H
is for Hawk
Helen
Macdonald (2014, Grove Press)
A few months after her beloved father died, Helen Macdonald brought
home a young goshawk. She let go of her graduate studies at
Cambridge, and lived by herself, hand feeding the hawk raw meat. This
is an odd thing to do, but not as strange for her as it would have
been for most people: she had been interested in falconry since she
was a small child, drawing birds obsessively and collecting the major
literature on the subject by the age of eight.
Macdonald
is shadowing an experience she read about as a child. Terence White
is best known for The Once and Future King, a book a certain
kind of bookish kid used to fall into in the days before Harry
Potter. Long, dense, and magical, the book also bears a strain of
melancholy; the more we get to know White, the more we see why. In
his late twenties, he trained a hawk he called Gos, and wrote a small
classic about it called The Goshawk. What's remarkable about
this is that he made a complete disaster of training Gos, and even at
eight, Macdonald could sense this, and find it disturbing.
She's
actually well qualified to handle her new bird, having had other,
smaller hawks and falcons, but a goshawk represents a special kind of
challenge. They are somehow more ancient, more reptilian, more wild
even than other birds men keep. “Half the time she seems as alien
as a snake, a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then
I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities that
turn her into something lovable and close.” So lovable, in fact,
that she calls her Mabel, “from amabilis, meaning lovable,
or dear.”
Her
days, and the book, are filled with close observation of Mabel; and
it's as if she can see the world around them through Mabel's eyes. On
one of their first trips outside together: “Joggers! Like bats
leaving their roost, their numbers build incrementally. ...By the
time Mabel and I are halfway home it feels as if we're in a nature
documentary about the Serengeti. They are everywhere.” She
describes the countryside in acute detail; she's almost always
hawking by herself, so she has to trot across woods and fields, and
plunge into thorny hedges. The goshawk has no conception of property
lines, and Macdonald doesn't always know where she'll come out.
Since
the major characters in H is for Hawk are two dead men and a
wild animal, we spend a lot of time in the author's own head. There's
an authorial sleight of hand, by which Macdonald describes herself
losing her place in human society, almost to the point of losing
language, in the most beautiful and precise language imaginable. Is
she losing her mind, going feral, going mad with grief? She must have
recovered enough to write the book in your hand, but you can't always
see how that will occur. “Some deep part of me was trying to
rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk
was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from
grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.”
But
of course, people are not meant to be wild animals. Macdonald is in
conversation with the dangerous example of White's attempted retreat
from society; her criticism of him is seasoned with compassion. He
had a frightened, lonely childhood, and was never free from sadistic
urges that he would have been ashamed to put into practice. But
Macdonald remembers in time that the bloodthirstiness of the goshawk
is natural to the goshawk, and not to people. “Goshawks are things
of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities.
Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing
to do with us at all.”
Macdonald
has extraordinary control over this material. The descriptions of the
natural world are beautiful, and I was surprised how much of it there
was within fifty miles of Cambridge. She can cite sixteenth century
falconers, and in the next breath see how her own bird gives them the
lie. H is for Hawk is also a wonderful memorial to her father,
who passed on a way of seeing the world that is to be treasured.
Any
Good Books - June 2015
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