"H is for Hawk"

“H is for Hawk,” by Helen Macdonald

       Recently released in the U.S., this book was first published in the UK in 2014 and was received rapturously by the book reviewers. It won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. I think it is best described as a serious work of literature, with a very high quality of writing and analytical thought. It has three main themes.

       The first theme is one that is all too common in literature these days—grief at the loss of a loved one. Helen Macdonald’s father dies and leaves her in a state of grief that, as she admits, verges on madness. Indeed, it sometimes prompts the reader to muse—“come on, woman, time to get over it.” I do not mean to diminish what she felt: clearly her attachment to her father was very deep and lasting, and her grief is convincingly described. And she goes back into her father’s life and links up many aspects of his life with her own:  for example, as a boy he ‘spotted’ aircraft, noting in a journal their type and serial numbers, while she grew up with binoculars round her neck, spotting and identifying birds.

       The second theme is her purchase of a goshawk—a beautiful bird of prey that she trains to hawk, hoping that this quest will relieve her grief. There is lot of natural history and wildlife in this theme and a great deal of interesting background on falconry, a subject on which the author was obsessed from girlhood, and this had led her to work in a couple of falconries. The trials and acute anxieties of training the goshawk, which she names Mabel, are described in fascinating detail.

       The third theme is an in-depth investigation into the life of T.H. White, the author of the “The Once and Future King,” the Arthurian saga. Helen Macdonald grew up reading and re-reading both the saga and White's book “Gos,” in which he writes about the frustrations of adopting and training a goshawk. White is a very confused and complicated character, and Macdonald has researched his papers in the Library of the University of Texas, drawing for her book on much handwritten material, especially from the time when White was writing “Gos.” When I first read reviews in England of  “H is for Hawk,” I was prompted to go into Abebooks and pick up a second-hand copy of “Gos,” which is an intriguing piece of autobiography and high octane writing.

       I certainly recommend “H is for Hawk” And just one quote from a NY Times review:

“If birds are made of air, as the nature writer Sy Montgomery says, then writing a great bird book is a little like dusting for the fingerprints of a ghost. It calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In her breathtaking new book, “H Is for Hawk,” winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence — and her own — with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.”

But let me add, this book is much more than “a great bird book.” It is a book about being human.