Riddle Reads… H is for Hawk
Our literary arbiter runs her eye over a poignant and sensitively written memoir
Review by Kate Slotover
So, a book about spelling? No about birds-of-prey, right? Is it a novel? An instruction manual?
This is a true story – that reads like a novel – of author Helen Macdonald’s experiences training a goshawk she calls ‘Mabel’. It’s a very personal memoir of her struggle to tame a wild bird while at the same time trying to cope with her overwhelming grief at the sudden death of her father. There is also an element of literary biography as Macdonald looks back through time to the author T.H. White (1906–64) (The Once and Future King) who also trained birds of prey and wrote about it in a book called The Goshawk. This, and White’s Merlin stories had been a key source of fascination for Macdonald as a child, and now she unpicks White’s own motivations, his struggles and frequent failures in his attempt to master the skill of falconry.
Can we start with the basics, what’s a goshawk? Are they like sparrowhawks?
Sparrowhawks lazily circling above fields or hovering beside the motorway are a familiar sight but you’d have to make a lot of effort, as Macdonald does at the beginning of her book, if you wanted to see a goshawk in the wild. She writes that there is no comparison between the two: ‘… goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see.’ Macdonald keeps Mabel in her living room in Cambridge and takes her out into the streets to acclimatise to being around people.
Does Macdonald know what she’s doing?
Absolutely. One of the pleasures of this surprising and compelling book is that it’s not, as you might expect, a story about someone learning how to do something. Macdonald had been obsessed with falconry since she was a very young child and in parallel with her education and then career as an academic she had worked at falconry centres and trained hawks. When Macdonald came to train Mabel she was already in many ways an expert, fully embedded in a community of people who could provide advice and support if she needed it. What’s interesting about this story is that Macdonald’s struggle comes not from inexperience, but from her own deteriorating mental state, which leads her to identify more and more with the hawk she is spending so much time with. ‘The hawk was everything I wanted to be’, she writes, ‘solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, numb to the hurts of human life.’ The book becomes a fascinating meditation on what it means to be human, and our relationship with the wild.
And T.H. White? What happened to him?
Unlike Macdonald, White was inexperienced and had no-one to help him. Although he learned from his mistakes and went on to successfully train subsequent hawks, White’s experiences with ‘Gos’, his first goshawk, were a disaster causing both man and hawk much emotional and physical distress. Macdonald is drawn to White’s emotional state, understanding, as perhaps few others could, the depth to which the relationship with the hawk consumed him, and she offers unexpected insight into how White’s experiences bore fruit in his writing. She also shares and celebrates his love of nature: ‘He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles.’
A recommended read, then?
Absolutely. A 9/10. This Riddle reviewer goes so far as to suggest you read it twice, the first time to fly through following Macdonald and Mabel’s story as it unfolds, the second more slowly to appreciate the beautiful quality of the writing, the complexity with which Macdonald weaves together the different strands of her story, and the poignant but ultimately uplifting story of her journey into darkness and back again. Through this extraordinary book Macdonald attempts to reconnect with her lost self. She also manages to reach back through time to a deeply troubled writer who attempted to heal himself and find solace through his literary creation, Merlin. And finally, she enables us to connect with something deeply buried within all of us, our kinship with the natural world.
Other reading?
If you didn’t read them as a child, you might be interested to read White’s Arthurian series that starts with The Sword in the Stone before going on to The Once and Future King. And should you want to learn more about White there is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1967 biography, described by Sadie Stein of The Paris Review as ‘a small masterpiece of humanity’. Finally thanks to that quintessentially British institution Springwatch you can see baby goshawk chicks in a nest here. 