
There's plenty of historical drama in Robert Harris's latest novel, but the events that led Britain into the carnage of World War I serve mainly as a backdrop for the intimate maneuverings in PRECIPICE (Harper, 464 pp., $30). At its center is the actual clandestine liaison between the country's 61-year-old prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and a 26-year-old aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, who became his sounding board and confidante as he faced mounting hostilities both within his government and throughout Europe.
Harris notes at the outset that all the letters from Asquith quoted in his text are authentic documents. Around them Harris has deftly sketched his own portrayals of Asquith, Stanley and their social circle, adding invented correspondence from Stanley to Asquith as well as an invented Special Branch detective who finds himself deep in an ''off the books'' investigation after copies of classified Foreign Office telegrams -- meant to be distributed only to a few select ministers -- start turning up in decidedly insecure locations. Going undercover at the Stanleys' Welsh estate, then covertly reading Venetia's mail, he becomes an increasingly uncomfortable voyeur, disturbed by the Asquith letters' ''bizarre mixture of secret military intelligence and passionate declarations of love.'' Will he be tempted to intervene? Or will Venetia, sensing the danger of her position, take action on her own?
Peggy
By Rebecca Godfrey With Leslie Jamison
Independence is the double-edged sword of Peggy Guggenheim's existence: seemingly granted by her inherited fortune but denied by the expectations surrounding the Guggenheim name and her own insecurities. At least that's the impression you get from PEGGY (Random House, 384 pp., $29), a sympathetic first-person narrative left unfinished at her death in 2022 by Rebecca Godfrey and completed by her friend Leslie Jamison.
The result of what Jamison calls their ''posthumous collaboration'' is an affecting rendition of Guggenheim's life from her girlhood in New York through the 1938 establishment of her Surrealist gallery in London. Wrenching herself from a deeply disapproving family and then from a dissolute husband who was pleased to be known as the King of Bohemia, she gives a convincing account of her struggles to live on her own terms. But it's the details of various encounters that best serve her argument: financing Emma Goldman's efforts to write a memoir by installing her in a St. Tropez cottage, where Goldman gratefully feeds Peggy homemade gefilte fish and offers romantic advice; shacking up for two sublime weeks in a borrowed Paris flat with Samuel Beckett, ''one of the only people who ever saw me as more than a spoiled heiress ... who thought I could do something that mattered.''
Life After Kafka
By Magdaléna Platzová
If Felice Bauer is seen at all by literary historians, it's simply as the recipient of more than 500 letters from her former fiancé, Franz Kafka. In Alex Zucker's translation of LIFE AFTER KAFKA (Bellevue Literary Press, 256 pp., paper, $17.99), the Czech novelist Magdaléna Platzová mixes an account of her own attempts to track down her subject with fictional renditions of Felice's relentlessly bourgeois (and intensely discreet) married life in pre-World War II Switzerland and postwar California, where she sold knitting supplies and baked cookies to make ends meet. Platzová's research extends to the next generation and to venues as varied as 1950s Tel Aviv, the 21st-century Hudson Valley and a remote Italian village in 1945.
''Who,'' Platzová asks, ''was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture and precisely set watches?'' The figure that emerges is still a tantalizing mystery, both to Platzová and to Bauer's descendants, for whom her Kafka connection remains enigmatic. When he finally grants Platzová an interview, Bauer's now elderly son says it's a shame Kafka appears to have destroyed all his mother's letters: ''I'd have liked to know more about her.''
Quincas Borba
By Machado de Assis
In Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson's new translation of Machado de Assis' 1891 novel, QUINCAS BORBA (Liveright, 368 pp., $29.99), ignorance of the pitfalls of late-1860s Rio de Janeiro society spells disaster and high comedy for an unsophisticated provincial schoolteacher. After nursing the title character through his final illness, Rubião becomes this wealthy philosopher's heir, with the sole provision that he care for the man's pet dog, also named Quincas Borba, as devotedly as he once tended its owner.
Tempted by big-city life -- not to mention the charms of a flirtatious, upwardly mobile young woman -- Rubião is swiftly established as a source of income for a swarm of hangers-on, who dine at his lavishly furnished mansion even when he has gone out for the evening. Among Rubião's new friends are the avaricious husband of his not-very-cooperative love object and an argumentative aspiring politician with a perpetually underfunded newspaper. As a rich bachelor, Rubião is also obvious prey for those with an instinct for matchmaking. Bolstered by his apparent success in his new milieu, ''Rubião, though he may have lacked ideas, now had imagination.'' But will anyone save him when his fantasies drift toward madness?
CAPTION(S):
This article appeared in print on page BR11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Becker, Alida. "Imaginary Lives." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Dec. 2024, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819221018/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7197f55e. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Robert Harris considers himself a lucky man. "I've been very fortunate in life," he told me, gesturing as if to tap his head, then thinking better of it and instead reaching for the floorboards by his feet. "I got to Cambridge in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do now--I mean, I hardly got any O-levels. I got to the BBC before John Birt started wrecking it. I got into Fleet Street when it was still the old days. And I got into novel writing when you could take time. There was no pressure on me to keep producing, which was wonderful, because I could easily have burned out."
Instead, 32 years after the release of his bestselling first novel, Fatherland, set in an alternative universe in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War, Harris has produced his 16th work of fiction. Precipice begins in the summer of 1914, when Europe is on the brink of war and the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, is having an affair with Venetia Stanley, a socialite half his age. Asquith wrote to her obsessively, several times a day (there were 12 postal deliveries a day in 1914 London), even from key cabinet meetings.
"It's a pretty extreme example of the kind of obsessions that politicians do often get," Harris told me at his house in west London in early August. (He has another, in Berkshire, jokingly called "the house that Hitler built" because he bought it with the proceeds from Fatherland.) "One sees this again and again: the people who hold power and their curious drives--the thing that gets them to the top is often damage."
Asquith shared with Stanley secret government documents, sending them in the post or showing them to her during their regular long drives out of London. These journeys were one reason Harris chose to imply in the novel that their relationship was physical. He looked up the model of the premier's car, a 1908 Napier six-cylinder: "You sat in an enclosed compartment and you communicated with the driver through a pushbutton console. There were curtains and blinds everywhere. And I thought, well, this is why they went for an hour and a half drive every Friday afternoon ..."
More extraordinary a breach of security was his habit of screwing up classified papers and throwing them from the car window once Stanley had seen them. The real-life discovery by members of the public of five such telegrams during the early months of the war gave Harris the idea for Precipice's third, fictitious protagonist, a young intelligence officer, Paul Deemer. Looking at the letter in which Asquith told Stanley the discarded documents had been discovered, Harris thought: "I could invent that character; there must have been a leak inquiry. That would be my way in."
When Asquith left Downing Street in December 1916, replaced as prime minister by David Lloyd George, he burned most of his private correspondence, including his letters from Stanley. "One of the attractions of writing this was I did want to write a novel with a strong female protagonist," Harris said. Precipice is only the second novel in a 30-year career in which Harris has written one (the other was 2020's V2, which featured a Women's Auxiliary Air Force member). "It's not that one has a kind of bucket list--'Oh, I must do this and that' but I thought the justification, in a way, for writing the novel was to give her a voice. He destroyed her letters. She has been rather forgotten and overlooked."
Asquith's letters to Stanley were preserved, and resurfaced around 15 years after her death. Precipice is constructed partly from Asquith's own words, and partly from Stanley's imagined replies. "Once I found myself inventing her replies, the relationship shifted. Suddenly, there were two people in it." It was, Harris told me, the first time he cried finishing a novel. "I got very caught up ... I found them both fascinating. This sort of tragic, doomed affair I found rather haunting."
Harris does not see their relationship as significant enough to have changed the course of the war, but said Asquith was "certainly distracted at key moments", such as during the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, from which the Entente powers withdrew after eight months and which took the lives of nearly 200,000 British soldiers. (Harris compares it to the war in Vietnam: "The constant attempt to keep sending men. You couldn't wind back ... because of loss of prestige.") Another "huge mistake" was Asquith's decision to send Stanley a letter from the war secretary, Lord Kitchener, about the shell shortage of 1915. Precipice recounts a rousing speech the prime minister gave in Newcastle in which he claimed, based on his reading of the letter, that there was no shortage at all. By the time he was challenged on his claims, his evidence was gone in the post.
But Stanley "clearly did give him political advice. If she had said to him, 'You shouldn't bring the Tories into the coalition government,' he might well not have done that. And that was the last Liberal government." By the time Asquith permitted the Tories to enter Downing Street, Stanley had ended their affair; Asquith's last letters to her are full of despair, even notions of suicide. "It's hard to believe, looking at the letters, that her absence from his life wasn't a big factor [in his political fate]. He lost his nerve, I think."
Since Fatherland, Harris's novels have roamed from Ancient Rome (Pompeii, the Cicero trilogy) to 19th-century France at the time of the Dreyfus affair (An Officer and a Spy) to a modern Vatican (Conclave, a film adaptation of which is due in November), but the First and Second World Wars keep drawing him back. The novelist was born 12 years after the end of the Second World War--"So, what's that? The equivalent of 2012. It seemed at the time a huge gulf, but now I see it was nothing"--and believes we still "live in its shadow".
"I think 1914 is the pivotal year in modern history. There's a world before that and then a world after that. It was a breakdown of international order that had been preceded by upheavals intellectually, socially, after a long period of peace. It's not hard to feel one's living in that kind of period now."
Robert Harris was born in Nottingham in 1957. His father worked at a local printworks, and one of his earliest memories is of accompanying him. "I used to sit beside these huge printing presses, and he used to give me a pile of paper--not the sort you'd get in the shop; big sheets of paper--that I'd scrawl on. The smell of the ink and the paper I can remember now." His desire to be a writer had begun. He first wanted to be a playwright, then moved on to writing "imaginary newspapers". He edited the school paper, Memograms (a play on the school's name, Melton Mowbray Grammar), with which he "caused a lot of trouble--I've always liked causing trouble".
At Cambridge University he worked on the student paper and on graduating applied for a BBC trainee scheme. He chose television over print because at that time the National Union of Journalists ruled that newcomers had to work on a provincial paper before graduating to a national. "Well, I'd had enough of the provinces having grown up in the Midlands!" After eight years in TV, including as a reporter on Panorama, he moved to the Observer to be political editor, and later also wrote for the Sunday Times and the Telegraph.
Political journalism has changed almost beyond recognition since Harris left it to become a novelist, primarily because of the advent of social media and the 24/7 news cycle. He lamented that political positions have become far more entrenched. "[People] now tailor the news that they receive to suit their prejudices--they don't want to be disturbed. That sense that you could write a column and argue someone round to a different point of view was probably quite mythical, but I certainly think it would be very hard to do that now."
He became close to Tony Blair in 1997 when the Labour leader invited Harris to join him on the campaign trail, but they fell out over the Iraq War. It was one of the few times Harris signed a letter of protest; the journalist Paul Foot rang him up and said: "Come on, sign it, man." In 2007, the year Blair left No 10, Harris published The Ghost, which featured a former prime minister, Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair, investigated by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Harris believes Blair's readiness to go to war in 2003 came in part because he wasn't of a generation with living memory of the world wars. "I think it was the generation that had fought in the war ... [who] had a healthy respect for peace, and they desired to avoid war. Blair purposefully engaged and manoeuvred the country into a war we should never have fought. That's not just hindsight: one knew at the time this was folly."
Harris is keen to "lay [the] canard to rest" that he supported the Lib Dems during the Corbyn years. "The thing you can never rely on is a Wikipedia page!" (In my defence, I'd read it in the Telegraph.) "My politics is essentially the centre left, and within that boundary I'm ecumenical. I will vote to get the Tories out"--as he did this July. He has been a member of Labour for three brief spells, one in the Seventies, another after Blair's 1997 win and the last to vote in the 2016 leadership election. Corbyn survived; Harris left soon after.
What does he make of the comparisons between Labour's 1997 landslide and this year's victory? "When you look back on it, that was quite a formidable Tory government that fell [in 1997]--Major, Heseltine, Clarke --and the economy was starting to boom. So it [was] a more significant victory, in a way." There is nothing close to the Blair-mania of '97 around Keir Starmer, and the mood around Labour in the 1990s was far more positive. "This was just anyone but the Tories ... a sort of surgical strike on the Conservative Party ... so it is different, and the inheritance is, frankly, grim." Among the "intractable problems" facing Starmer's government Harris counts the high burden of debt, creating growth outside the single market and an ageing population.
The Tories "seem to be heading to a very dark place ideologically and it'll take them some time to pull back from it". Does he see a route to recovery for the party? "One of the benefits of getting old and having studied politics is I remember that after Thatcher in the Eighties they said the Labour Party would never hold office again, and after Blair had his landslide, they said the Tories would never hold office again ... They will revive, but the way it's going, it's going to take at least two terms, I would have thought." Compared to our contemporary politicians, Harris told me, Asquith and his cabinet--Churchill, Lloyd George, Haldane--were of a different quality. "That doesn't mean they weren't flawed, but they operated on a much bigger stage ... There are very few politicians like that these days." Harris dislikes certainty in people, preferring what he calls "keep-the-show-on-the-road politicians" over "conviction politicians". He sees Starmer as the former.
"The best politicians construct a narrative. They tell a story. They make us all participants in their story. The most gifted was probably Churchill, who convinced the British that they were heroes with immense courage in 1940 and everybody played along." Thatcher was a storyteller, he said, and Blair, too, to a degree. "Those are the great politicians, they're like artists. They're like novelists. Does Starmer have that gift? We'll see ..."
"Precipice" is published by Hutchinson Heinemann
Caption: Robert Harris, photographed for the New Statesman by Cian Oba-Smith
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Bailey, Pippa. "Robert Harris's imagined histories: The novelist on political storytelling, Labour's 'grim' inheritance, and his desire to reinvent the past." New Statesman, vol. 153, no. 5778, 30 Aug. 2024, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809251974/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c671db84. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Precipice
by Robert Harris
Hutchinson Heinemann, [pounds sterling]22, pp. 464
London in the long hot summer of 1914. A city of gold sovereigns, chaperones and muffin men, but also a place where war looms, paranoia breeds and secret papers mysteriously disappear. The world that Robert Harris brings to life in Precipice is both close to that of Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and simultaneously very far away. In place of rugged heroes giving dastardly spies what for, he offers a subtle drama about the distasteful and ultimately destructive love affair between a young aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, and a man 35 years her senior who, not coincidentally, happens to be the prime minister H.H. Asquith.
When the book opens, a few days after the assassination at Sarajevo, we find Asquith preoccupied not with the danger of conflict on the Continent but with the prospect of civil war in Ireland. The outbreak of the Great War temporarily shelves the Irish problem, to Asquith's relief, even if it generates many far greater challenges too. Harris captures the feverish atmosphere and political manoeuvring of the July crisis neatly. Then, as the war starts and the pressure mounts, Asquith's romantic obsession with Venetia deepens, even as she begins to see a future of freedom away from the idle life of the rich which bores her so. Will she escape in time? What will happen to him - and the war effort - if she does? Therein lies the drama.
As in much of Harris's previous work, these are more or less true stories about real people. Fortunately for the historian, and for Harris, Asquith wrote to Venetia at length and in detail, sometimes three times a day, and his side of the correspondence survives. So we can get a good sense of both his daily and his political life. Indeed, he was breathtakingly indiscreet about government business and the progress of the war, even by our own recent low standards. Occasionally Asquith was even writing to Venetia describing cabinet meetings in real time, while they went on around him. Harris has a clever plot device to allow us to read their letters, and uses the theme of betraying confidences to bring Asquith's personal life and political future back together in a denouement which has, like all good thrillers, both the inevitability of tragedy and a capacity to surprise.
Historical fiction is as little concerned with the past as science fiction is with the future. Both genres are ways of highlighting the preoccupations of the present, and Harris has always been attracted by the continuities of history as much as by the changes. One way to read Precipice is as a book about a self-indulgent Balliol-educated classicist with an eye for women who became prime minister. He suddenly found himself having to lead the national response to an unprecedented global crisis which threatened to kill millions. The time had come to take responsibility and exercise leadership, but he ultimately proved unable, or perhaps unwilling, to do either. Eventually, that cost him his office and his career, but only after others had paid a much higher price. Worse, this was not just an individual failure caused by the weakness of one man, but symptomatic of what happens when a feckless ruling elite, self-absorbed and entitled to the point of moral bankruptcy, forgets its responsibility to govern.
Even if you're fed up with 21stcentury Whitehall farces, though, Precipice still offers a very good thriller which sails through the Downton Abbey test with the grace of a dreadnought cruising down the Channel. It feels realistic enough for us to suspend disbelief over the occasional bit of hokum, and makes us care enough about the characters to keep turning the pages. It's Harris's best book since Conclave.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Boff, Jonathan. "In love and war." Spectator, vol. 355, no. 10226, 24 Aug. 2024, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808920636/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fa4f8cb9. Accessed 1 May 2025.
Harris, Robert PRECIPICE Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $30.00 9, 17 ISBN: 9780063248052
A World War I novel of love, politics, and a continent gone mad.
In 1914, British prime minister H.H. Asquith, a 61-year-old married man, carries on an affair with 26-year-old Venetia Stanley. Those surrounding the two know of their friendship but not of its depth, though some wonder. Asquith harbors an obsession with Venetia--when they're apart, he writes her letters up to three times a day, expecting and generally receiving prompt responses. Meanwhile, DS Paul Deemer investigates the accidental drowning of Asquith's son. Since Venetia was listed as a witness, he questions her. But with a war in the offing, he's told by higher-ups at Scotland Yard to also quietly investigate the odd relationship that some suspect. "Prime," as Venetia calls her lover, feels the constant need to tell her what's happening at the office. When war breaks out, he shares secret information with her: troop requirements, battle losses, ammunition shortages--all by regular mail, reminding her not to share what she learns. "The enclosed telegram from our Ambassador at Petersburg wh. came on Friday night will interest you," one note says. The narrator notes: "A thin sheet of Foreign Office paper was a poor exchange for sweet verbena, but it was the only bouquet he had. What greater proof could he offer of his love, of his dependence on her, of his absolute confidence in her loyalty and discretion?" Never mind dependence; the man is nearly driven to distraction. Meanwhile, Deemer steams open the intercepted envelopes, reports to his boss, and sends the letters on their way. German spies are thought to be everywhere in Britain. Fortunately, Deemer is not one of them. A grisly war is on, to which politicians and generals send young men to die by the tens of thousands, to the benefit of no one. Over 100,000 soldiers on both sides perish at the Dardanelles in Turkey because of Churchill's insistence on attacking there. The world has indeed gone mad, but Venetia hasn't. She wants to become a frontline nurse, but to do that she must extricate herself from her needy lover. The pair are real historical figures, while Deemer is fictional. The letters from Asquith are genuine, while the author invented those from Venetia. Asquith apparently burned them.
A foolish affair and a horrible war that will grab and hold readers' attention.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Harris, Robert: PRECIPICE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504800/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=073485f2. Accessed 1 May 2025.
The Vatican-set thriller ''Conclave,'' based on Robert Harris's 2016 novel, has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. In an email interview, he theorized why the book and movie have dodged controversy. -- SCOTT HELLER
What books are on your night stand?
A biography of Henry V by Dan Jones, and the life of Caesar Augustus by Adrian Goldsworthy.
What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?
''Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1918,'' edited by Laird M. Easton. An amazing firsthand account of some of the leading cultural and political figures at the turn of the century.
Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?
The Gospels. I reread them when I started work on ''Conclave.'' Their message is much more revolutionary than anything in Marx and Lenin.
Do you distinguish between ''commercial'' and ''literary'' fiction? Where's that line, for you?
I don't think there is a line. Look at the great novelists of the 19th century. They turned out a book or two a year, often in serial form, aimed at a large readership. If you'd asked Dickens or Trollope or Thackeray to distinguish between ''commercial'' and ''literary'' fiction, they'd have given you a blank look.
Eight of your novels have been adapted for the screen. What still surprises you about the process?
How seldom the original vision is preserved, how many egos -- often with the best of intentions -- conspire to distort it. But very occasionally, when the process works -- as it has with ''Conclave'' -- you end up with something wonderful, both recognizably the book and much more.
Is there one adaptation on which you wish you had more say?
''Fatherland.'' It was my first novel, and I was very inexperienced. Mike Nichols bought it, to make a feature film. But it dwindled into a TV movie, and everything about it sets my teeth on edge, especially the ending.
The final twist in ''Conclave'' feels like it was written in, and for, this moment. Were you ahead of your time?
I knew it was a risk. But I thought, ''This is what novels should do: jolt the reader, cause a commotion, make people think -- even if they hate it.'' It slipped by without too much fuss nine years ago. The reception of the movie has been different, probably because the issue is so much more potent today.
Why do you suppose that the Vatican hasn't been hostile to ''Conclave,'' the book or movie?
Fundamentally I think the story is sympathetic to religious faith, and to Catholicism in particular. It's written from the perspective of an insider rather than an outsider, of a man struggling to do the right thing. As one of the cardinals says, ''We serve an ideal; we cannot always be ideal.''
How has your thinking (and writing) about politics changed over your years as a novelist?
I used to think of politics as essentially driven by rationality. Now I recognize that the processes of the human mind are much more emotional and complicated. It feels as though the era of the Enlightenment has ended; we are back in a time of superstition and conspiracy theories.
You're regularly praised as a novelist strong on plot. Do you enjoy novels light on plot, but heavy on character or atmosphere?
I think there can be an aesthetic beauty in the working out of a plot, just as much as in language or character. For me, the supreme example is Dickens's ''Great Expectations,'' in which all three work together.
When did you learn about Venetia Stanley, whose (epistolary) romance is at the heart of ''Precipice''?
H.H. Asquith, the prime minister, wrote 560 letters to Venetia, most of them in 1914 and 1915: She kept them all. I calculate she must have written him at least 300 in reply: He destroyed the lot. What a novelist can do and a historian can't is invent. The moment I started to imagine what she might have written back to him, she started to come alive in my mind -- clever, funny, unconventional.
What was the secret to inventing letters from her in answer to actual ones written by the prime minister?
Her granddaughter let me see the letters she had written to other people. That helped to give me her voice. And from the letters he wrote to her, I could deduce the kinds of things she had said. I think she wrote quite passionately to him. It was a love affair completely unlike any other, between the leader of what was still, arguably, the most powerful country in the world, and a clever young woman less than half his age.
Do you still write letters yourself? On what occasions?
Hardly ever. Letters of condolence mostly. That's one of the things that haunt me about ''Precipice'': It describes the end of an ordered, peaceful world, a world before the widespread use of the telephone, let alone WhatsApp.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
My three literary heroes: Graham Greene, George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.
Email interview conducted and edited by Scott Heller. An expanded version is available at nytimes.com/books.
CAPTION(S):
This article appeared in print on page BR6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Robert Harris." The New York Times Book Review, 26 Jan. 2025, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824812405/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69f1f990. Accessed 1 May 2025.