Book review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

If H is for Hawk, then Hawk is for Hope, Hunger, Mania and Wildness.

Helen Macdonald, a middle-aged Cambridge professor, archaeologist, falconer and poet, loses her way when her photo journalist father dies of heart attack. She starts dreaming hawks--about hawks, of hawks, with hawks again and again, till hawks became her inevitable. So, her self-prescribed 800-pound sterling worth antidote for her father’s death: training a “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier” goshawk. (Goshawks are the most secretive and bloodthirsty of the Hawk family.)

The goshawk becomes Mabel. “My heart jumped sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.” writes Macdonald when she encounters Mabel. You meet Mabel. Mabel becomes the anchor of her life. Mabel becomes your anchor to the book. Thus begins the intense, demanding, and transforming journey with Mabel.

As Macdonald has no peers who have successfully trained a goshawk, she starts referring old books where authors have written their personal experiences or a guide book of sorts. But she keeps going back one particular book, The Goshawk. That book chronicles the failed attempts of T.H. White, an unfulfilled closeted homosexual, to train a Goshawk in the 50’s. Both their stories go in tandem. Both the stories are so exhausting, filled with sadness. There are times when you just want to put the book aside. But then comes Mabel, recurrently, like a breath of fresh air. Like a new born, experiencing everything for the first time, experiencing everything in a new light. Looking at everything with “infinite caution.” Engaging you with all your senses at the most as Macdonald (and you) tries to figure out what Mabel is thinking.

Macdonald is so close with Mabel; you feel like you are riding shotgun with them. As you travel with them, you realise Goshawks are every bit savage and predatory as big cats. Every time Macdonald removes Mabel’s jesses (thin leather straps tied to their legs) out in the woods, you hold your breath. You witness the extraordinary scene of Mabel hunting the pheasant, making the kill. You can’t help but wonder how something so bloodthirsty can be so graceful at its entirety.

As Cheryl Strayed (author of Wild) makes the walk, the walk back to the person her mother knew. Helen Macdonald takes the flight to find her father. But as Mabel and Macdonald move further into their relationship Macdonald realises, “hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks.”

Macdonald does not alternate between wild and mundane. They come together. The line blurs in her life. And that’s what you are left yearning for as a reader. For shots of wildness in your daily life.