You learn a lot about hawks in this memoir as Macdonald has an encyclopaedic knowledge of them and the noble bird is a surprisingly fascinating subject. On first seeing the hawk emerge from the box she hilariously remarks: “She came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.” Goshawks are notoriously more difficult to train than falcons – which are the only birds she’s trained before. She decides to acquire a goshawk which she names Mabel. Whenever she encounters people she may think vicious or antisocial thoughts, but then acts quite civil and nice to them. In reality, I doubt she was as introverted as she makes out in the book. She writes: “What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later.” In making a retrospective survey of this emotional time period she organizes her thoughts about her unique process for dealing with death and finds profound universal meaning.Īfter she receives the shocking news of her father’s death, Macdonald gradually turns inward and becomes something of a recluse. Macdonald writes about approximately a year of her life in relation to these three subjects and the result is something which is devastatingly powerful.
They seem totally disparate subjects on the surface, but White also had a great affinity for hawks and wrote a book about his (bungled) experiences trying to train one. White (famed author of “The Once and Future King”). There’s a tremendous immediacy and directness to it – probably because she often addresses the reader as “you.” In this memoir she makes meaningful connections between her experience trying to train a newly-acquired young goshawk, the process of grieving for her father and the fascinatingly sombre life and writings of T.H. To tell the truth, Helen Macdonald’s writing is so graceful and clever (yet highly approachable) that I would be interested in any subject she writes about. But almost immediately the author reveals it’s also about the death of her father and the grief of dealing with this fact.
Since it’s all about falcons I wasn’t sure it was going to interest me. I had started reading Maria Semple’s re-released novel “This One is Mine” and didn’t find it that engaging so I switched to this book. Do you ever read a book and are so intensely involved with it that it feels like a whole year has gone by rather than just a few hours? That was my experience reading “H is for Hawk.” I only started it on Monday and have been totally engrossed reading it during every spare minute that I can find.
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