H is for Hawk

DNF at 25%.

This book is like a college paper. You have to write a certain number of pages but don't have enough material. You start to add unnecessary words just to make your page count. You ramble. You pull in random unrelated topics. You add fancy words to make it sound impressive.

That is this book. “I love gosshawks. Gosshawks** are beautiful. Gosshawks love to soar. They are hard to train. I collect books on gosshawks. T.H. White wrote a book on gosshawks. He was a sad confused man. Here's his whole life story. I'm including all of that to make my page count. He didn't know what he was doing with a hawk. I love gosshawks.... “ you get the point.

Yes, I see it's the author's way of coping over the loss of her father. I hope writing the book helped her get through it. Maybe she pulled herself free by the end of the book. This was just not the book for me.

** I listened to the audiobook version, so I'm uncertain of the true spelling of gosshawk. The audiobook narrator did a wonderful job. It was only due to her reading that I made it as far as I did.

I found Helen's writing style to be beautiful and loved hearing about the journey of grieving she went on while raising this Hawk. I found the described moments of grief to be deeply relatable for me and moving. And even cried at the very beginning of this book.

What really knocked down the enjoyment of this book for me was all the parts about White. Honestly I found all that talk about his books and how badly he raised his Hawk to be pretty boring and weird. Especially all that talk about his tortured life and repressed sexual feelings. I'm not really sure what that had to do with the authors personal story of grief or of raising a goshawk. I had to fight myself to keep from skipping his parts every time they came up.

Haunting, but not really satisfying. Macdonald takes us through her slow-motion journey through loss, loneliness, and a most uniquely primal isolation. During this period she takes on responsibility for another life, like so many of us do with puppies kittens and oh-honey-let's-make-a-baby. Unlike all those, this life is more alien than familiar; it takes special skills and sensitivity to work with. Macdonald has those, but her grief leads to poor decisions which in turn lead to eventual self-knowledge.

Macdonald writes beautifully: some sentences merited rereading with relish. She teaches us much about raptors, including their fascinating psychology. Her journey is a powerful one. On reflection, though, I'm not sure I needed to read this book or that you do. I don't feel transformed, don't really feel like it was the best use of my so-sadly-limited reading time. I don't see it staying with me. Obviously mine is a minority voice, and I'll be curious to hear your thoughts and what I've missed.

Was always on the edge of hiding such a wonderful topic and story behind a subplot of coping with mourning. But the main story, and the interesting parallelisms with TH White shine through. It is a short enough book to soak up quickly and, if you love animals it does a great job in highlighting the Hawk's nature and shunning from anthropomorphizing them.

There's so much going on in this book. Helen, a historian and falconry enthusiast, is grieving the death of her father. In her grief, she arranges to buy and train a goshawk. In the course of working with her hawk, she reflects on the life of T.H. White, the writer of The Once and Future King and another book, The Goshawk, which haunts her. There are the stories of her and her father, stories about T.H. White and his struggles, and the story of Helen and her hawk in the present. All of these are braided together in a memoir that is more than a memoir.

There is more than a little melodrama here. In a book where death and grief are so central, it's not surprising, but at times it was painful to read about the turmoil of T.H. White and then witness, in a way, the turmoil of Helen. Thankfully relief does come, along with some startling insights about the human relationship to the wild.

This review is also featured at Behind the Pages: H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk tells Helen Macdonald's journey through grief and the joy falconry brought her. As a young child, she and her father would watch for goshawks, and it sparked a fascination with birds of prey. Growing up, she learned all she could about falconry, determined she would one day have a bird of her own. Years later when she lost her father, it would be a goshawk who helped her overcome her grief. Her hawk, Mabel, would help her see the world with new eyes.

Helen weaves together memories of her father and her journey to falconry. She also draws parallels between the author T.H. Write and his book on falconry, where he did just about everything wrong, and her methods of taming Mabel. It was fascinating to learn about goshawks, and how they interact with the world around them. The way Helen described Mabel in flight painted pictures of a beautiful and deadly creature hunting her prey.

My favorite moments were when she began to understand her young Goshawk and connect with her on an emotional level. Having parrots of my own, I understand that instant you realize how much you love them despite how different you are. And you will do anything to make sure they are happy and healthy.

Helen also went through moments where she thought she was a horrible trainer. The depression from her father's death and the uncertainty of training a goshawk combined to make her doubt herself. These moments spoke to me. There have been many times I've felt guilty, wondering if I did everything right for parrots I rescue. Taming a bird is never easy, regardless of the species. There is a part of them that will always remain wild. Birds of prey more so than the parrots I am familiar with, but still, there is that part of them that will never be tame.

When I saw this book sitting on the bookstore shelf, I knew I had to read it. I love learning about birds, and I had never heard of a goshawk before. And even though it wasn't quite what I expected, I still enjoyed it.

I'm not a hunter, and I'm not mad for animals, but great writing is great writing, and this book is great writing. Helen Macdonald's dad collapses and dies abruptly, and Macdonald is bereft. She takes on a goshawk and begins to read about author T. H. White's encounters with hunting birds and starts to write about her father, and she slowly begins to re engage with the world. The vocabulary she uses in this book is beautiful and perfect and her descriptions—of the goshawk, of the world where she hunts, of her desperate sadness—are defiantly evocative. She masterfully binds together all her story lines in this brilliant picture of love and loss and the natural world.

A very personal memoir, the author deals with the loss of her father by escaping the world with the solitary experience of training a goshawk. She dedicates all her time to the hawk, a being driven by the urge to kill and eat and sleep, and finds solace in the bond that forms between them.

This feels as if Rebecca Solnit had written Walden. It's all about nature and the wild, written with beautiful language, a narrative that intermingles present and past, thoughts and stories.