Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by frasersimons
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
4.0
Had I not read this with a friend I highly doubt I’d have ever picked it up. I’m glad I did, though I didn’t often agree with the conclusions the author had in her rumination predominately about her buying a hawk in a fit of processing the complex grief she is experiencing from her father passing. In a way it is a exorcism that takes place during the training and subsequent excursions. She goes back and forth on the ethics, antiquity of the practice, and various takeaways from her being pretty legitimately unhinged from the decision and it’s ramifications.
Unfortunately, it straddles her experiences with that of White, the author of The Once and Future King—a book I did not remotely enjoy, nor want to know more about. Boy, she is enamoured with the authors life experience and how it relates to what he wrote, and, of course, his own granular, inexperienced journey in getting and “training” a hawk, too. I can see why it’s there… but I just was not interested in it; certainly not in that granular a detail.
As mentioned, I also found myself shaking my head at her conclusions. She gets close to the idea of maybe it being archaic and foolish and kind of shitty to own a hawk. The damn things get “lost” all the time, aka, they don’t want to be controlled by a human because they’re animals? I don’t think what she does is particular ethical. As mentioned, for much of this, she is not in her right mind, though. Im not sure that excuses her behaviour, since I don’t know much about what would happen to these hawks people attempt to obtain. Would it never have been caught? Or would someone else just have the Hawk she got from the guy?
Regardless, I thought she had a fascinating mind and enjoyed her kind of writing. What she was interested in, when not intersecting with White, I found fairly captivating. She is quite the character, probably in part because her experience was so far removed and she was a wild thing. And her revelation about why the hawk was an imperative was well done, so I found this far better than it had any right to be. I see a few people disliked it because of the conceit of her subjugating an animal and I understand that, but I thought about all the fiction and nonfiction I’ve enjoyed before: None of them had characters doing things I would do or agreed with. In part, I think that is the point of this story.
Unfortunately, it straddles her experiences with that of White, the author of The Once and Future King—a book I did not remotely enjoy, nor want to know more about. Boy, she is enamoured with the authors life experience and how it relates to what he wrote, and, of course, his own granular, inexperienced journey in getting and “training” a hawk, too. I can see why it’s there… but I just was not interested in it; certainly not in that granular a detail.
As mentioned, I also found myself shaking my head at her conclusions. She gets close to the idea of maybe it being archaic and foolish and kind of shitty to own a hawk. The damn things get “lost” all the time, aka, they don’t want to be controlled by a human because they’re animals? I don’t think what she does is particular ethical. As mentioned, for much of this, she is not in her right mind, though. Im not sure that excuses her behaviour, since I don’t know much about what would happen to these hawks people attempt to obtain. Would it never have been caught? Or would someone else just have the Hawk she got from the guy?
Regardless, I thought she had a fascinating mind and enjoyed her kind of writing. What she was interested in, when not intersecting with White, I found fairly captivating. She is quite the character, probably in part because her experience was so far removed and she was a wild thing. And her revelation about why the hawk was an imperative was well done, so I found this far better than it had any right to be. I see a few people disliked it because of the conceit of her subjugating an animal and I understand that, but I thought about all the fiction and nonfiction I’ve enjoyed before: None of them had characters doing things I would do or agreed with. In part, I think that is the point of this story.