[REVIEW] H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

300 pages, $26.00, hardcover

Review by Cate Hennessey

All great books are works of obsession, but Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk grasps obsession with its elegant, terrifying claws and carries it to the wild intersection of loneliness, grief, falconry, and literature.

After her father’s sudden death, MacDonald attempts to assuage her grief by training a young goshawk she names Mabel. Despite her experience training falcons, Macdonald doubts her ability with the goshawk, a notoriously difficult raptor. But in doubt is often where we find ourselves most alive, and Macdonald is no exception.

The first time we meet Mabel is the first time an apprehensive and shattered Macdonald meets her, too: “She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers.” It is impossible not to fall in love with language like this, just as it is impossible not to fall in love (and awe and terror) with Mabel. Macdonald’s book is at its finest and most alive when the goshawk appears on its pages.

The narrative of Mabel’s training is woven with a fascinating history of falconry, one as difficult and enchanting as the goshawk itself. But the book contains another, unexpected facet. While Macdonald is driven to Mabel first by grief, a secondary impulse comes from literature: T.H. White’s book, The Goshawk. Better known as the author of The Sword and the Stone, White’s memoir chronicles his painfully inept and disastrous attempt to train a goshawk. Macdonald, through Mabel, in some ways wants to atone for White’s shortcomings, but too she sees White’s contradictory and troublesome impulses in herself. Her fascination and revulsion lead to a deeply researched account of White’s life and psychology. The result is a fiercely intelligent and deeply empathetic examination of what it means to dig into the books that have formed who we are, and to carry with us writers who both enthrall and unsettle us.

Whereas T.H. White fights his goshawk in a battle of wills, Macdonald’s answer to her search for healing is to become her hawk. To become wild. Rather than emerge from her grief, she spirals into it as Mabel gains ground in her training, and the two become hunting partners. It becomes difficult to tell where Mabel ends and Macdonald begins, and the resulting examination of what it means to hunt and kill is perhaps the most honest accounting of humanity I’ve read. It is also perhaps no surprise that the descriptions of England’s countryside are those of a woman whose self becomes anchored to field and thicket.

If there is anything to quibble about in H is for Hawk, it might be that some sections about T.H. White go on a bit long and made me peek to the pages where Mabel returns. But this is part of the book’s intent: to fixate over every angle of a thing, or creature, or emotion, and get it right – no matter the world’s reaction to what you’re up to. It’s not that Macdonald doesn’t care about others; on the contrary, she is acutely aware of how she and Mabel look to others (particularly the Cambridge campus police); she worries that she might seem like a fool to her falconry friends when she has trouble with Mabel; and despite Macdonald’s best efforts, Mabel sometimes trespasses onto others’ lands and kills captive pheasants. Throughout the narrative, Macdonald shows us that the wild is a place where, even when we try our best, we make mistakes. This, for her, a research scholar, was difficult to accept, nearly as difficult as her father’s death. But when she writes, Macdonald goes full force and gives all of her obsessions the passion and time they deserve – because she must. Because the wild – whether grief, hawk, or literature – is nearly too large to explain. Because “[T]he wild can be human work.”

***

Cate Hennessey’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, where she writes a column on the intersection of life and literature. Noted in Best American Essays, she has been a finalist for the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction.