What really drew me in though was Macdonald’s reaction to losing her father. Mabel herself is a magnetic presence throughout the book: aloof from the concerns of humans she is still the element that pulls everything together, and there’s such a lot to draw together, so many ideas, images, bits of history and myth reading a book like this is an adventure.
There are enough defrosting day old chicks and episodes of bloodshed, often Helen’s own, to rub some of the glamour from the idea of falconry, but not enough to truly rob it of its romance. To the lay person it’s a fascinating insight into an ancient art complete with its own arcane language. Training Mabel is at first a distraction from Macdonald’s grief, and later its progress an indication to her that she’s not coping well with it (eventually she’s diagnosed with depression).
H is for Hawk has a sort of potted biography of White running through it as well as feeling like a conversation with him at times. White and his account of life with a goshawk ( The Goshawk). Meanwhile, she also develops something of an obsession, if that isn’t too strong a word, with T. She acquires a young female, calls her Mabel – meaning loveable – and starts to absorb herself into the hawk’s life. Helen, who has already had a career as a falconer, finds herself dreaming about goshawks and decides that what she needs to do is train one, so that’s what she does. There’s no distraction from grief, but plenty of opportunity for crisis. When he dies unexpectedly from a heart attack whilst out on a job (he was a photo journalist) Helen is in her mid to late thirties, has no partner, no children, no 9-5 job (I believe she was a research fellow at Cambridge at the time) and no permanent home of her own. It’s hard to pin down exactly what sort of a book it is – I’ve seen it described as journalism, nature writing, a bird book, a misery memoir (which annoyed me), it’s part biography, part autobiography, has elements of a training manual, touches on philosophy and is in every way more than the sum of its parts, but very briefly it’s an account of the authors life as she comes to terms with the death of her father. I was initially attracted to this book by it’s absolutely stunning cover (I have a soft spot for William Nicholson so enjoyed the homage) which in turn made me open it with a little bit of caution – could it be as good as the cover made me want it to be? It was, it made me look things up, think, cry (somehow always in public places), occasionally laugh, buy a copy of T H White’s The Once And Future King, and follow Helen Macdonald on twitter.
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