Storybook Saturdays - H is for Hawk (2014) by Helen MacDonald

The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life. I was turning into a hawk.

Looks like you’re getting another double-bill of posts today – as I wanted to get an early night yesterday and, to be honest, I felt this review needed the time to be done right – but also, as I mentioned on Friday, it’s a double-bill of goshawks as I introduce you to Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. This is the first book I have reviewed this year which I haven’t already read which made for a nice change. I honestly didn’t know what to expect except that there would be a hawk involved and it deals with the theme of grief, but oh there is so much more!

The story is autobiographical, MacDonald walking us through the scenery of her life following the death of her father and how, as an experienced falconer, she takes on the challenge of training a goshawk, a notoriously difficult bird, as a way of coping with her grief. It is, at times, a very dark fall down the proverbial rabbit hole, as MacDonald begins to feel herself withdrawing into the world of her hawk and away from society, metaphorically becoming a hawk herself. This is illustrated by a continued theme of ‘burning’ from feeling as if her own ‘humanity was burning away’ to her goshawk, Mabel, being like ‘the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle’, ‘a fire that burned my hurts away.’ It is as if, without knowing it, her cure (the hawk) is more of a curse. But as I read, I believe I was made just as blind to MacDonald’s self-sabotage as her, because the way she describes Mabel, and the countryside around her, is simply spellbinding.

Almost 2 whole pages are dedicated to the unveiling of Mabel from which this line stuck with me:

her wild eyes were the colour of sun on white paper, and they stared because the whole world had fallen into them at once.

She is a ‘cappuccino samurai’, ‘a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass’ with ‘hot hawk breath’ that ‘smells of pepper and musk and burned stone’, a deadly set of sensory descriptors which almost seem at odds with Mabel’s adorable playfulness. These latter scenes of Mabel, playing with balls of paper and shivering with happiness, seem to childishly personify her – which, given she is a young bird, kind of makes sense. It also sheds some light onto the otherwise bleak landscape of MacDonald’s life, as too does the beauty of the landscape itself, so uniquely rendered through the senses that I wondered if she wasn’t a hawk after all. I mean who else could see ‘a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come’, distinguish each bird call with a different verb, or label the smells of the forest as a ‘Goshawk cocktail’?

And then there is the way past, present and future thread their way through the entire story courtesy of the main male figures in her life: her father, and T H White, author of The Goshawk.

In a way the latter man’s story (set in the late 30s), which she weaves with her own – in an admittedly less colourful fashion – is almost a repetition of her own, at times even written in the present tense to further confuse you. Both MacDonald and White find themselves raising goshawks in a simultaneous act of running away from, yet holding on to, life; a way to ‘stop the loss’, as MacDonald puts it, as if she were uncontrollably bleeding. Their efforts inevitably turn their hawks into mirrors of themselves through grief and ignorance – White often mistreating his so badly I felt sick – but their stories serve as a lesson on the boundary between human and animal, and ultimately what it means to be human. Her father’s involvement, meanwhile, is of a much gentler kind, evoked in memories which often tie past, present, and future together in a single paragraph. He is the reason she loves birds – himself a keen plane-spotter – the evidence of his life still litters hers, both physically and mentally, and by the end White’s goshawk even seems to symbolise her father, not dead but simply lost. I find it mildly amusing that this book, when paired with my previous two reviews, makes a trio of stories with prominent father figures, just as my first three were about orphans. Whatever next?

This significance of the past also gives the book a sense of magic, imbued by the folklore of the landscape and the hawks themselves, MacDonald’s childhood memories, and the continual references to one of White’s most famed works, ‘The Sword in the Stone’. There is a repetition of the words ‘fairy’, ‘fey’ ‘feral’ and ‘ferox’ throughout which help to reinforce this feeling of eldritch mysticism. But, on the flipside, the past also creates an inescapable gloom of grief and dissociation which saturates the story with unease, manifests in long panicked sentences or disjointed snippets of sensation and action. I felt at times alienated, frightened and even familiar with the way MacDonald viewed life through the lens of her depression – ‘I could not hear my mother’s pain. I could not feel my own’. So it made me glad to see how much brighter her world is painted when Mabel is around, how she describes the hawk as her ‘soul’, even comparing this notion and the pain of separation to the daemons in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a comparison I rejoiced in having read this series myself.

For a story whose overarching theme is of death, not only her father’s but those associated with the hawk and the hunt, H is for Hawk manages to lessen the blow without sugar-coating it. There is still visceral detail – ‘blood upwells as she breaks into [a rabbit’s] chest […] horrible, mesmerising, seeping claret filling up the space’ – but this is softened by MacDonald’s mercy-killing of Mabel’s prey to prevent it being eaten alive, and the occasional juxtaposition of making tea in the kitchen ‘where a dead white rabbit is defrosting like a soft toy in an evidence bag’. Then there is her father’s death which, while sudden, is never made to feel real. It is as if MacDonald were still a child, believing her father is ‘somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead’ and all she needs to do is ‘find him and bring him home’. In a way, it feels like MacDonald has written a fairy tale for adults, with all the grit and reality of life nestled next to the warm safety and fantasy of nature.