“Vesper Flights” sees wonder — and refuge — in the natural world
Vesper Flights
“What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle- class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge!”
That’s Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, in 2008, memorably assailing the stereotypical English nature writer. I wonder if he has ever recovered. Does he hobble over the hill now, a bit sheepishly? That tourist, she depicts him, who struts into the country, pen drawn, ready to “discover” the wilderness, to tame it with his “civilized lyrical words.”
He’s a soft and obvious target, almost too easy to clown, but Jamie’s criticism is subtler than it might first appear. It’s not his maleness that incriminates him; it’s those two adjectives, so delicately damning — “lone, enraptured.”
We see “solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature,” Helen Macdonald writes in her new book, “Vesper Flights.” “But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.”
What’s that coming over the hill? The polymathic Macdonald — historian of science, naturalist, poet, illustrator and one- time falcon breeder for the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. Macdonald is the author of the internationally bestselling memoir “H Is for Hawk” ( 2015), winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. She could be the twin sister of the Lone Enraptured Male (“From Cambridge!” applies), but instead her work is an antidote to so much romantic, reductive writing about the natural world as pristine, secret, uninhabited — as a convenient blank canvas for the hero’s journey of self- discovery.
Macdonald’s writing teems with other voices and perspectives, with her own challenges to herself. It muddies any facile ideas about nature and the human, and prods at how we pleat our prejudices, politics and desires into our notions of the animal world. There’s nothing of the tourist or bystander in her approach. She has been an amateur naturalist from girlhood — so bird- besotted that she slept with her arms folded like wings. She grew up wandering forests, collecting feathers, seeds and the skulls of small animals. Her bedroom menagerie included an orphaned crow, a badger cub, a wounded jackdaw and a whole nest of baby bullfinches.
Hers is a gritty, companionable intimacy with the wild.
At one point, she mentions a fox allergy discovered while “skinning a road- killed fox to turn into a rug.”
Macdonald describes her new book as a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of wonders that is itself “concerned with the quality of wonder.” The book required moral courage: “Some of the ways in which I try to talk about class, about privilege, about climate change — I think I would have been too scared to have done that a few years ago,” she has said. If such an admission feels surprising, given how common are her critiques of Brexit and the mounting xenophobia in her country, it’s wise to remember that she’s a writer with a preternatural drive for self- concealment.
The essays in “Vesper Flights,” several of which were first published in The New York Times Magazine, are short, varied and highly edible, some only a page or two long. Macdonald experiments with tempo and style, as if testing out different altitudes and finding she can fly at just about any speed, in any direction, with any aim she likes, so supple is her style. She writes about migration patterns and storms, nests as a metaphor for the domestic and the danger of using nature as metaphor at all. I was reminded of the goshawk, so thickly plumed, so powerful that it can bring down a deer, and yet it weighs only a few pounds. These are the very paradoxes of Macdonald’s prose — its lightness and force.
The pieces carve similar paths. Macdonald examines how an animal or natural phenomenon illuminates something in her own life, or on the national stage. An essay on her childhood habit of collecting nests twines with her youthful skepticism of domesticity, how nests render birds — exhilarating in their freedom — suddenly so painfully vulnerable. A riff on hares winds into a meditation on global warming. And then, in almost every essay, an unusual move: She takes a step back to confront what it means to use the natural world as a mirror, and how we might learn to appreciate the nonhuman in its own right.
That step back, that act of revision, of re- seeing, provides the book with its chief animating drama: Macdonald getting things wrong. She cheerfully charts her errors in judgment, her bungles, her myopia. “Vesper Flights” is a document of learning to see, of growing past useful defenses of diversion and escape.
For its wry self- deprecation, “Vesper Flights” is a book thick with sorrow, an elegy in the midst of the sixth great extinction underway.