Barry Hines Kes, Threads and Beyond

Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), adapted for the screen as Kes, is one of the best-known British novels of the post-war period, and his screenplay for the television drama Threads is a central and compelling Cold War-era vision of nuclear attack. Yet, Hines published a further eight novels and nine screenplays between the late 1960s and late 1990s, as well as writing eleven other works which remain unpublished and unperformed. This study examines the entirety of Hines's work, showing the great variety of aesthetic forms he used to represent the lives of working-class people in Britain through the permissive 1960s, hopeful 1970s and Thatcherite 1980s, into the post-industrial conclusion of the twentieth century. The authors argue that most of his works deserve equal standing with Kes and Threads. Particular highlights include the novel and screenplay Looks and Smiles (1981), an art-cinematic treatment of youth unemployment in Sheffield; the 1983 novel Unfinished Business, about a married woman's return to university; his final novel Elvis Over England (1998), about a musical pilgrimage taken by a redundant steelworker; and a trilogy of plays about the Miners' Strike that were never published or performed. Besides demonstrating his flair for poetic realism, Hines's authorial contributions to the films of his novels show the profoundly collaborative nature of these works. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in contemporary literature, film and television studies, as well as any eader with an interest in Hines' writing. It includes a foreword by Tony Garnett, the distinguished producer of many films, including Kes itself.