Making your way from grief to life
Helen Macdonald’s astonishing new memoir recounts how a hawk named Mabel helped her heal
In his 1992 song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” It’s a powerful line, likely drawing on Cohen’s Zen practice and its emphasis on the fleeting nature of happiness and perfection — either material or emotional — while allowing for a glimpse, a possibility, of spiritual awakening, of rebirth.
Curiously, it is those lines which come to mind when reading H is for Hawk, the much-hyped, utterly astonishing new memoir from English writer Helen Macdonald, which was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the Costa Book of the Year Award following its publication in the U.K. last year.
It is, on the surface, a straightforward enough story. Macdonald, in the final year of a fellowship at Cambridge, is struck down by the death of her father, with whom she was very close. “Normal grief, they call it. That’s what this was. An uneventful, slow climb back into life after loss. It’ll be healed soon. I still break into a wry smile thinking of how blithely I believed this, because I was so terribly wrong.”
In her sorrow, when “the world itself started to grieve,” Macdonald buys a goshawk to train, meeting a breeder from Northern Ireland with a bundle of cash for a transaction that looks like nothing so much as a drug deal. That goshawk, whom Macdonald names Mabel, is the light that seeps through the rent of her grief.
Deciding to train a bird of prey might seem extreme to most readers, but it was, in one way, a safe choice for Macdonald: as a child, she was fascinated by falcons and falconers and she grew up to be a trainer herself. She had never trained a goshawk, though. “They unnerved me,” she writes. “They were things of death and difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets.” Her decision was never a rational one. “There would be a goshawk,” she writes, as if it were a simple, unquestionable fact. H is for Hawk chronicles her loving
training of Mabel, the fastidious care she lavishes upon the bird, and the startling intimacy they share. Recounted in precise, perfect prose, the book attains a sense of poetry, drawing the reader into an alien world, immersing them in words and ideas utterly foreign, a world in which beauty and brutality blur together to create something vital, something thrumming with a steady pulse.
As it progresses, the book — like Macdonald’s experience — lifts from grief into the fullness of life, richly described and deeply felt.
But H is for Hawk is more than just a memoir of grief and salvation, more than just the story of a woman and her bird. Unavoidably, it becomes part of a tradition of English nature writing — which includes such books as Gavin Maxwell’s
Ring of Bright Water — which chronicles the close, cross-species relationships between human beings and their animal companions. Macdonald recognizes this, but holds it up for examination: over the course of the book and Mabel’s training, she explores the experiences of T.H. White, and his own chronicle of training,
The Goshawk.
White’s book serves as a touchstone for Macdonald’s work with Mabel, but as a negative influence: unlike Macdonald’s loving care, White’s approach to training is uninformed, brutal and, ultimately, unsuccessful.
In unpacking The Goshawk, however, Macdonald slips into a biography of White, the man who would go on to create the immortal Arthurian epic The
Once and Future King. Her sadness, it seems, draws her to a man whose life was atragedy of concealment and solitude. “It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.” As she rises, it seems, White falls, and her heartbreak finds a place to rest, a fellow austringer, a fellow soul, lost in the darkness.
H is for Hawk defies easy description and categorization; every reader will take something different from it and few will remain untouched. It is also a book which is impossible to recommend highly enough. It is the sort of book which will not only be read, but will be urgently pressed on loved ones, imploringly shared. Unsurprisingly, Macdonald says it best. “Looking for goshawks,” she writes, in the book’s first chapter, “is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”
Indeed.
Robert J. Wiersema’s new novel, Black Feathers, will be published in August.