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A review by nuts246
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.5
The book starts with the author driving down to an abandoned East Anglia airfield which has now been reclaimed by nature to look for hawks. Not any hawk, but the goshawk- the most magnificent of them all. She becomes the young girl who is taught to wait patiently by her father because the things worth seeing come only if you wait. After her darshan of a pair of goshawks flying high in the sky, she finds a tuff of reindeer moss clutched in her hand. She takes the moss home, and she was looking at it when the fateful phone call came announcing that her father was dead. A few weeks later she brings a goshawk home, hoping that training the goshawk would help her come to terms with her grief.
The two main strands of the book are about her relationship with the goshawk and of how she navigates the terrain of grief. But interwoven through it is also the story of how T.H. White tried to escape who he was by attempting to train a goshawk, and the story of her own father, a photographer famous for waiting for the right photograph to come to him.
I particularly loved the parts where she gradually establishes a relationship with Mabel, her goshawk; she becomes the goshawk, and the goshawk becomes her (when the goshawk is flying, she can literally see herself from Mabel's vantage point), and her musings on her father were so like my own in a similar situation. It was almost inevitable that she would finally understand that hands are not just just meant to hold hawks but also to hold people tight.
I can understand why she brought in the bits about White, and while I enjoyed reading some of her musings on children's literature, I personally felt the book would have held faster without it. Mabel, the author, her father and her family and friends was all I really wanted from the book. There were mediations on the inherent classism of hunting in the UK which I would have loved her to elaborate on. I also learnt more about falconry than I ever thought existed!
The timeline of the book extends for less than a year, and the story ends with the end of the first season of hunting with Mabel. What I found interesting was that the book was written seven years later after Mabel herself passed away. Was it an account of her grief at losing her father, or was it also tempered with the grief of losing her mate?
The two main strands of the book are about her relationship with the goshawk and of how she navigates the terrain of grief. But interwoven through it is also the story of how T.H. White tried to escape who he was by attempting to train a goshawk, and the story of her own father, a photographer famous for waiting for the right photograph to come to him.
I particularly loved the parts where she gradually establishes a relationship with Mabel, her goshawk; she becomes the goshawk, and the goshawk becomes her (when the goshawk is flying, she can literally see herself from Mabel's vantage point), and her musings on her father were so like my own in a similar situation. It was almost inevitable that she would finally understand that hands are not just just meant to hold hawks but also to hold people tight.
I can understand why she brought in the bits about White, and while I enjoyed reading some of her musings on children's literature, I personally felt the book would have held faster without it. Mabel, the author, her father and her family and friends was all I really wanted from the book. There were mediations on the inherent classism of hunting in the UK which I would have loved her to elaborate on. I also learnt more about falconry than I ever thought existed!
The timeline of the book extends for less than a year, and the story ends with the end of the first season of hunting with Mabel. What I found interesting was that the book was written seven years later after Mabel herself passed away. Was it an account of her grief at losing her father, or was it also tempered with the grief of losing her mate?
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Grief