Kes: From Page to Screen

Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave follows Billy Casper, a school leaver living on the edge of poverty in an unidentified northern English town. Bullied mercilessly by his brother and his classmates, Billy finds new purpose and hope through his relationship with a kestrel, Kes.

While Hines’s written text and Loach’s cinematic version of Kes are often seen to be at odds, our analysis of these small but significant changes from novel to film suggests that there exists instead a continuum between them. For instance, although Leigh claims that the ‘dominant tone of comedy’ in the scene in Gryce’s office arises not from Hines’s writing but from the ‘casting and performances’, it is, rather, that these filmic elements themselves are inspired by and respond to the novel. Making visual the boys’ reactions, of laughter or tears, to Gryce’s behaviour reinforces the comedy as it already exists.

In the interview scene, changes in the process of adaptation bring out the novel’s effects in filmic ways, emphasising Billy’s withdrawal in the face of authority. Thus his deliberate under-selling of himself, saying he has ‘a job to read and write’ when we have witnessed his writing the terms of falconry on the blackboard in class, is turned in the film into part of a dialogue, since the interviewer’s spoken response is to consign Billy to manual labour.

It is not only the filmic quality of Hines’s writing, and the often verbatim retention of his dialogue in the screenplay, that reveals his central role in the film’s construction. We can also see in Kes the origins of quite specific topics that preoccupied the author in his later, less well-known work, including those that formed the basis of the subsequent three collaborations with Loach. Most strikingly, the figure of the kestrel, despite the insistence on its entirely realist form by both writer and director, shares the same contradictory symbolism as the pheasants which are reared to be shot in Loach’s film of Hines’s novel The Gamekeeper (1980). In the latter, the birds embody the powerlessness of the working-class characters but also constitute the material of their work. Billy’s kestrel too has a double signification, that of offering a way out of his circumstances, embodying ‘freedom and spiritual affirmation’, yet the bird also echoes his own status, as wild and untameable but, if caught, subject to domestication and training. As Frank Collins points out, Kes is killed by Jud, who meant simply to turn her loose, because she ‘tries to resist’, giving an ominous sense of fatality to the film’s ambiguous ending.

As well as these narrative continuities, Hines’s dramas about young people, including Speech Day, Shooting Stars (1990) and the never-filmed Fun City, include directions for similar cinematic effects to those in Kes. These include the punctuation of the action by the jarring sounds of ‘time discipline’, such as alarm clocks and school or factory bells, as well as the ironic use of non-simultaneous sound in the form of school songs and hymns whose lyrics are heard before we see the action that contradicts them.

This case study of A Kestrel for a Knave’s becoming Kes, using the evidence of both archival material and the specific detail of how Hines’s words make the journey to the screen, does not deny the crucial role of director, producer and cinematographer in the film’s genesis. Rather, it allows us to restore an awareness of the animating role of Hines’s novel to the film, and equally the already filmic nature of his writing. For these reasons, Derek Malcolm’s verdict on Loach, that he is ‘a very good film-maker . . . when encouraged by good writers such as Barry Hines’, accords perfectly with our own.