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When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer captivated by hawks since childhood, she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators: the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral anger mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T. H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her journey into Mabel's world. Projecting herself "in the hawk's wild mind to tame her" tested the limits of Macdonald's humanity.By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement, a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, and the story of an eccentric falconer and legendary writer. Weaving together obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history, H Is for Hawk is a distinctive, surprising blend of nature writing and memoir from a very gifted writer.… (more)
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To say that Macdonald's writing is exquisite just doesn't do it justice. It's incredibly beautiful and goes a long way in expressing her difficulty in getting through the very dark days when nothing seems to be going right.
"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are." (Page 171)
Memoir, natural history, meditation on life and death and absolutely wonderful. Very highly recommended.
Helen Macdonald’s father passed away suddenly, throwing her life into disarray. To cope with her loss, Macdonald, a keen falconer, adopted and began training a goshawk that she named Mabel. Macdonald's exquisite prose captures Mabel's beauty:
The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops.
Working with Mabel allowed Macdonald to retreat inside herself, choosing when and how to connect with other humans. H is for Hawk deftly blends daily life, bereavement, and the art of falconry as seen through both Macdonald's eyes and those of author TH White, as described in his 1951 memoir, The Goshawk. Macdonald's memories of her father appear in the narrative without warning, much as they must have popped into her mind as she went about her daily activities.
As time passes, Mabel's training proceeds apace and Macdonald, still lost inside her mind, deconstructs the art of falconry. What is hawking all about, really? Initially Macdonald was caught up in “that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers,” distanced from the death that is a natural consequence of the hawk’s hunting. As Macdonald becomes an active participant in Mabel's hunting, she realizes “the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too.” Macdonald's journey alongside Mabel's, and her ultimate ability to achieve some sense of normalcy, make for a fascinating story.
Ms Macdonald also explores author T.H. White's life and his lesser known book The Goshawk. This book details White's initial attempt at training a hawk; it was quite unsuccessful and used techniques that White himself was ashamed to have used as he progressed as a falconer. Although I've read and loved The Once and Future King this was my first glimpse into TH White, the man. It was interesting to see parallels and contrasts of White's life in his King Arthur books. As a gay man, White struggled to fit into a non-accepting society. He was also anxious to free himself from his disliked profession of school master which recalled to him his own difficult childhood.
Although this is one of my favorite non-fiction books this year, I did have one quibble with the author's experiences.
When you have animals, stuff happens. But when the stuff happens, you need to fess up, make it good with the landowner and pull out your wallet or offer to work it off to make it right. It happened several times, but I'm thinking especially of the incident where the hawk killed several pheasants in a pen of exotic pheasants. Macdonald quickly stashed them in her hunting coat, beat feet out of there, congratulated herself on avoiding an unpleasant confrontation and most probably went home to dine on pheasant.
No. Just no.
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Ms Macdonald. While author narrations are sometimes a bit sketchy, she is a talented reader and helped make listening to this book a really pleasurable experience.
I have to say, I was not at all sure about this book at first. It was over-hyped to me to the point where I was almost resistant to reading it, and it seemed at first as if it might consist largely of the sort of self-indulgent self-psychoanalysis that sees everything in the world as a metaphor for the author's own life, which doesn't really have a lot of appeal for me. Plus, the writing style, half-casual, half-poetic, takes some getting used to.
But it grew on me, a lot. The prose really is good, and the emotions and experiences Macdonald writes about feel very honest. The things she talks about, from the lives of hawks to the life of T. H. White, are interesting. There are some good insights and thoughtful reflections. And ultimately -- and most importantly -- Macdonald very much respects and understands her hawk as an independent, non-human entity, not as a mere prop or tool with which to work out her grief, and she makes that gratifyingly clear by the end.
I don't know that this blew me away the way it seems to have done with some people. But I found it a very worthwhile read, nonetheless.
It is an odd mismatch of a book. The hawk is something I'd barely be able to recognise if it bit me on the nose. So training of a hawk is something outside my range of experience, meaning that the methods and approaches were interesting. The comparison of her training with that if TE White was intellectually interesting, but I'm not sure that is was a necessary diversion. The contrast was clear, they were both in very different situations, emotionally and in terms of experience. I still don't think it added much to the narrative's direction.
The training of a hawk in response to her father's death is an unusual response to grief, but that doesn't make it any less valid. However, grief is an emotion and there was curiously little of it in this book. I didn't get any sense of the depth of her loss. I found her description of herself as an orphan when her mother remains alive as entirely unjustified. Her mother was noticeably absent throughout the book. I found little in this book that I could recognise from my experience. The only elements were the wish to avoid people and the appointment at the GP with depression. That struck a chord, although we arrived at the same place via different routes into that situation and out of it again.
Maybe I'm not able to review this objectively, maybe I can't see someone else's experience as equally as valid as mine. I can't say I enjoyed it. the writing was good, she can put words together well. But it was curiously unemotional, it barely seemed to flicker from a strange flatness of emotion. I can't recommend it,. I didn't hate it, but I can't say I feel positive towards it either. OK is as good as it gets.
A good author can make me interested in a topic that I formerly didn't know anything about... a great author can get me to share their passion. Macdonald doesn't manage either in regards to falconry (or training goshawks...) I just found it to be a weird combination of uppity and dull.
I expected a story of going to nature to deal with grief. But Helen's story is much more complex than that. She's reflective, she's hard on herself, and she doesn't necessarily think that her relationship with Mabel was a panacea for her hurts. Still, her experience and that of White's makes the reader reflect on how we deal with pain, what relationship we have with both people and the natural wild world, and what it means to truly live. There are so many aspects of this story that will be fascinating for book discussions and it's the kind of book I look forward to rereading because I will have a different experience every time.
Helen Macdonald, a naturalist and falconer, suddenly loses her father and it catapults her into an abyss of grief and despair. She then makes a radical decision
This wonderful, beautifully written book contains many things: it is a memoir, a nature book, a short biography on T.H. White, who wrote The Goshawk, one of Macdonald's favorite reads and it is a look at the complexities of bereavement.
“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”
I listened to this on audio and it is narrated by the author and she does a stellar job, capturing the different emotions with perfect aplomb.
Whatever, it's beautiful, go enjoy it if you can ignore the elephant rotting in the corner, I can't.
Helen was raised as a typically middle class english girl, her parents both loved her and had money sufficient for treats but not extravagances. She went to university and started her career as a professional academic. Her father was a photo-journalist who introduced her to his hobbies, and the book opens with his death from heart attack, and quickly moves on to how this devastates her life, even though she'd been living independently for some time, the knowledge that the rock of support he'd always offered her, had suddenly crumbled. We follow her into and through her depression, and her withdrawal into a world dominated by caring for Mabel, and training her to fly. Helen has previously owned and flown other hawks so this isn't a completely amateur effort. She does know, care and understand what she's doing. I found it strange that there was so little reference to her other hawks though. It is alsi strange that there was so little personal interaction at any other point - for the period of almost a year, she has a few short meetings with friends and family and one - pre-mabel - "car-crash" of a relationship, that is not described in any detail (again an odd omission when she is so frank about her mental states). It is reassuring that single women don't feel the need to rush into relationships, but the complete absence of any kind of romantic interlude throughout the whole book perhaps indicates a bit just how disturbed she was at this time.
Points to praise - the acknowledgement that the english countryside is completely artificial product of thousands of years of human management, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but that it isn't 'natural'. Secondly a profound absence of anthropomorphism on behalf of Mabel. She is a Hawk, and doesn't see the world in anything but in a Hawk's eye. Helen sometimes mistakes this, but always comes back to the correct interpretation.
Not really my cup of tea, but t times very powerful and engaging. Sadly these moments of deep pathos were then spoilt by trite commentary and speculations about TH White, of whom I could hardly care less. A talented author I would be interested in finding out what else she has written on less personal matters. At times though the impression given was that I had nothing better to do with my time so I wrote a book about my experiences, which is not the point that was being made.
This book might more accurately have been called 'G is for Goshawk' for although Macdonald offers a potted history of the broad ambit of falconry, it is with goshawks that she is principally concerned. Wracked with grief at the sudden death of her father she seeks therapy through buying a young goshawk, whom she names Mabel, and undertaking to train it. All hawks, it seems, are troublesome creatures, and training them is a battle of wills that stretches bird and falconer to their very limits. Macdonald's goshawk is certainly no exception and she describes her struggle to bend Mabel to her will.
The descriptions of the bird's appearance, and its movements (whether in outbursts of furious temper or, later, its graceful flights launched from Macdonald's fist, are masterful, almost hypnotic. Once fully trained, the partnership between hawk and hawker is as close as that between shepherd and sheepdog, though executed with infinitely more grace.
The book is, however, far more than a simple account of Macdonald's experiences training the goshawk to do her bidding. She gives us a detailed history of the falconer's art, a deep insight into the natural history of the hawk family, and a dazzling biography of T H White, now best known for his works 'The Sword in the Stone' and 'The Once and Future King' which did so much to crystallise the public's understanding of, and fascination with, the Arthurian legend. Macdonald's interest in White is, however, prompted by another of his books, the less well known account of his own attempts to train a goshawk. This chronicle, simple called 'The Goshawk' captured MacDonald's imagination as a girl, and ultimately inspired her to acquire and train her own bird. White's experience with his own goshawk, like so much else within his tortured life, was not a happy one, and the book is, by all accounts, a difficult and tortuous read. That is far from being the case with Macdonald's wonderful work which also serves to show that even the deepest grief can, gradually, eventually, be overcome.
It leads the reader towards the
Looking back at my other reviews, I have less patience with this genre than with others. The point of reading memoirs is that the reader gleans wisdom from the writer's experiences. But I see it as an act of egotism - why is your life experience so meaningful that I should be expected to give up hours of my life reliving it?
It is also a question of framing. What details does she leave out to smooth the rough edges of her art, to obscure the truth in order to maximize the dramatic weight? Of course her father was a saint. Of course she succeeds with the hawk.
Write a novel, or a poem at least. Spare us the navel-gazing and self importance.
Another strength of McDonald’s memoir is how she imparts knowledge about the ancient art of falconry. For anyone not familiar with this sport, there is much to be learned and appreciated here: how falconers develop a kinship with these creatures, harnessing their killing potential for their own purposes; how the history of falconry has made it exclusively a male sport and one dominated by the wealthy elite; how certain birds are more easily trained than others, with goshawks being particularly difficult. In this regard, Macdonald includes a large amount of material from T. H. White’s book about how he attempted to train a goshawk. His motivations were not unlike Macdonald’s: a means to deal with his own depression and an excuse to withdraw. However, White was not as skilled in falconry as Macdonald and his efforts eventually failed. Unlike White, Helen recognizes that society’s perception of hawks as predators interferes with appreciating their true nature and consummate skill. Her development of Mabel was not always successful. Indeed, Macdonald shares several instances of setback, doubt and fear. Despite what often seems to be a battle of wills, Macdonald ultimately succeeds with intelligence, knowledge and understanding. As a counterpoint, White demonstrates ineptitude and frustration often relying on cruelty in his attempts to train his hawk.
The book is well written and its structure is definitely engaging. However, Macdonald’s tendency occasionally to drift away from the stronger aspects of her narrative into lyricism often seems misplaced and overdone.
The hawk is wiser.
The book is fabulous and I tore through it with that horrible feeling of "I can't put it down" and "I wish it would never end".
I grew impatient at times with the depth of Helen's sorrow, only to realize that I carried the same unaddressed sadness about my dad's death.
I'm glad I did. The book feels richer, deeper, for being read in the context of my own views of what White wrote in the Goshawk. And sharper - there are
The prose is beautiful. It is a book that feels very near - I don't need to try and understand an alien world for this rich tale of Cambridge, of failing at acadaemia and leaving, of grief at the death of parents, at losing oneself in the wildness and wondering how to return.
I feel like I know White so well from being saturated in his prose, but it is interesting to get this... well, birds eye view of him. The short clear descriptions of the things he never dared say about himself, which were always there under the surface of his own writings.
It is a book of feelings. A book where nothing happens and everything happens, where you feel like you have been inside someone else's head, and feel less lonely as a result. How Macdonald escapes into eccentricity, how it is both the fulfilment of a long dream and also a folly to hide in.
A deeply nourishing book.
"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."
Contrary to what it appears other people struggled with, I found the passages about T.H. White interesting in how she compared her own grief and training process with his. The audio of this was fantastic--I wonder if I would have been as into the book had it not been for hearing her voice tell her own story. Wonderful book all around.
Whenever a "trained" goshawk like Mabel flies from the hand, the question is whether it will choose to return. Would it be better to continue to fly, and be free in woods and fields, enjoying the thrill of hunting and the abundance of tasty prey, such as rabbits, pheasant, and grouse? Or would it be better to return to the human who has been her companion, and who also is a reliable source of food? Every shared journey may be the last.
An example of the gorgeous writing in this book:
"{M}y heart is beating like a fitting beast, but she's back on the glove, beak open, eyes blazing. And then there is a long moment of extraordinary intensity.
The goshawk is staring at me in mortal terror, and I can feel the silences between both our heartbeats coincide. Here eyes are luminous, silver in the gloom. Her beak is open. She breathes hot hawk breath in my face. It smells of pepper and musk and burned stone. Her feathers are half-raised and her wings half-open, and her scaled yellow toes and curved black talons grip the glove tightly. It feels like I'm holding a flaming torch. I can feel the heat of her fear on my face."
Being with the hawk is an adrenaline-filled escape from her loss. "{O}ut with the hawk I didn't need a home. Out there I forgot I was human at all. Everything the hawk saw was raw and real and drawn hair-fine, and everything else was dampened to nothing".
This is a great book that you won't want to miss. Highly recommended.