A Kestrel for a Knave

A Kestrel for a Knave is brilliant.  It’s another of those books that I’ve been meaning to read forever and have just had such trouble getting my hands on.  It’s always checked out of the local library and I can see why.  Barry Hines’s little novel is wonderful and, yes, it probably owes a lot of its popularity to Ken Loach and the fact that Kes was based on it.  But that doesn’t diminish just how good it is.

One of the things I loved about A Kestrel for a Knave is the way the story is told.  Essentially we follow Billy Caspar throughout the course of one day- the day Kes dies (spoiler, I guess).  A good half of the story is told in flashback and it works so well.   This makes the book bloody succinct.  As soon as Kes is found, we know that Billy succeeds in training her without Hines showing us the months of this arduous process.  It’s a nice way of letting us experience all of Kes’s lifetime without actually having to experience the boring bits of Kes’s life.  There’s an immediacy between Billy finding her and her death that would be lost if the flashback format wasn’t used or, indeed, if the book were split into chapters.

The story is simple and well told and so readable, but the best bit of the book is Billy’s passion.  One scene is set in an English lesson and while the boys are being taught the difference between fact and fiction, Billy recounts how he has trained Kes to the class and to Mr Farthing- literally the only good teacher in Billy’s entire school.  What could have been a dry procedural bit of text is transformed by Billy’s passion for what he is talking about.  It’s almost tangible.  And it helps so much that he is being egged on by Mr Farthing.  It is the only time in the entire book that Billy is encouraged to talk, or encouraged full stop.  It’s the moment of the book that gives the rest of it poignancy.   While Billy is being written off as useless by his mother, the other teachers and the man from the youth employment agency, we are shown that he has the potential to do so much more.

Another thing I loved about this book was the accents.  I almost always enjoy accents.  Coming from Kent, I’m not used to accents that you have to write differently to how words are spelled.  Maybe there’d be a few dropped ts or hs, but it’s not like the Yorkshire of A Kestrel for a Knave.  And while I’m not a hundred percent convinced of the veracity of these accents; I know a fair few people from various parts of Yorkshire and I’ve never heard even one of them use the word “thee” in quite the way the Caspar family do, I still love it. 

So, there it is; A Kestrel for a Knave.  Essentially, it’s a very readable and surprisingly interesting tale of it being grim up north unless you have a nice bird (and even then it not really being that nice)- that kind of working class despair that  we’re all going to become well acquainted with under Tory rule.  Also, there’s a completely inappropriate Thalidomide joke that took me by surprise, so that was a nice bonus. 

I am now on to book 400- The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing.  

Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared)

I like Kafka.  It’s been ages since I read anything by him, but I remember really enjoying The Trial, more so than I expected from a book that’s freely hailed as an absolute classic.  So I was looking forward to Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) and I ended up being just a little bit underwhelmed by the whole thing.    

The book tells the story, such as it is, of fifteen year old Karl Rossman, a German boy sent to America after impregnating a much older housemaid.   The novel follows Karl as he tries, and ultimately fails to settle into various roles in New York.  Each chapter acts almost as a short story, a new chapter (if you will) in the tale of Karl’s American experience that has only limited connections to the previous ones.  There is nothing wrong with the narrative style, but there are a couple of issues with the book itself, as whole. 

First of all, this isn’t a whole.  Amerika is an uncompleted book and it’s very obvious- not in the least because it ends with a section entitled “fragments” which are essentially a few pages of snippets showing us where the plot was likely to go.  Uncompleted books are always of a challenge; it’s either a case of you can still see the bigger picture and are left a bit unfulfilled because it’s not there, or all you’re left with is a hundred odd pages of directionless build up and character building that goes precisely nowhere.  Amerika falls into the latter of the two categories.  Karl spends his time milling about between people and circumstances and nothing ever quite pays off. 

On top of this, Amerika was Kafka’s first novel.  At least, it was the first he started writing, even if it was far from the first of his work published.   First novels, like unfinished ones, can be a challenge.  They tend to be rougher around the edges, tipped with potential that is shown more clearly in later books.  That’s true of Amerika too.  Karl is as effectual as any of Kafka’s later characters- as in, not all.  He drifts through his encounters in America being acted upon and rarely acting except as a re-action to a change in his circumstance.  He does not drive the narrative.  This is something that Kafka is famous for, characters being acted upon by unknown forces for unknown reasons, but Karl isn’t acted upon by unknown forces.   He meets the people who drive his destiny and, because these people are knowable, Karl seems less of a victim and more of a wet blanket. 

I don’t want to be so negative about this book; there are some moments that are pure Kafka- Karl has to leave the house of the uncle he was staying with in part because a letter is delivered late.  But… it’s undeveloped.  The letter is delivered late because a man decides to do so.  The feeling of the pointless and unbeatable bureaucracy of The Trial is missing.  It’s not America that Karl cannot fight, it’s the Americans.

My next book is A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines.