Sophie Gee

Animal Farm was the book that he read that made him want to be a writer, and he loved Orwell's writing.

Orwell very much takes Barry Hines' point of view, except that...

which is to say that he's intensely critical of class hierarchies and, you know, British social strata, except that Orwell is writing as a boy who went to Eton, albeit on a scholarship.

He is a public school boy.

And so I think that we cycle through lots of these tropes of public school, boarding school stories in this book, but it's become a kind of dystopian version of it.

So there's the bedroom scene, which is kind of like a dormitory scene,

There are the various dining hall scenes.

There's the sports scene, you know, like compare the football match in the Kestrel for a Knave with a Quidditch match in J.K.

Rowling.

They couldn't be more unlike one another.

Completely.

And actually, that really comes through in the film version where you realise that the goals that they're kicking the ball through don't have net.

So it just trails off into the scrub at the edge of the field.

Incredibly iconic scenes on the soccer pitch.

And then again, the cold showers are a kind of really distorted version of these homoerotic scenes in boarding school stories.

of the boys bathing, of the boys getting in and out of their kit, their gym clothes, and so on and so on.

So it's kind of both.

I really want to introduce us to what I think the other major literary move is that Hines is making in this book.

So he toggles between

this dystopian horrorscape of coal mining life in southwest Yorkshire, the effect of long-term poverty, of bad education, of no job prospects, of the dysfunction of the school system itself.