Woodland hawks tell tale of life and death
FORTY-FIVE minutes’ drive northeast of Cambridge is a landscape Helen Macdonald has come to love.
As she writes in the opening lines of H Is For Hawk, a wonderful non-fiction memoir of training a hawk and a diary of grief, mourning the sudden loss of her photojournalist father, she describes it as a land of twisted pines, burned-out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases.
It is called the Brecklands – the broken lands – and it is where she ends up early one morning after waking at 5am, dressing and taking off in her “frozen, ancient Volkswagen’’ on a whim.
Halfway down the motorway she realises where she is heading and why – she is going in search of goshawks.
“In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats,’’ she writes. “Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail.’’
She waits patiently in this broken wilderness and eventually sees a couple.
“I smelt ice and bracken stems and pine resin. Goshawk cocktail. They were on the soar,’’ she writes, and describes a scene in which initially the birds are being mobbed by crows “and they just didn’t care, like, whatever’’.
“But they were loving the space between each other and carving it into all sorts of beautiful concentric chords and distances.’’
As quickly as they appear, the goshawks disappear into the wood. H IS FOR HAWK Author: Helen Macdonald Publisher: Vintage/Random House RRP: $29.99
She recalls her impatience as a child in the forest with her father looking for sparrowhawks. Her dad explained patience to her, but the little girl only heard a lecture.
Years later, after waiting for the goshawks, she understands the lesson – “I was patient and the hawks came’’.
A few weeks later her mother calls and breaks the news her father has died.
And so begins Macdonald’s tale – beautifully written with the detail of a Cambridge historian and the eloquence of a gifted author.
She decides she wants to train a goshawk and from the moment she first describes the creature that will become an integral part of her life, we understand two things – her quest will be anything but plain sailing as woman and hawk both learn important lessons, and there is an intensity and power to her writing that grabs even the most reluctant of non-fiction readers.
As she first lays eyes on the hawk, Macdonald is reminded of: “A fallen angel. A griffin from the pages of an illuminated bestiary’’.
This book, like her bird, is “something bright and distant, like gold falling through water’’ – a bit like reconciling life and death, for which the book is a metaphor. Verdict: B is for brilliant.
IT would have to be the height of optimism: gifting a terminally ill Terry Pratchett a fivebook contract to be co-written with hard science-fiction impresario Stephen Baxter based on a short story idea Prachett had in the 1980s. Of course Prachett, that prankster, got the last laugh, dying three books in.
The Long Utopia, the third in this series, is a bit like the worlds the authors create, with too many options, too little exploration, not enough drama and you feel you need to read the first two to grasp the third.
But who knows? Maybe in another world it’s a ripper.