Book Review: "H is for Hawk" (Helen MacDonald, Jonathon Cape; London, 2014)

I first heard about this book when I chaired a talk by Conor Jameson, a highly skilled naturalist and writer who recently had his own book on Goshawks (“Looking for the Goshawk”) published by Bloomsbury Press. Jameson’s book concentrates on studying the habits and detailed behaviour of this truly wild raptor, visiting the places where it lives and talking to the people who know most about the species (including Helen MacDonald). Jameson had read her book and strongly recommended it: a few months later it won the “Costa Prize” for a work of non-fiction and Helen MacDonald was parachuted into the limelight, achieving a degree of fame and (one assumes) fortune.

I should start by saying that my interest in this book at the outset lay in its natural history content: goshawks are almost impossible to see, never mind to photograph in the wild. I wanted to find out more about them and was interested to understand their role in falconry.  Nevertheless, this book does have some relevance to my course work, as I will show later. Essentially the book sets out to describe MacDonald’s training of a young goshawk, acquired shortly after the sudden death of her father, and how her communion with this bird helped to alleviate the grief that she felt over her father’s loss. Running in parallel with her own story she recounts the bumbling efforts of the novelist T H White (1906-60; author of “The Once and Future King”) who, unlike MacDonald, was not a skilled and experienced Falconer, to train his own Goshawk.

A number of issues quickly became apparent as I read this book. Firstly, MacDonald is a brilliant and gifted writer, with a distinctive literary style. Her sentences are often short and terse, making her story very readable, and her subtle use of descriptive prose makes scenes come alive vividly in my mind. Secondly, her description of working with and training the hawk, using all the experience gained from her work as a falconer and the knowledge gained both by detailed research and by quizzing experts in her field, must surely create the most perfect handbook for anybody wishing to follow in her footsteps by becoming a falconer. A detailed bibliography offers the reader further research options. Thirdly, it is clear from her writing that, whilst she may be academically brilliant, she is also somewhat eccentric; perhaps a difficult person to understand, to be with or to like. At the time of her father’s death she had no family, job, partner or home. It is to her credit that this “part autobiography” does not shirk from these details.

I did have some problems with the subject matter. We all deal with grief differently: my father also died suddenly and unexpectedly when he was too young. However, I overcame the grief within a few weeks and, although I had to deal with the consequences of his death for many years afterwards, I did not return to that initial state of grief. MacDonald appears to be in a perpetual state of grief, only seeking solace and ultimate salvation (many months later) through the flying of the hawk. Events may well have occurred exactly as written, but at the back of my mind there was always a feeling that her retreat into the world of her goshawk, the curative power of wild nature in the form of the goshawk and her return from this spirit world with the realisation that she is once again human and the grief has gone, fitted rather neatly into her circumstances at the time.

One literary prop that makes this book stand out amongst its counterparts is the running of her autobiographical story alongside a potted biography of T H White, concentrating on his unsuccessful battle to train his goshawk, “Gos”. She presents a vivid portrait of this troubled author as she constantly and expertly switches between her story and his through the middle sections of the book. She quotes regularly from his autobiographical work, “The Goshawk”, and it is interesting to compare his rather stilted prose with her own flowing style. Both authors train their goshawks in an attempt to escape from their own, rather different, worldly problems, to escape the challenges of the present (and, in the case of White, the past) by taking on a new challenge.

What makes this book stand out amongst its counterparts? Undoubtedly it is her nature writing, her passion for looking at life from the goshawk’s point of view, for moving into, understanding, breaking down and finally escaping its instinct-driven world, for both creating and analysing the bond between human and wild animal and finally for expressing the beauty of the natural world that both share, which raises this work to a higher level. Her training of the goshawk not only gave her the chance to put aside the grief at her father’s death but also to demonstrate, both to herself and the reader, how a close bond with the natural world can enrich the human soul.                       

Conclusions and Learning Points

“H is for Hawk” is part biography, part autobiography but predominantly a very powerful piece of nature writing, which explores the bond between people and wild animals in a similar manner to Gavin Maxwell’s “Ring of Bright Water” or Paul Gallico’s “The Snow Goose”. Her ability to show how nature can connect with the human soul establishes her as one of a (sadly dwindling) group of outstanding nature writers (Richard Mabey immediately springs to mind), but her mastery of the written word and obvious research skills must also provide a platform for her, if she wishes, to become a successful writer in a number of other genres, including fiction.

My specific learning point from this book was in the expert way in which MacDonald expresses how nature (and in particular wild animals) can stir the human soul. This achievement must be incredibly difficult: very few nature writers can accomplish it successfully. I have striven to express the empathy that people have with wild birds in my major project, by photographing the interactions between birds and the people feeding them. Birds are, as MacDonald describes, instinct driven. They can learn to overcome their fear of man and accept the food on offer, because they need food to survive. On the other hand people feeding birds can feel and express emotions relating to altruism, satisfaction, success; even fear. If I can express these emotions (which I also feel when feeding wild birds) in my photographic output in a similar manner to the way in which MacDonald uses words then the question “what do wild birds do for us?” can be successfully answered.