"H is for Hawk" by Helen MacDonald (published 2014)

The title is “H Is For Hawk” because, like in those children’s picture books in which C is for cat and M is for mouse (and on and on), the hawk is an animal. And the underlying question is *what, exactly, is a hawk*? What does it look like, what does it do, where does it come from, how does it live? In her novel “H Is For Hawk” (2014) Helen MacDonald writes about the field of falconry (her profession) and readers learn answers to those questions about hawks. Her narrative answers those questions in different ways. Partly through her uncanny fascination with the famous T.H. White (author of “The Once and Future King” and a lesser known book, “The Goshawk”) and her experiences while reclaiming her life after her father, her guiding light, suddenly passes. It is a goshawk, one of the deadliest kinds of hawk, she connects to afterwards:

“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… grief had spurred me to fly the hawk, but now the grief was gone.”

One of the first things readers will learn is that a hawk is not *just* a murderous predator - yes that - *and so much more*. One of the fascinating things falconers have to do, as MacDonald demonstrates in her book, is make the kill of the goshawk less violent by ending the life of the prey before the goshawk begins eating the animal alive. In short, MacDonald had to snap the necks of rabbits before her goshawk Mabel attacked it in order to somewhat lessen the cruelty of the entire “sport”. What readers also learn is that the history of falconry is tied up in aristocracy, not so much in the contemporary world but the past. What makes MacDonald so admirable and poignant are her reflections on a people’s connections to the land. As an Englishwoman she has very clear notions about what those connections mean for different people:

“I had hunted with hawks for years before death meant anything to me at all. Perhaps I was then to all intents a child. I’d never considered what I was doing cruel. I was a spectator, not a killer… and falconry for me was about reveling in the flight of the hawk, never in the death it brought. But when my hawk caught me things I was pleased – partly for the hawk, and partly because I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities… I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence… but up on the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history… on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage… that [land] held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later too, that I realized these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness.”

How could a reader such as I not come to adore Helen MacDonald and her book after reading paragraphs such as these, and even more about her relationship, a very peculiar, special relationship with her goshawk Mabel? There was more:

“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard… we take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history. History, and life too. It might resemble Old England here but it is not anything like the country of four-hundred years ago…”

What beautiful words that I am now only understanding connect to the death the goshawk brought to its prey. Mabel’s wildness as well as her partial domesticity in the hands of her master might be some allusion to the course of history, part passed down through generation, another part created.

In “H Is For Hawk”, MacDonald also writes about her *becoming* hawk – in juxtaposition with T.H. White’s personal story of the same thing many, many years prior with his own hawk, Gos. At times MacDonald became paranoid, jumpy, moody. She became wild even, getting torn up out in the fields on thorns and brambles… and never fully comfortable, always hazy. Through her amazing narrative, MacDonald uncovers what it’s like to emerge from a type of savagery and to come back full circle:

“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.”

Falconry, mythology, life after the death of a loved one, friendship, history, family, education… all these are part of Helen MacDonald’s wonderful book, “H Is For Hawk”. For anyone interested in the link between humanity and “beasts”, the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we pursue to understand our pain, the beautiful simplicity of real relationships, the complexity of our past, the ethereal moments that bind us together, and the push and pull of how learning truly happens… “H Is For Hawk” will have quite enough to satisfy.