Sophie Gee

The other thing I want to say, and I can't believe we've got this far in the episode without saying it,

is that this is not the first Kestrel to have appeared on The Secret Life of Books because the other name for a Kestrel, the sort of common name for a Kestrel, was a Windhover.

And Gerard Manley Hopkins' great sonnet, The Windhover, which is an ode to freedom, it's an ode to faith, it's an ode to joy, and it's an ode actually to a certain resistance or rebellion against the sense of entrapment

in a kind of religious hierarchy in England, is just such an unbelievable description of a bird in flight.

So listen to our episode on Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Windhover if you are interested in knowing more about this literary tradition of falconry.

So we need to take a break, and then we need people to get a real feel for this book because there's so much going on.

There's the unbelievable nature writing.

There's the...

grim but totally convincing school scenes.

And then there's the family drama that's going on around the edges.

And just to give a smoking quill... Well, Dan, I was just going to say, I think you've got yourself a smoking quill there.

Yes.

And you're totally right.

And that's a great smoking quill because he's very clearly comparing the mines and the pits and the conditions of working class coal mining England to internment camps and specifically the Holocaust.

He is doing that.

You're right.

He's also making it really obvious that he is savagely tearing down the tropes and the ideas of boarding school stories, which he would have inherited and he would have known about.

I mean,

One of Barry Hines' major literary influences was George Orwell.

He was very indebted to Orwell.