H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald
Jonathan Cape £14.99
(978-0-224-09700-0)
Church Times Bookshop £13.50 (Use code
CT292 )
HELEN MACDONALD's prose streams on to the page with absolute
clarity in this extraordinary book, written after her father's
sudden death, recounting her obsessive retreat into training a
goshawk. The hawk, Mabel, is everything that Macdonald wanted to be
- "solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts
of human life" - and the book is poetry, philosophy, autobiography,
scholarship, and nature-writing all bound together in one coherent
and beautiful whole.
As a falconer, she was unnerved by goshawks: "spooky, pale-eyed
psychopaths", "thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket", whose
hot breath smells of pepper and musk and burned stone, and who fill
the house with wildness. But Mabel, she exults, is also like a
fallen angel, a griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary,
"something bright and distant, like gold falling through
water".
This is a searing portrait, too, of the tortured, contradictory
T. H. White, whose book, The Goshawk, portrays the
metaphysical battle to train his own hawk. Macdonald wholly
identifies with White's desire to escape to the wild - a desire
"that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a
world of savage, courteous despair".
Hers is a ruthlessly honest insight into what it is like to
lose, without warning, someone you love. What happens to the mind
after bereavement makes no sense until later, she reflects, writing
of the "bouts of derealisation, strange episodes where the world
becomes unrecognisable", and of the terrible finality of the brute
fact: "I would never speak to him again. I would never see him
again."
Recognising that and so much else in this book about the journey
of grief, I found myself uplifted by her conclusion, that life
reaches a point where you realise that it is a thing made of holes,
"things that were there, and are there no longer. And you realise,
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."
Yes, I wanted to say. Yes. That's it exactly.