He stood on the doorstep and banged the boots together, and segments of dried earth fell from the tread of their soles like typeset from a tray. The noise woke up the dogs in their pen, and they appeared from their kennel in slow procession, the springer spaniel, the black labrador and the cross-bred terrier, stretching and snuffling, and yawning clouds into the cold morning air.
Most published novels are a more intimate form of soap opera. Hines’s The Gamekeeper is more like a handbook, a manual.
The text, undivided by chapters, covers a year of a gamekeeper’s life or, rather, of the work which determines his life. Because this work follows the seasons, when we reach the end we are back at the beginning.
The gamekeeper, aged about 40, is married with two sons. Previously he was a steelworker. (The setting is probably Yorkshire.) Long before the book begins, he has left the steelworks to become one of the Duke’s half dozen gamekeepers. He is independent-minded; he feels good out of doors; he likes dogs and is fascinated by wildlife. His choice was towards a relatively larger freedom.
But the purpose of his life’s work now, with no holidays and less leisure than before, is absurd. He breeds and protects pheasants so that the Duke and six or seven of his associates can shoot 300 birds in a couple of days. Shoot and do nothing else. They do not carry or load their own guns; they do not walk; they do not train their dogs. They aim and pull the triggers. And they are not anachronisms: they are men of very considerable modern power.
To ensure these powerful men their few hours of amusement, the gamekeeper daily throughout the year – and sometimes at night – pursues poachers; intimidates kids bird-nesting or picking flowers; lays traps; ferrets rabbits; kills crows and magpies; shoots foxes; hatches the pheasants in incubators or under broody hens; feeds them absolutely regularly; administers medicine to them; releases them and watches over them so that on the prescribed day they can be driven by men with sticks towards the little line of trigger pullers.
Such is the absurdity of his chosen life. He recognizes the absurdity. Yet he accepts it and in no way allows it to undermine his singlemindedness and efficiency as a gamekeeper. He gives himself over – just as the writing gives itself over – to all the practical tasks at hand:
The gamekeeper removed the spade and placed the ferret at the entrance to the hole. He did not rush around to relieve his confinement, or dash straight down the burrow. He just stood there for a moment, extended his head, snake like, to confirm the judgement of the dog, then calmly walked into the dark. There was nothing extravagant about his movement. Yet he was all the more dangerous for his calm.
Marginally, in the vitality of some of the wild birds or animals around him the gamekeeper deposits his minimal belief that life has another dimension.
While the gamekeeper was on his rounds, and the boys were raking the rearing field, the pheasants inside the first incubator were starting to hatch. Cushioned in their sacs of water, protected by their shells, they had been growing for twenty-three days, and now they filled their shells. They stirred, they had to peck their way out, through the membrane, through the shell.
This is a book that borders on despair. No emotions or feelings are described in it. The near-despair resides in the contrast between the practicality of everything described and the unproductivity of the final outcome. A near-despair with a profoundly proletarian origin.
To assess the book, one must interrogate its meanings. The meaning of its method: in place of the endlessly exchanged opinions and constantly fluctuating feelings of the middle-class novel, it substitutes jobs, causes and effects. Its social meaning: without explicit judgement it shows the difference between the lives of privileged and underprivileged. Its philosophical meaning: it describes a ‘world’ in which the ruling class has succeeded in recycling nature, the game of the woods and moors has been proletarianized, it is fed and housed so as to produce the maximum surplus value – which, in this case, is the number of brace ‘in the bag’.
The book also invents its own meaning which is stronger than any other and which Hines probably calculated less. This is the meaning of the gamekeeper’s solitude and the relation of this solitude to the will-to-live of animals. Here, I suspect, is where Hines’s heart and obsession as a writer reside. His earlier novel A Kestrel for a Knave was also about such a relationship. It is very rare to know and write about animals as well as he does in narrative form. To do so may well require a deep experience of solitude. The only modern writer I would compare Hines with, in this respect, is Louis Pergaud, who was killed in the First World War.
Applying the highest standards and bearing these meanings in mind how should his new book be assessed? The thirty-page description of the grouse shoot on 12 August is unforgettable. So are other shorter passages. But the whole may be flawed. The signs of the flaw are very few: they all imply an uncertainty about the storyteller’s exact position in relation to the story he is telling:
‘What’s up with you this time, John?’
John looked at his stomach, then marked its position with his hand.
‘I’ve got a stomach-ache.’
The gamekeeper levelled a forkful of egg at him. The portion of white, hanging over the prongs, looked as languid as a Dalí watch.
‘Stomach-ache my arse. You’re telling lies again, John…’
The reference to Dalí shatters the integrity of the scene. It belongs neither to narrator nor narrated.
Occasionally he allows an animal a time-sense which is sentimental: ‘The grouse were accustomed to mists, and for them, this was a day just like any other day.’ The comparison with any other day is false. Throughout the book there are maybe a dozen slips like this. Apparently unimportant except that the book concerns extreme technical rigour. But even so unimportant in themselves. Important only as signs of why a strength which should one day be there in a book by this writer is not yet there.
These slips suggest that Hines is not sure of his story. Yet he evidently is master of its content. So if he is not sure, it is probably because he is using the story, treating it as a means, not accepting it as an end. Occasionally he appeals over the edge of the story he is telling.
I can only guess why. I think Hines sees no way out. He lives with a sense of historical hopelessness. ‘Ar, well, there’s nowt we can do about that, George.’ In the animal world situations of ‘hopelessness’ are redeemed by the animals’ unawareness and instinctive and ferocious struggle to survive. In return for his empathy, Hines borrows this redemption from the animal world and it consoles him. But the consolation risks turning the story into a means. Hence his unsureness.
Finally animals lead any close observer into metaphysics.
One day Hines will have to write about why women and men need hope. Whether he then sees that need with full despair or with support, nobody but Barry Hines can decide. But when he writes with complete conviction about his position as storyteller – because the story is sufficient to the truth which he must write – he may well produce a great book. Meanwhile this is an outstanding one, which I read with admiration.
—John Berger, 1975
Never before published, the text above by John Berger, here published in full, is in the Hines Papers at the University of Sheffield’s Special Collections, where it is accompanied by a letter dated 6 November 1975 from John Berger to Barry Hines, in which Berger says:
I read The Gamekeeper with excitement and much admiration. I asked to review it for New Society – and then wrote the enclosed. They cut it in an imbecile way – pruning out all the reasoning, drawing only an opinion. (The reduction of intellectuals to opinion-taps is one of the small ways in which the system ensures its continuity.) So I refused to let them publish it. But I thought you might like to see it – so I enclose it.
Whatever Hines’ thoughts about the review not being published may have been, he replied on 27 November 1975, in a letter now in the John Berger Archive at the British Library: ‘What was warming for me was that at last somebody knew what I was on about. You actually talked in details about the politics of the book.’