Helen Macdonald’s new essays are no flights of fancy, as she examines who has the right to define and be the gatekeepers to the natural world. By Susan Mansfield
‘Imust introduce you to my parrot,” Helen Macdonald says. “He’ll interrupt, he always does.” And sure enough, mid-interview, Birdoole, a green-cheeked parakeet, hops down on to her finger and pins me with a steady black eye before flying up to perch on the arm of her angle-poise lamp.
It feels appropriate to find Macdonald in the company of a bird, albeit a very different one from goshawk Mabel, the subject of her best-selling 2014 memoir H is for Hawk. The book, which charts Macdonald’s journey training the bird in the aftermath of her father’s sudden death, won the Samuel Johnson Award and Costa Book Award.
Success came as a shock to Macdonald, who thought she’d written a book so uncategorisable no-one would read it at all. She says now: “I don’t think I really understood what was happening, I was just walking around grinning and being bewildered by it all.”
There were benefits – “I’m now driving a car that doesn’t break down every ten miles” – but what has had the biggest impact on her has been the contact with readers, the chance to hear others’ stories.
She has also realised there are things she wants to say and, in her new book, a collection of essays called Vesper Flights, she is starting to say them. While sharing many of the qualities of H is for Hawk – frankness, reflective thinking, formidable powers of observation and wordcraft – it has something else too: a political edge.
“We’re taught to assume that nature is entirely free of class and politics and society,” she says. “We use it as this refuge from these other human things, but actually it’s packed with them, in our minds. We use it to prove the rightness of our own assumptions about ourselves and about the world.”
Macdonald has spent lockdown at her home in an “absurdly chocolate-boxy” village in Suffolk (“People assume that I’ve been spending all my time walking around under the clouds and staring at hedgerows, but I have been eating a lot of ice cream and watching a lot of action movies as well!”). She is intrigued by talk of the resurgence of nature during the pandemic, “as if we started to look for animals when we hadn’t really had any interest in looking for them before, and suddenly there they were”.
No observation of nature is neutral, she says. In times of resurgent national feeling (the word “Brexit” hovers over our conversation), we look askance at “invasive species”. In the 1930s, Norfolk farmers shot skylarks when they found they had flown over from Germany. Class hypocrisy is there too: men in marginalised communities are vilified for keeping caged songbirds, while landowners clipping the wings of waterfowl are happily ignored. Macdonald says: “There is always that question of who has the right to define the natural world? Who has the right to interact with it and how? Those are the big questions for me because so much of it is about power and class and race and gender.”
In one essay, Macdonald recounts a journey on the Thames with a group of men engaged in the ancient ceremonial pursuit of “swan upping” (catching and marking the birds for their owner, in most cases the Queen). She went feeling cynical, but came back with a sense of respect for the fieldcraft of the swan uppers, and a renewed love for the riverside landscape. However, she retains a healthy suspicion about the power of national myths: “When a country is hurting it very often reaches for an idea of itself anchored in some golden imagined past, and those stories are always dangerous, I think, because they always exclude people.”
In another essay, she describes vividly the place she grew up, when her parents – both journalists – bought a cottage on a crumbling estate in Surrey owned by the Theosophical Society. Wandering at liberty in this semi-wild environment, she says, turned her into a naturalist. “It had formal gardens and parkland and meadows and forest, and I just ran riot across it. I’d be in trouble