A Kestrel For a Knave - A Heartbreaking Story

A Kestrel For A Knave - A Heartbreaking Story

Well, when you start reading a book, you expect it to be interesting for you and to keep you reading. This book, A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines is exactly one of those. At first, it was an obligation (which is something I hate - reading books not because you like them but beacuse you are told to do so) to read the book for my English lessons  but when I started reading it, I couldn't help going deeper and deeper into Billy Casper's heartbreaking story.

The story is set in Barnsley, South Yorkshire and it is about a working class schoolboy named Billy Casper. Billy has a lot of problems both at school and at home. He is delivering newspapers in the mornings and his mother and his brother are mostly in the pub drinking. His brother, Jud, is always bullying him, just like almost every single person in Billy Casper's life. He is only interested in his kestrel, which he names "Kes". The story includes flashbacks in which we could see details about his capturing the kestrel and the details about Caspers' family. 

No caring at home, no love, sometimes no food; yes, basically nothing important in his life; the story of Billy Casper is really heartbreaking. Living with a bullying brother who steals his bike in the morning, Billy Casper is within the unfair arms of his fate because of the fact that he has to be a "survivor" in this unfair world. He is even thought to be an idiotic troublemaker at school. However, as we learn more about him and his story of training a wild kestrel, we see that he could do good at school too. So the story of Billy Casper is a very good example of how becoming passionate about something can change your life in a tough world.

The dialogues in the book are written in dialect but this makes the story even more realistic even though it takes time to get used to the language use in the dialogues. This book was also made into a movie (Kes) in 1969, the year after the book was published. Although the movie is also a great success I don't think that it can catch up with the book's great depictions. As Imogen Carter states in his review of the book  "Although undoubtedly a masterpiece, Loach's film can't match the novel's dazzling natural imagery... A dew drop becomes "the tiny egg of a mythical bird", a young lad rides his tricycle "his legs whirring like bees' wings". Hines's descriptions throughout highlight Billy's love of the natural world and the contrasting harshness of his home life." I haven't really made a list of "my all time favorite books" but if one day I decide to make one A Kestrel For A Knave is definitely going to be somewhere close to the top.