Kate's Story

I honestly and truly believe this book to be Billy Hopkins' abiding masterpiece. This is not to denigrate his debut novel, OUR KID, in any way - or the rest of that hilarious sequence, culminating in the recently-published ANYTHING GOES. But whereas the appeal of those other four books is of an immediately accessible kind for all and sundry - and quite rightly and understandably so! - KATE'S STORY is the sort of book (e.g. MRS DALLOWAY, THE GREAT GATSBY, TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT, THE GRAPES OF WRATH) that could not possibly have been written before its creator had succeeded in cutting his writer's teeth elsewhere. It's so much softer in tone, for one thing, and - given the really serious, life-threatening vicissitudes in fin-de-siecle downtown Manchester UK that must be faced on a daily basis by the narrator and her loved ones (it opens in 1897, for instance, with an 11-year old girl visiting her father's place of work, the cause of his premature and impending death) - its humour too is necessarily of the un-guffawing kind. But there's something else here too - a very particular something that, for me at least, marks KATE'S STORY out as the work of a master storyteller second to none. John Braine used to say that you can't really call yourself a novelist until you've got three books under your belt. But what I think is worthy of even greater respect is when a male author so contrives things that he tells his tale with the voice of a woman. Which is what Billy Hopkins does in Kate's Story - he adopts the persona of his own mother. And though other authors have contrived a similar technique in the past (Anthony Burgess with ONE HAND CLAPPING;Charles Portis with his superb TRUE GRIT; David Storey with FLIGHT INTO CAMDEN; Joe Orton with a right load of old rubbish that I can't even remember the title of - the tart!), Billy Hopkins brings to the narrative of KATE'S STORY such thoroughgoing decency and unwavering sensitivity that (all uncouth - indeed, sham masculinity being set aside to that purpose) womankind as a whole will feel immediately at ease in his presence. Heck! she'll forget her narrator's a man! And this, to my mind (together with the narrative location amongst the early twentieth century urban poor),makes KATE'S STORY by Billy Hopkins the most interesting and important social document penned by a writer of fiction since James Plunkett's Dublin-based STRUMPET CITY in the 1970s. It is surely only lack of imagination coupled to creative paralysis and a perennial aversion to paying the going rate for good fiction that keeps TV and film producers focused instead on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes.