Batman Can't Fly is the title of a short novella by Bradford-born writer David Hines, the cousin of Kes author Barry Hines. But he doesn't need to rely on that connection. His play Bondage, acclaimed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989, 1990 and this year, formed the basis of Ken Russell's movie, Whore. Here, David talks to Jim Greenhalf.

The story starts with a fatherless boy trying to make a mark on his errant mum's affections by launching himself from an upstairs window, to prove to her that his hero Batman can fly.

It ends seven or eight years later with the boy, now a renegade teenager fending for himself, poised to leap from the clutches of an old homosexual who has lured him to his apartment, masking his real intentions by a show of concern for the juvenile's plight.

I was going to say something trite, along the lines of: only the deprived need a super-hero to fill the hole left by the absence of maternal affection.

However, Batman Can't Fly for the most part avoids the pitfalls of special pleading and moralising characteristic of fiction which aspires to the school of post-war gritty Northern social realism.

This school, in which class war is supposedly the only subject on the curriculum, always had its maverick pupils - Alan Bennett, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Alan Ayckbourn, to name a few.

While Batman Can't Fly is a story of survival in keeping with the tradition created by writers such as Alan Sillitoe, and David Hines' cousin Barry Hines, the author of Kes, the usual kitchen sink accoutrements are missing.

There's no seething Arthur Seaton-style interior monologue as in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; angry young men and envious young men, like Joe Lampton in Room at the Top, are nowhere to be seen, thank God.

Batman Can't Fly, 84 pages long, refreshingly avoids the usual sociological clichs about environment and upbringing. Though sexual abuse, prostitution and back-street abortions are elements within the story, they are not its reason for existing.

The struggle to survive has its own comic resilience, the comedy of survival. All true comedy has more than a touch of tragedy or pathos; in Batman Can't Fly, this takes the form of a soliloquy by the boy's mum.

Hines's writing is stripped of superfluous description and period decoration: there are no bakerlite wirelesses, buses with conductors, women in turbans scrubbing the front door-step. Though set in post-war Bradford, the location could just as well be post-unification Berlin or the slums of Chicago in the 1940s. The story is universal.

Such disciplined, pared-down writing is hard to do; but the effect is liberating, for the writer, the story, and the reader. The story is told in a series of scenes (not back-flashes), whose characters are not described in a novelistic way but evoked though their actions and reactions to one another as recounted by the un-named boy.

If ever Batman Can't Fly is made into a movie, it should be shot in former East Germany with a cast of English-speaking German actors.

"It's absolutely incredible you should say that!" David Hines said excitedly on the phone. "The book was published in Germany a few weeks ago, and there's a woman in Berlin who's trying to raise the money for a film. She's got the art work done and everything. She wants to set it in East Berlin after the fall of the Wall.

"I am obviously writing about my own childhood (he was brought up by his grand-parents in Leamington Street, just off Oak Lane), but the story is stripped of all sentimentality which is an enemy.

"You shouldn't be used by your past. I have known all sorts of people who are crushed by their past, by circumstances," he added.

The boy in the story, like Hines himself, is not crushed: he has a gift, a talent for art.

"I always had that to fall back on," he acknowledged.

His mother, who was indeed a prostitute, died in Greengates last year. Although her son, now 52, says she left him with a lot of pain that comes from feeling unloved, he admitted that she had also given him his gift.

"My humour is my mother's. She had a bizarre sense of humour. I think she was a very clever, talented person with an original sense of humour. I miss her laughter, her singing. She was very candid about everything, and I saw things through her eyes," he said.

I remarked upon the writing's lack of extraneous description, period detail and authorial explanation.

"You don't have to write down to people, they understand without you leading them by the hand," he replied.

Batman Can't Fly begins with the boy coming down to earth with a thump. It ends with him poised to leap into his future.

This is not a tale of woe: it is a creative triumph, and an affirmation that people, if inspired, can rise above the gravity of their experience.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.