Tag Archives: Robert Harris

#BookReview ‘Precipice’ by @Robert_Harris #WW1 #thriller

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A gripping, page-by-page account of the prelude to war interleaved with the secret letters and snatched meetings of a forbidden relationship between the prime minister and a young society woman. I read Precipice by Robert Harris over a weekend, resenting anything that forced me to set the book aside. Robert HarrisThat the man involved is Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, that the story starts in the days preceding the declaration of war against Germany, that the fictional account is based on truth, all adds to the frisson. Harris is a master storyteller used to creating a fictional thriller based on historical fact. It ceased to matter what was true and what was made up, Harris puts us inside the private worlds of Asquith and Lady Venetia Stanley at a time of national danger. We all know how the war begins and ends but I didn’t know the details of the Asquith/Stanley affair or the level of reckless sharing by Asquith of privileged information; using ordinary post, top secret telegrams thrown from car windows. ‘That was a kind of madness.’ Letters were written, sent, received and replied to, with such speed and in such volume as to resemble a frantic exchange of emails or texts between lovers today.
Harris’s genius is to add the fictional character of young policeman Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, a new recruit at Special Branch, who is charged with looking into the torn remnants of secret Government documents found in the road and handed in by a member of the public. Deemer adds the element of risk that the story needs, a sense of danger as the sergeant uses old-fashioned policing technique – asking questions, following leads, covert surveillance, gathering evidence – in the chase to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, uncannily accurate comments about military matters are appearing in the Daily Mail. From where is the newspaper getting its information? Is the Prime Minister blinded by love? Is he incompetent, perhaps a traitor? Or is someone close to him a spy?
This is a political story about war, about ambition, obsession, showing government tensions at the most pressurised time possible as the country faces tremendous change. I turned to Harris after an unsatisfactory attempt to read another novel, it was like gulping water at a time of extreme thirst.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers, also by Robert Harris:-
AN OFFICER AND A SPY
MUNICH
V2

If you like this, try:-
‘Life Class’ by Pat Barker #LIFECLASS1
‘The Warm Hands of Ghosts’ by Katherine Arden
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview PRECIPICE by @Robert_Harris https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-8ub via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Michelle Paver

#BookReview ‘V2’ by @Robert_Harris #WW2 #thriller

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Mostly written during the 2020 virus lockdown, V2 by Robert Harris is a World War Two thriller like no other I have read – and I’ve read a few. I’ve been a Harris fan since the beginning with Fatherland. V2 is different because it tells two stories – the technical development of the V2 rockets, and five days in November 1944 when the lives of a German rocket engineer and British spy are changed by this weapon. Robert HarrisHarris skilfully handles truth, fiction, engineering details and mathematical calculations, adding two fictional characters to create a page turning story. The V2 rocket is placed firmly at the centre of this book. Without it, there would be no story. Originally conceived by scientists as a space project, the V2 was a hateful weapon that inspired fear. Unlike its predecessor the V1 which could be seen and heard before it descended giving time to take cover, the V2 hit without warning. It was also highly unreliable, going off-target, exploding at launch, crashing at sea, killing the people who built it – slave labourers – and launch crews.
The story opens as rocket engineer Dr Graf is trying to concentrate on pre-launch missile checks on the Dutch coast at Scheveningen. He is interrupted by the arrival of a Nazi officer. The rocket is launched. In London, WAAF officer Kay Caton-Walsh emerges from a bathroom wrapped in a towel. Her assignation with her married lover ends when the V2 lands on their building. Harris’s tightly plotted story sees Kay moved from London-based photo reconnaissance, studying launch sites of the rockets, to Mechelen in Belgium. There she and a team of female mathematicians calculate the flight trajectory of the rocket, tracking it backwards to identify the launch site for Allied fighter-bombers to target. As Dr Graf is pressured to launch rockets more frequently than is safe, Kay can’t shake the feeling she is being followed through the strange shadowy streets of Mechelen.
Occasionally the technical details get in the way of the story but what is most fascinating are the portrayals of the German and British leadership at a time when the end of the war seemed to be approaching. Doubts and regrets by some on the German side are balanced by fanatical demands and obsessive management from the SS. In London, key decisions about the defence of the nation are influenced by an extra-marital affair. On both sides, the men at the top making the decisions seem apart from real life. An excellent read, it is a race against time as Kay and her colleagues try to identify the launch locations and Dr Graf is questioned by the Gestapo. I raced through it.
I was fascinated to read the Author’s Note at the end, explaining the inspiration behind the book. In September 2016, Harris read an obituary in The Times of 95-year old Eileen Younghusband, formerly a WAAF officer at Mechelen.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers, also by Robert Harris:-
AN OFFICER AND A SPY
MUNICH

If you like this, try:-
‘The Accident’ by Chris Pavone
‘The Second Midnight’ by Andrew Taylor
‘The Farm’ by Tom Rob Smith

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview V2 by @Robert_Harris https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4Rs via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Munich’ by @Robert___Harris #spies #WW2 #thriller

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Robert Harris is a classy thriller writer at the top of his game. Munich is his re-telling of the September 1938 meetings between British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Both had public, and private, objectives. Chamberlain was a pragmatist; though he sought peace, he was prepared to accept a delay of war to enable our woefully-equipped armed forces to prepare. Hitler wanted all of Europe for Aryans, which meant war. All of this is well-documented. But Harris takes two fictional characters and places them into this real history, splicing their personal stories into the political drama. Robert HarrisHugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann met at Oxford in the early Thirties. In 1938, Legat is a junior private secretary to Chamberlain. Hartmann holds a similar position in the German government; he is also part of the anti-Hitler movement. They two men have not spoken or seen each other since a holiday in Munich with a girlfriend. We do not know why. Everyone in this story faces a personal decision of conscience: whether to be loyal to country, self, and family, or betray them. The costs are different for each person. For some; death. For others; isolation, loss of job, loss of family, loss of self-respect.
Chamberlain and Hitler meet in Munich with Mussolini and Daladier to settle the fate of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. We are party to a fascinating game of chess as the diplomats and civil servants behind each of the leaders struggle to find a way through the opposition’s refusals and disagreements. The subtle tensions and pettiness within the teams, the one-upmanship, the jealousies, the cliques – which anyone who has worked in management will recognise – remind us that these politicians are ordinary people with an extra-ordinary job to do. If they fail, millions will die. Chamberlain is portrayed as a dedicated, workaholic who is desperate to avoid another war less than twenty years after the end of the Great War.
I read this over a weekend, the last pages flew by as Legat and Hartmann sneak around Munich, hiding secret documents and running from the Gestapo. This is a meticulously-researched literary thriller where the tension comes partly from our own knowledge of the outcome and our understanding that, whatever words the British present, Hitler’s mind is made up. Chamberlain will give his ‘peace in our time’ speech. But to find out what happens to the fictional Hugh and Paul, we must read to the end.

Read my reviews of these other thrillers, also by Robert Harris:-
AN OFFICER AND A SPY
V2

If you like this, try:-
‘The Travelers’ by Chris Pavone
‘Darktown’ by Thomas Mullen
‘The Long Drop’ by Denise Mina

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview MUNICH by @Robert___Harris https://wp.me/p5gEM4-357 via @SandraDanby

Great Opening Paragraph 86… ‘The Ghost’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away. I can see that now. I should have said, ‘Rick, I’m sorry, this isn’t for me, I don’t like the sound of it,’ finished my drink and left. But he was such a good storyteller, Rick – I often thought he should have been the writer and I the literary agent – that once he’d started talking there was never any question I wouldn’t listen, and by the time he had finished, I was hooked.”
Robert HarrisFrom ‘The Ghost’ by Robert Harris

Read my reviews of these other thrillers, also by Robert Harris:-
AN OFFICER AND A SPY
MUNICH
V2

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ by Thomas Hardy 
‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’ by John McGahern 
‘Bel Canto’ by Ann Patchett 

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#Books #FirstPara THE GHOST by Robert Harris #books via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1V9

#BookReview ‘An Officer and a Spy’ by @Robert_Harris #thriller

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Robert Harris is a master storyteller. Whether he turns his attention to a volcano exploding, ghost writing the memoirs of a questionable politician, the deathly politics of Rome’s Senate, or the Nazis winning the Second World War, you know you can rely on him to tell a rollicking tale based on sound handling of the historical facts. An Officer and a Spy has so many echoes of today it is uncanny. Robert HarrisThe true story on which this novel is based too place in 1895. Don’t let the historical basis of the story deter you; this is a good old-fashioned spy story complete with forgeries, eavesdropping, surveillance and murder.The spy of the title is Captain Alfred Dreyfus, convicted as a military spy and sent to Devil’s Island. The captain is Georges Picquart, who witnesses the humiliation of Dreyfus in front of a baying mob. Picquart, who after this opening scene is promoted to run the Statistical Section of France’s Ministry of War, discovers evidence that puts Dreyfus’ conviction in doubt. His superiors dismiss his concerns and tell him to forget them. He doesn’t forget, instead undertaking his own investigations which uncover evidence of a new spy. His efforts lead him to a prison cell.
Aghast at the army’s willingness to accept a miscarriage of justice rather than the upset of a retrial, Dreyfus doesn’t stop fighting for justice. “For the first time in my life I carry hatred inside me. It is an almost physical thing, like a concealed knife. Sometimes, when I am alone, I like to take it out and run my thumb along its cold, sharp blade.”
Underlying the spy story is the fact that Dreyfus is a Jew. The anti-semitism in the French army portrayed by Harris is deeply disturbing in the light of rising right-wing extremism in Europe today against minorities.
The cause of Dreyfus is taken up by luminaries of the time, including the novelist Emile Zola, who uses the power of the press in the fight to bring Dreyfus home for re-trial. To Picquart , the army’s refusal to admit its mistake “really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying; it has become a psychosis.”

Read my reviews of these other thrillers, also by Robert Harris:-
MUNICH
V2

If you like this, try:-
‘The Ways of the World’ by Robert Goddard
‘Homeland’ by Clare Francis
‘Dominion’ by CJ Sansom

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview AN OFFICER AND A SPY by @Robert_Harris via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-Cm