H Is for Hawk
2006
- grief
- spirituality
- hawks
- falconry
- goshawk
- spiritual life
- goshawks
- white, t. h. (terence hanbury), 1906-1964
- authors, biography
- lgbtq biography and memoir
The story
When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, Helen had never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk, but in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself "in the hawk's wild mind to tame her" tested the limits of Macdonald's humanity and changed her life.
What it’s like
Late-autumn English fields and moorland rendered in close, exacting prose, with long passages of weather, grass, and the bird's stillness set against a sharp, wry voice that moves between the present and the 1930s. The reading mood is quiet and absorbing, cool and damp in tone, with sudden flashes of fierce hunting energy: a goshawk tearing into a rabbit or streaking low across a hedgerow is described with an unflinching eye. Its emotional register is grief-stricken and spare, working slowly through loss, obsession, and the strange intimacy of training a wild thing, and its people's arc is a woman gradually loosening her hold on sorrow by surrendering to a ruthless, untamed companion. Violence is present but never gratuitous: animal killing and a few moments of bodily strain are described plainly, with occasional sharp images and no gore for its own sake. Best suited to a slow, rainy afternoon or a long train journey with a cup of tea, for readers drawn to nature writing, literary memoir, and reflections on mourning, lovers of hawks and English countryside, and anyone who likes their sadness tinged with wildness and wit.
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