Well this little gem of a memoir is definitely making my end of year best books list. I usually view nonfiction as a (sometimes enjoyable) chore, but this one latched onto my heart and wouldn’t let go. Macdonald’s writing is both electric and soothing. Apparently she’s written poetry in the past and from her lyrical writing style, I can believe it. This woman has a way with words.
And birds. H is for Hawk is about the year after her father died when she became obsessed with the idea of training a goshawk. She’d been a falconer all her life, but had never attempted training this fierce, wild bird. She adopts a bird she calls Mabel (“There’s a superstition among falconers that a hawk’s ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all.”) and their relationship becomes a lifeline as Macdonald deals with her expansive grief. You wouldn’t think a book about training a hawk would be very interesting, but the book is absolutely riveting until the very end. Throughout her story she weaves a mini-biography of the writer T.H. White who wrote The Goshawk as well as The Once and Future King series. Just like Macdonald, White attempted training a goshawk as a way to work through issues in his life. Their stories intertwine in fascinating ways.
There are no words to tell you how beautiful the writing is in H is for Hawk except Macdonald’s own words.
Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.
It’s so beautiful that it makes my heart twist. One more.
Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.
But H is for Hawk is more than just beautiful prose. The way she weaves her grief around jaw dropping naturalist writing and then connects it to White’s life years ago is masterful. This is a memoir unlike any I’ve ever read before. Something fresh, exciting, and new.
