Book Review: H is for Hawk
This is a memoir about grief, and coming to terms with mortality. This is the story of a falconer and their hunting bird, a person and a goshawk and the delicate, savage, complex relationship between them. This is a fascinating kind of shadow biography of TH White, best known as the author of The Once and Future King, and himself a falconer who trained a goshawk and wrote a book about it. This is a reflection on the nature of wildness and humanity's relationship with it, the ever-changing realities of landscape and place and animal movements. Importantly, this is also a book that asks us to interrogate the danger of constructing a narrative that reifies a fictive "return to nature", and assigns "the wild" a moral weight and power by denying the realities of human ontology.
The catalyst for everything that happens in the book is the sudden death of Helen Macdonald's father as they are coming to the end of an academic fellowship at Cambridge. Helen is destroyed by this loss, having been extremely close to their photojournalist dad (who sounds, through the picture presented of him in the book, like he was a wonderful person). The miasma of grief and loss combines with their sense of unmooring and uncertainty as their job ends, and leads Helen (an experienced falconer) to undertake the project that provides most of the action in the text - procuring and raising a young goshawk, who they name Manel, and training her to hunt. At the same time, they re-engage with a book they had read much earlier - TH White's The Goshawk, about his experiences with his hawk, Gos - and use it to talk about White as not just a falconer but a (tortured) person.
Helen is not insensible at all to the risks of absorbing themselves so thoroughly in Mabel as a panacea for the enormous wound they have suffered (especially, perhaps, in hindsight). As they write:
"you are entirely at the world’s mercy. It is a rush. You lose yourself in it. And so you run towards those little shots of fate, where the world turns. That is the lure: that is why we lose ourselves, when powerless from hurt and grief, in drugs or gambling or drink; in addictions that collar the broken soul and shake it like a dog. I had found my addiction on that day out with Mabel. It was as ruinous, in a way, as if I’d taken a needle and shot myself with heroin. I had taken flight to a place from which I didn’t want to ever return."
The middle section of the book, where Helen is sunk in what will later be identified as depression, and living in panicked isolation with Mabel, is both bleak and also incredibly well-written, to the point where, even as the reader can see why it is dysfunctional, there is a hypnotic beauty to it that lulls you into seeing it as some kind of prayer.
All in all, this book resonated profoundly with me. I only really enjoy memoirs that are focused around a theme (a place, an activity, an incident) rather than being whole-life narratives, and Mabel's journey with Helen provides a perfect such theme for their exploration of wider and deeper truths. I am always interested in books that look critically and vulnerably at human relationships with animals, and don't shy away from the ethical snares inherent in any such relationships. I admire enormously Helen's absolute willingness to take the reader on their journey, with all its mistakes and conundrums and dubious ethical calls (this was hugely enhanced by the content around White, because it allowed for the exploration of the uneasy link between hunting with animals and impulses towards cruelty - human impulses, that is, as the bird's behaviour is not cruel, merely natural).
I found myself absorbed in the narrative and moved by the insights that Helen painfully extracts from their year of grieving and goshawk training. The sense of being overwhelmed and drowned, and then slowly, slowly saved, was so powerfully conveyed and so meaningful. I love that, at the end, they come to peace with the understanding that they are not Mabel and Mabel is not them, and that the answer to human misery is not and will never be a flight into a fictive wildness or animalism. At the start of the process, they write "The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life", but by the end, they are able to say this:
"Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. 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."
And that, it seems to me, is an insight worth holding on to, in these times where constructed ideas of naturalism are causing so much confusion and danger in a complex human world. 9.5/10.
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