Tags
Autobiography, Birds, Book Review, Books about Books, Falconry, H is for Hawk, Helen MacDonald, The Natural World
Love, death and the wild, wide world
Helen MacDonald’s aching, raw story of loss and relationship speaks so much of longing that reading it is as much about being fed, sustained by grief, as her hawk is fed by the death it has dealt. Indeed the two, love and death, are linked.
We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost
We love because we will lose, or be lost to, that which we love. It’s the presence of death which fiercens the love. Mabel, Helen’s hawk, is of course overwhelmingly real – but that reality is thickened by all the metaphors accreting to her. The potency is the potency of what the hawk represents, in history, in literature, in imagination to us.
To me she was bright, vital, secure in her place in the world. Every tiny part of her was boiling with life, as if from a distance you could see a plume of steam around her, coiling and ascending and making everything around her slightly blurred, so she stood out in fierce, corporeal detail. The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away, There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only, and that was my refuge
There are 3 major strands in this book. The first, which created or re-created all the rest, is the loss of MacDonald’s father, Alisdair MacDonald, the photojournalist, and the bottomless grief that brought a sundering of relationship, an absence.
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will be a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are
As a child, MacDonald had been obsessed, possessed by falcons, birds of prey, and then, specifically, the goshawk. So the second strand is the making of relationship. She returns to everything that initial possession was about, and engages on building a relationship with a goshawk. Which she discovers can only be done by negating herself, becoming an absence, as, initially, in any way, the presence of human is too harsh for the incredibly highly charged, responsive, awareness of a terrified hawk. Human space can only become tolerable to hawk by the patience to not intrude
And, finally, she examines another writer T.H. White. White was also a passionate hawker. He was a man painfully within his challenging contradictions. Like the goshawk, one with a charged, reactive nervous system. White had recorded his own story of relationship with goshawk, The Goshawk. I hope that the success of MacDonald’s book encourages the re-publishing of White’s, as I’m now anxious to read it.
Much of White’s account (there are plenty of extracts in MacDonald’s book) is dark, anguished, irrational. And much of MacDonald’s book is also outside the rational – there are many accounts of her vivid dreams, the boiling of raging emotions, the unendurable overwhelm of feeling. But this is part of the power of this book. We are not creatures of reason alone, reason the visible tip of a fiery iceberg beneath.
MacDonald’s book was another one of those which I read with a sense of some deep value I can’t articulate – through a mist of weeping. The value is that of having, often, no idea at all of the why of that weeping. All I can say is that, for me, weeping without any obvious, recognisable emotion behind the weeping is a way in which my body seems to respond to something being named from a place of authenticity. Reason says ‘I don’t understand’ but, on some deep level, the fabric of my being responded
In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.
A book this raw and personal somehow calls forth the raw and personal response from the reader. I would have liked to have read it slowly and savouringly, and maybe this is what I’ll be able to do, at some point, on a re-read, as I know the writing is very fine, and the information, about hawks, landscapes, T.H. White, and more, of interest. But I was not able to read it like that. Instead, a savage gulping down of chunks of it, thrown this way and that by feeling and sensation. Longing, I suppose. That desire to experience the world through the sinews of some other than human understanding.
Wonderful review! I’m waiting on this coming out on paperback as I suspect that it’ll be a book I want to keep; one of the chaps who I’m friendly with in Waterstones says it’s out this month in p/bk. I read an interview with the author last week, when she spoke of buying Mabel – naively, I hadn’t realised you could buy and sell birds of prey; I thought you’d have to register them or something! It’s a memoir that comes from a strange angle, rather like The Hare With Amber Eyes (which I so adored!) Great to see such an unusual book capturing the public’s imagination. Where I grew up, there were a lot of buzzards, some golden eagles; they were fine. But since they controversially reintroduced the massive sea eagles by the loch right behind my dad’s farm he – and his farmer friends – are in a constant state of anger (although it doesn’t take much to get my dad like that!) over lambs going missing. The hills used to be full of rabbits and hares; you never see them now. It’s a fine line between looking after wildlife, and looking after people’s livelihoods. Anyway, glad you enjoyed this, and I’ll look forward to getting my paws on it soon!
I got it on Kindle, and as you can tell did a lot of reading! What you say is very pertinent, there are so often conflicts of interest and we swing from one extreme to another, often.
I’m entranced by the chest of the bird. It really looks like a crusader in chain mail
Fabulous review! This is one of these books I wish I wanted to read, but know absolutely it’s not for me. I wonder if it’s because of what you say in your second paragraph – for me, the knowledge of inevitable loss is more likely to deter me from being open to love rather than being a reason to love. Of course, that means the holes left by absences don’t get filled… unless one can find people to love who by their youth are likely to outlive one. The major argument for children…
Or learning to love tortoises from the Galapagos Isles. Though it does seem to be a long way to travel.
I think it was seeing the stage version of Shadowlands, with Nigel Hawthorne, about C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, which had a very profound affect on me, over time, and really made me think and feel that loss was not only the price to be paid, but that without the awareness of loss, an intense savouring of the moment we have can’t happen. That play (but not the film, despite good performances) rather burned its way into my thinking, in a way i only really realised when i saw it many years later in a revival, and had a sense of where I had been, and where I was currently. Inevitably, I bawled my eyes out, both times, but with very different emotions
What a beautifully written review. I really want to read this, and your review has just nudged it higher up my TBR 🙂
Thank you Madamebibliophile. It’s certainly a book which kind of raises the sensibilities of its readers I think, taking them into a more intense and awake state of mind.
Wow! Such intensity! The first and third sets of quotes just knocked my socks off. I will find this and take a little “book walk” to see if it’s for me. That is, after I find my socks.
Go sockless Jilanne, or cover your tootsies in a spare pair of mittens.
It’s some book, for sure, and a worthy winner of its prizes.
Do you think this would work as an audio book? Im looking for audio books I can take on holiday with me
Definitely. Though in some ways I’m not the person to ask, as I’m not really an audio book fan, simply because the pace of them is not flexible enough compared to reading from the page for me. Plus of course, it depends enormously on the reader. But in theory as a one person memoir, this should work better than many audio books
Loved this book – a truly original and moving memoir.
Yes, it was stunning, wasn’t it.
Reblogged this on Richmond Hill Reading @ The Roebuck and commented:
We were evenly divided on this book last night but as we are book champions I’m reblogging this insightful post which I found very helpful.
Thank you Christine