Rapid Reviews: Cutting Edge by John Harvey

I'd previously read just one novel by John Harvey and that was 2014's Darkness, Darkness - the final novel in the 13-book series featuring his hero Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick. That novel concerned a cold case mystery left unresolved from the days of the miners strike of 1984/'85. It was OK, a readable affair, but I felt I needed to have experienced Resnick before to have perhaps fully appreciated it. 

So I went back to 1991 and book 3 in the series, Cutting Edge which I recommend. 

A savage assault with a scalpel leaves Dr Tim Fletcher's body badly slashed in a deserted hospital walkway - the first victim in a series of brutal assaults on NHS staff in Nottingham. As panic grips the city, it's up to DI Resnick to find the killer. His chief suspect appears to be an over confident, sexually abusive medical student who had previously dated Fletcher's girlfriend - but is he and his team letting their dislike for the man clouding their judgement? Faced with a mass of clues that lead nowhere, Resnick is confronted by a face from his own past as he finds himself pushed to breaking point.

I really enjoyed this one and have come to like Resnick, the sandwich eating, multiple cat owning and jazz loving troubled 'tec. So much so that I went on to ioffer and bought a DVD of the BBC's sole attempts at adapting Harvey's novels (Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment, books 1 and 2 in the series) starring Tom Wilkinson in the role and dating back to the early '90s.

Cutting Edge is an engrossing read full of lovely little details that play out on the periphery of the main crime; there's a handful of other investigations Resnick's team are currently looking into, and then there's their home lives too with one of his detective constable's struggling with a wife suffering from post natal depression, and Resnick himself finding himself putting up a drunken down and out acquaintance based on their mutual love for jazz. In tackling these various strands Harvey's style is quite fragmentary at times but it's never alienating or difficult in its approach. Without giving anything away, a turning point of the plot concerns a medical phenomena that is rarely spoken of and quite terrifying to consider!

But if reading Cutting Edge isn't appealing to you, you could always try listening to this enjoyable full-cast adaptation for Radio 4 dating back to 1996 and starring Tom Georgeson as Resnick, a young John Simm as Tim Fletcher and  Gillian Bevan who plays staff nurse Sarah Leonard and also provides the chanteuse torch song style vocals to the play's theme tune.

Halloween Treat : The Stone Tape, Radio 4 10pm

As discussed in yesterday's post, Radio 4 will remake Nigel Kneale's classic 1972 ghost story The Stone Tape tonight at 10pm to mark Halloween.

Directed by Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy) and written by Matthew Graham (Life on Mars) the play stars the divine Romola Garai as Jill, the role taken by Jane Asher in the original, with Asher providing a cameo as Jill's mother.

Also in the cast and recording the piece at 4 Princelet Street, Spitalfields are Julian Rhind-Tutt, Julian Barratt and Dean Andrews

And if you're still in the mood for chills after that, stick around on Radio 4 immediately after for their adaptation of the 1991 novel by Anita Sullivan Ring, which was subsequently made into a classic cult film in 1998 and remade in Hollywood later. It stars Torchwood's Eve Myles and Naoki Mori, as well as reuniting Myles with her Broadchurch and Baker Boys co-star Matthew Gravelle. Then you can switch to 4 Extra for their remake of The Exorcist with Robert Glenister.

Queens Of The Coal Age

BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Play strand premieres actress Maxine Peake's play Queens Of The Coal Age, a dramatisation of the 1993 occupation of the Parkside Colliery, Newton-le-Willows (just up the road from me) by four miners wives - including NUM chairman Arthur Scargill's wife, Anne - in an attempt to save pits from closure.

Peake will also star in the play as Anne Scargill, alongside Coronation Street's Julie Hesmondhalgh and Early Doors' Lorraine Cheshire.

All the information on the play - broadcast at 2:15 tomorrow (Mon 4th Nov), plus archive footage featuring the wives from 1993 and footage of Peake et al going underground at Kellingley Colliery to experience a working mine, can be found HERE

Dangerous Visions : The Sleeper

Well, if The Testament Of Jessie Lamb was one of (if not the overall) highlights of Radio 4's JG Ballard inspired season of dystopian dramas, then I have to say, with regret, that The Sleeper was one of its biggest disappointments.

As the above theatre bill suggests, The Sleeper originally made its debut in 2011, performed by The Welsh National Opera. Therefore its origins lie in the genre of staged opera. For the Dangerous Visions season the playwright of that operatic piece, Michael Symmons Roberts, has bravely stepped up to the plate and adapted his work for a different medium - the radio. And, in doing, so he gained the talent of such esteemed and experienced performers as Maxine Peake, Jason Done and Kevin Doyle alongside several up and coming young actors too, such as Matthew Beard and Sarah Churm. Fair play to him. But in making the transition to radio drama something has got lost in translation and as such, it just didn't work for me. What was it, an opera? A theatre piece? Or a radio drama? I have to say an hour later, I was still none the wiser.

Snatches of pretty unintelligible but pretty beautiful song, plus half song speech and lullabies litter the piece, as do occasional (and slightly cringey in this medium) rhyming couplets which betray the play's origins. They seem at odds with an addition Symmons Roberts admittedly specifically made to lend the piece to radio more; an intimate dramatic two hander between Done and Peake playing a cabinet minister and policewoman respectively. It's those bits that worked (helped no doubt by the peerless acting) the rest - those parts most faithful to the opera - worked considerably less so here.

The premise of The Sleeper is nonetheless an interesting one and definitely an insomniac's nightmare. In the near future the population have lost the ability to sleep. The government of the day turn it to their advantage and bombard the nation with notions of wakefulness leading to happiness and, in truth, more productivity. Meanwhile the more twisted elements of society illegally trade on what they once had, creating pornographic 'slumber movies' (this alternate realities answer to the snuff movie) with actors impersonating sleep and adopting nightdress for kicks. Somewhere amongst all this is our innocence; a group of teenage runaways who endeavour ro find a better way of life and keep the true flame of 'sleep' going. They begin a cult devoted to it, to respecting and paying homage to all the intricacies that went hand in hand with this long lost act of sleep - night gowns, pyjamas and lullabies. Except one of their group can do much more than pay homage, one of them can actually still sleep and with that revelation the group go on the run as she constantly faces threats of curiousity, study, photography and molestation from those who cannot. 

Like a good deal of dystopic fiction and its season stablemate Jessie Lamb, The Sleeper presents us with a vision of a near future in which society is without something and ultimately at risk. Likewise, it does not dwell on the reason why they are without sleep, it merely concerns itself with the effects of a world without, with Symmons Roberts tinkering for radio briefly drafting a deeper conspiracy stemming from the heart of Whitehall, with the notion of the double meaning of 'sleeper' (sleeper agent/mole within the group) onto the drama. It's a thought provoking conceit but its hampered in the realisation, falling between the stools of its original medium and the adapted version to become a weird amalgam of earnest and faintly laughable 'Yoof Theatre' piece and serious fantastical adult drama.

It's a great shame, but The Sleeper was a snooze.

Dangerous Visions : The Testament Of Jessie Lamb

Of all the recent plays in the Radio 4 season of dystopia, it was perhaps Jane Rogers adaptation of her own Man Booker Prize nominated and Arthur C Clarke prize winning novel, The Testament Of Jessie Lamb that impressed me the most.

There seems to be a vogue for teenage centric dystopia of late what with The Hunger Games franchise dominating both the literary and film world just now, but Jessie Lamb is a much more thoughtful and personal vision of a realistic future that could worryingly just be a couple of months away. A future where every woman on the planet had been infected by an airborne contaminant which causes Maternal Death Syndrome (MDS) across between AIDS and CJD which strikes in pregnancy, when the mother's immune system is low. The result is death in all pregnancies and the dystopian possibility of a world without children and sex. Scientists begin to place the mothers into irrevocable comas ('Sleeping Beauties') but as time goes on they discover the possibility of placing immunized pre-MDS frozen embryos into willing sacrificial young women between the ages of 16-18. Step forward Jessie Lamb, a previously unaffected ordinary teenage girl from Yorkshire. At the start of each instalment we meet Jessie, held hostage in a small room, bike lock around her ankles, writing her diary to explain her beliefs and her reasoning for selflessly giving her life; the testament of the title. What follows from there is essentially a flashback explaining how she came to that decision and just who it is trying to keep her from it.  

So, as you can gather this is not the fantasy world of Katniss Everdeen. The Testament Of Jessie Lamb packs a strong emotional punch that is much more akin to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and the adaptation - broadcast in bitesize 15 minute chunks daily and a full 75 minute omnibus yesterday - was a sombre, intelligent and heart wrenching piece of drama that provoked a good deal of introspection and thought.

Holliday Grainger plays Jessie. Grainger is perhaps most famous now for the recent big screen adaptation of Great Expectations and for her role as the infamous Lucrezia Borgia in The Borgias. But for me, I will always remember her as the little child actress who played Colin Buchanan's daughter in the 90s comedy drama Preston Front. As such, it's pleasing to see she still has time to return to smaller more intimate productions here in the UK. Grainger, as a former child star, is also someone who perpetually plays younger than her years. She's 25 now, but plays the 16 year old Jessie with absolute conviction and absolute believability. It's an utterly affecting performance that isn't at all hampered by being unseen like many radio drama characterisations can be. Both in her first person narrative and in the scenes where she acts alongside other cast members (who perform equally capably) she is 100% truthful and impressive and the production triumphs as a result.

Jane Rogers, both here and in the original novel, creates a world in which the incurable disease and the prospect of  a dystopia provokes several courses of action and amidst the hysteria. As such, it is a clever way of exploring all potential likely points of view and all too realistic life choices. Jessie is, as I say, largely unaffected until she is confronted by three situations that occur close to home, thus opening her eyes to events and setting her on course for her eventual decision. One is when her mum's friend, her favourite 'aunt' who has always wanted a child of her own, slides into depression and increasingly erratic and dangerous behaviour as a result of a world in which MDS is a reality. The other is when her best friend is raped by a gang of angry boys who believe that the disease is proof that women are dirty and to be despised and who know full well that sex in this new world can lead to a woman's death. The last is when her father, a geneticist involved in finding a cure walks out on her and her mother. Each strand explores reactions to the world the characters now live in; the aunt willingly goes off the (super advanced) Pill and becomes pregnant, thereby committing suicide, whilst the raped friend becomes an activist, understandably blaming men and with much to provoke the thoughts of the audience bemoans the history of women as the constant injured party. Meanwhile other friends of Jessie join animal rights terrorist cells, attacking the research labs, or simply strive to opt out completely. But naturally most important of all is Jessie's course of action - her father's brief departure ignites a stroppy and perhaps originally ill thought out desire to catch his attention, which she does by volunteering to become a 'sleeping beauty' herself. Ultimately her decision matures into a believable and well reasoned desire to sacrifice her own life to save the future of humanity.

Rogers challenges the audience (or the reader) throughout with some interesting raised questions, primarily around the notion of sacrifice. For example, how different is the sacrifice a 16 year old 'sleeping beauty' will make to that of a 16 year old conscript going off to war? When society allows and accepts the notion of a human sacrifice, what then? Would you let your daughter die to save the human race? 

It also looks with great intelligence and depth at just how old you have to be to make a conscious decision for your own life. There's much exploration on how adults infantilise youth; Jessie argues at one point how her parents may have been responsible for her life but that they should accept what she wishes to do with it, meanwhile her friend Lisa, who opts out of society by setting up a home in the sticks only for teens, puts it very succinctly when she says "They make us think that if you decide to do something and take responsibility for your decision, you'll have a really tough time. But it's not true. What's hard is being in someone else's power"

The questions raised in this dystopic vision are chillingly all too real and close to home which makes it much more effective if you ask me. There's no massive futuristic apocalypse, just the slowly shifting face of a familiar world soberly revealing how grave concerns and our own failings are always just around the corner.

In the end Jessie's decision may well be both infuriating and admirable but her testament is ultimately clear, unequivocal and poignantly brave.

You can listen to The Testament Of Jessie Lamb for the next five days on the Radio 4 Extra site here 

The production stills of the cast that accompany this blog are taken from that site 

Meanwhile Jane Rogers had written about the challenge of adapting her novel for radio at the BBC Writersroom blog here

Jagger In Jail

Jagger In Jail was a play by Nigel Smith broadcast on Radio 4 last week as part of their History Plays series.

Starring Kayvan Novak (Facejacker) as Mick Jagger and Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners) as Jim.

It is 1967, the summer of love and Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones, is in prison starting his three month sentence for drug possession. His trial - and particularly his sentence - has both scandalised and split public opinion.

Jagger in Jail imagines the conversation that might have taken place between Mick and a cellmate, Jim, during what turned out to be his only night behind bars. As the night passes Jim and Mick find that while they have a fair bit in common, society's plans for them could not be more different. And Jim isn't too happy about it....

It was a very interesting half hour play, well written and touching upon a lot of interesting ideas about the 60s and the state of the country at the time, specifically how opportunities were available for some and not for others. It transpires that Mick and Jim had gone to school together yet their lives could not be more different. Mick Jagger feels the counter revolution has worked, but lives in fear of losing his relevancy - something which may well have been playing on his mind with the notion of three months away from the limelight - and the world moving on. He even complains at the futility of playing live to audiences screaming too loud to hear. Whilst Jim already understandably feels left behind; he's due out the following morning, but after two and a half years inside, prison has become his home now. He knows the world has moved on and what captures the imagination of those outside, such as The Stones, seem facile compared to him. He's bitter. The England he sees now disgusts, terrifies and alienates him, and there's some great attacks about the already burgeoning mythology of 'Swinging London' and the horrors of jerry built new towns like Redditch, with their tower blocks and roads...

''Roads, we're always building bloody roads. It's never worth the journey when you get there. There'll just be another municipal flower bed, a mural and a supermarket'' - Jim

Jim can't understand how the rest of Europe seems to have progressed correctly, especially Germany, rebuilt after WWII whilst his own country still bears the marks of bomb damage between the new builds. When the topic turns to Scandinavia - the ultimate chic of architecture and design - Jagger points out...

"Helskinki doesn't have The King's Road''

To which Jim counters...

"Most of this country hasn't got The King's Road! Redditch certainly ain't. There's about 200 of you who've got it...the rest of us are just looking on" 

It's a two hander play and for my money, Harrison owns it. He nails his character and breaks free of the radio trappings to suggest movement in his performance, something that is sadly lacking from Novak; you can almost see him reading his script. Primarily an impressionist, it is perhaps telling that he is concentrating more on imitating Mick Jagger's voice rather than giving a performance.

A great social commentary, satisfying with hindsight too Jagger In Jail, for its setting alone, is often reminiscent of an episode of Porridge or Simon Gray's play Cell Mates.