Greenmantle by John Buchan
Artist...............: John Buchan
Album................: Greenmantle [2-part BBC Radio Drama]
Year.................: 2005
Genre................: Radio Drama
Comment..............: Part 1 was broadcast on July 3, 2005, but the airing of Part 2 scheduled for July 10 was cancelled due to the terrorist attack on London July 7. Part 1 was re-broadcast on Dec 26, 2005 followed by Part 2 on the next day.
Type.................: internet radio recording
Duration.............: 2 hrs.
Number of Parts......: 2
Audio Format.........: MP3
Bitrate..............: 56 (CBR)
Hz...................: 22,050
Channels.............: Stereo
Greenmantle is the sequel to The 39 Steps but there is much more to this book than the previous one. Set in 1915, Richard Hannay is recuperating at Furling country house in Hampshire after having been wounded at the Battle of Loos. He is expecting to be given command of his own battalion but when he gets a telegram from the Foreign Office, he ends up working undercover with others.
Sir Walter Bullivant has already lost his son on the same mission. When Harry Bullivant died he had 10 bullets in him but managed to say one word ‘Kasredin’ before he died. With just a few more clues Richard Hannay takes up the trail.
Going undercover as a South African Boer who hates the English, Hannay pretends to be on the side of the Germans, who are planning to stir up revolt amongst the Muslims. He is aided by three others, Peter Pienaar a South African, John S. Blenkiron an American and Sandy Arbuthnot a Scot.
First published in 1916, this book has a much more convoluted storyline than The 39 Steps. As you would expect from an adventure/spy novel which is almost 100 years old, it contains rampant racism, homophobia and sexism but this doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the story.
As you can imagine, Greenmantle was a huge bestseller during the First World War.
Given the state of the world today, nothing much seems to have changed in all that time, except we aren’t fighting Germans now.
The writer Allan Massie said ‘Maybe Greenmantle should be a set-book for our security services.’
It could only help – they need something.
An enjoyable adventure story.
Replies
Thank You Bob for the Hi-fi encode of my Lo-fi post. LOL. I looked for a better encode and couldn't find it so I posted it counting on the fact that the odds were fairly good that you had a lot better. Merry Christmas and Happy new Year.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rick
As an aside, this sentence is not exactly correct, at least according to a number of reputable UK news outlets:
the airing of Part 2 scheduled for July 10 was cancelled due to the terrorist attack on London July 7.
It seems that the cancellation was due to political correctness rather than a respect fopr the dead and injured.
Art in the aftermath
Channel Five was wrong to pull a drama about a suicide bomber
Mark Lawson
Saturday July 16, 2005
Guardian
After 9/11 there was much discussion about the Hollywood blockbuster of that summer having been about a surprise attack on America: Pearl Harbor. The British equivalent brings its own examples of bleakly neat releases. This summer's big US import is a film in which people flee cities on foot after explosions beneath the earth: War of the Worlds. And the main British movie opening that week was The Descent, about being confined underground. This would now be impossible to watch with simple enjoyment even without the fact that the bomb on the number 30 bus ripped in half an advertisement for it.
Still more chilling, July 7 was the official publication date of Incendiary, a novel by Chris Cleave which imagines an al-Qaida attack on a football stadium in the capital.
Such collisions of fiction and reality are mainly accidental, although Cleave's plot was presumably encouraged by the frequent insistence of the head of the Metropolitan police that such an event was inevitable. Steven Spielberg also deserves some credit for prescience. He remade War of the Worlds to examine US vulnerability after 9/11, and the arrival in Britain of the same trend of terrorism happens to overlap with its release.
No one, though, has suggested that War of the Worlds or Deeper should be pulled. One pundit said Incendiary must be pulped, although several reviewers suggested the book is more deserving of an audience than before 7/7, when it could have been dismissed as a sick fantasy. It is still on sale, although advertising has been withdrawn.
Another group of fictions, however, found themselves categorised as unacceptable in the aftermath of July 7. The season finale of CSI: Crime Investigation, in which a terrorist blows himself up, was pulled by Channel Five on Tuesday after the terrorists proved to be suicide bombers. And last Saturday Radio 4 postponed transmission of John Buchan's Greenmantle, in which an Islamic army declares jihad against England.
Such deletions from the schedules are common in broadcasting. Airplane and Airport were dropped after Lockerbie and a BBC1 thriller about child abduction was postponed during the Soham case. But I strongly feel that the decision to cancel CSI last week was the wrong one.
At one point in the drama detectives pick through debris left by a suicide bombing, making a breakthrough by discovering a tiny body part. Watching a preview DVD last weekend, I inevitably thought of the investigation taking place in and under London. But this connection seemed to me not inappropriate or distracting but revealing.
The human mind has a protective tendency to imagine bomb victims as intact bodies slightly battered or burned. Published factual images, for reasons of dignity and decency, connive in this idea. Only watching CSI did I understand what the victims and the emergency services had experienced.
The test on these occasions should be whether the entertainment cheapens or deepens the experience of the terrible event. For example, comedy news shows are rightly dropped after atrocities as their premise is making jokes from the headlines.
But Greenmantle is probably a more interesting story now than it was 10 days ago, and a mature audience could have appreciated it as a historical commentary on the British attitude to Islam. If Greenmantle, the CSI episode and Incendiary had been commissioned now, they could be accused of opportunism. But all art is changed by the context in which it is seen, and each of these is strengthened not weakened by the recent reality their audience has seen.