Review: "H Is for Hawk," Helen Macdonald

By Paul Carrier

British writer, naturalist and scholar Helen Macdonald was devastated when her father died suddenly in 2007, at the age of 67. MacDonald was 37 at the time, unmarried, childless, and about to lose her home once her fellowship at Cambridge University expired.

Already an accomplished falconer and the author of a book on falcons, Macdonald coped with her grief by adopting and training a female goshawk, Mabel. It was a yearlong experience that she chronicles in H Is for Hawk, a stunning accomplishment that seamlessly melds multiple genres in a memoir graced by great insight and rapturous writing.

“While the backbone of the book is a memoir about that year when I lost my father and trained a hawk, there are also other things tangled up in that story which are not memoir,” including nature writing, Macdonald told The Guardian newspaper in 2014. “I was trying to let these different genres speak to each other.”

Macdonald has been obsessed with birds since childhood, particularly birds of prey. Before her father’s death, MacDonald writes, she shared falconry’s historical prejudice against goshawks as “ruffians,” dangerous creatures who were “difficult to tame, sulky (and) fractious” birds with “solitudinous, murderous eyes.”

Still, Macdonald vividly recalled the first time she saw trained goshawks, back when she was 12 years old. And although she had read many standard reference books on falconry as a child, she continued to be haunted by The Goshawk, a first-person account from the 1930s by T. H. White, of The Once and Future King fame.

Macdonald writes that White did a lousy job of training his goshawk; he didn’t know what he was doing. Yet she felt an affinity for him and some appreciation for why he decided to take on the task, even if he botched it badly. So she weaves her story on parallel tracks, exploring White’s troubled life and his unfortunate experiences with Gos, as his hawk was named, while also recounting what Macdonald went through with Mabel. That includes an indelible account of the moment Macdonald's hawk, which was raised at an aviary in Belfast, emerged from her box upon delivery.

“Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”

H Is for Hawk builds to a heart-stopping turning point when Macdonald decides — or at least hopes — she has finally invested enough time and effort in training Mabel to allow her to fly freely, without being tethered. It is the moment in which the author discovers whether Mabel will choose to return. She does, and more adrenalin-pumping adventures follow.

Macdonald deepens our understanding of the relationships that can exist between humans and animals, taking it far beyond the lighthearted realm of mischievous puppy memoirs. Hawks, after all, are killing machines, and even in captivity they are raised to hunt. To release a trained hawk, Macdonald writes, is to “let slip havoc and murder.” When Mabel sees a pigeon flying overhead, "the hawk is transformed. It's as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged." One favorable review described H Is for Hawk as a “nearly feral book.”

Yet Mabel proves to be playful, and perhaps even affectionate, though by no means cuddly. Consumed by inconsolable grief, Macdonald becomes so preoccupied with her single-minded devotion to Mabel that she seems to be trying to escape into the hawk’s world, only to discover, in the end, that Mabel helped her reclaim her humanity.

“I wanted to be like a hawk, and the book traces this very strange psychological transference,” Macdonald told The Washington Post last year. Hawks “come across as being very unlike us, very self-possessed, very powerful beings. But you can communicate with them, and that relationship between these two very different souls is what falconry is all about.”

H Is for Hawk is nothing short of dazzling, a triumphant, soul-baring blend of memoir, biography, falconry, and natural history.