The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Look away, Jodie Comer
Prima Facie, the West End play in which Comer starred, has become a novel – an early contender for the worst of the year
PRIMA FACIE by Suzie Miller
336pp, Hutchinson Heinemann, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514),
RRP £16.99, ebook £8.99
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If you’ve heard of Suzie Miller, it’s probably thanks to Jodie Comer. In 2022, the actress transformed Miller’s onewoman play Prima Facie into a West End sensation with her incendiary turn as Tessa Ensler, a defence barrister who has a rapierlike skill for pulling apart witness testimonies in sexual-assault cases, but finds herself in the witness box after she accuses a colleague of rape. The play hit a raw nerve in exposing a legal system structurally skewered against the emotionally non-linear nature of women’s testimony. (Only three per cent of reported rapes result in a prosecution.) But it was also, some critics whispered, the sort of morally grandstanding piece that impelled audiences to give standing ovations out of solidarity with its arguments, rather than in critical admiration.
Swept up by the former and unalert to the latter, Miller has now turned an arresting but overpraised play into a truly abysmal novel. A working-class girl from Liverpool turned supreme legal operator, our heroine excels at blindsiding her female complainants by wresting away control of their lived experience. You were drunk, Tessa insinuates. You invited him back. You’d bought fancy underwear.
Nonetheless, while she knows that in the gladiatorial arena of a law court, the truth is only the “best version” of any story, she also has an unshakeable faith in the law’s ability to secure justice. So, when handsome Julian invites her for dinner, and they get plastered on sake, and she invites him back, only to find herself in the middle of the night with one hand over her mouth, another grabbing her wrists, and the rest of his body on top of her, she remains convinced that the law will protect her if she simply tells the truth.
On stage, Comer’s performance was nuanced and particularised, and
Ensler felt, for a while, like a fully-rounded personality.
But even Comer couldn’t do much with the play’s second half, which abandoned dramatic momentum and plausibility for a rant, however fair, against the bias of a legal system that prioritises precision-ofrecall above all else. In Miller’s novel, the characterisation of Tessa has no nuance whatsoever. A generous reader might suggest that Miller wants us to read her as an archetype of the wronged woman, cast in a universal parable about the institutionalised supremacy of the patriarchy. But I suspect it’s merely because Miller can’t write.
For instance, we’re told too many times that Ensler feels “vulnerable”. Mixed metaphors abound: one minute, a floundering witness suffers “the break in his serve”; the next, “he digs himself in further”. So do banal aphorisms: “A great barrister, one who leaves no stone unturned… can make all the difference.” That Ensler feels an outsider in this elite world is repeatedly rammed home as an axiomatic consequence of the fact she once was poor and hails from Liverpool. She refers to herself as being a “Cambridge University scholarship girl” when, with the occasional specific exception, there’s no such thing.
Prima Facie was a swift 100-minute play. Miller has set herself the ambitious task of turning it into a 300-page novel without adding a smidgen of extra plot. Nor does she bother to address the narrative bodge in the second half, in which Ensler lets rip in court – something that would never be allowed in a British courtroom. Instead, we’re given a lot of extra repetition and needless detail. Only occasionally does the novel expose a stuffy detail to readers who haven’t been called to the bar: in some families, for instance, wigs are passed down through the generations, which is fascinating and queasily symbolic at once.
Miller, herself a former lawyer, has a good understanding of the shifting sands around consent, whereby women who knew they didn’t want sex found themselves forced into having it while, within the implacable machinery of the legal system, retaining almost no means of proving they were forced. Something, it’s true, must change. But is that any excuse for a novel this ineptly executed? Your Honour, I rest my case.