Some of my favourite books have been memoirs of a challenging relationship with an animal - Jane Shilling's Fox in the Cupboard, Gavin Maxwell's otter oeuvre. H is for Hawk belongs alongside them.
If that description 'relationship with an animal' sounds fluffy or cosy to you, think again. These animals aren't pets. They are forces to be negotiated with, embodiments of the wild that pitch you into a different way of life and living. You don't invite an otter, a horse or a goshawk to be your friend. You go to their world. You tune into their mind, their instincts, their priorities, their joys, their fears - and in so doing, you find the places where you are wild yourself. And that wildness doesn't mean uncomplicated freedom. Its values have little in common with human concerns. It is a stripped-away state of being, a universe of survival and struggle, where trust might be life or death.
In H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald's journey has added significance. She acquired her goshawk when in the depths of mourning after her father died suddenly. So the hawk is a voyage into a land of death, for not only is her hawk - who she names Mabel - red in tooth and claw, she is a mysterious, highly tuned instrument of death. The only fluffiness in this book is the down on the new-born chicks that are Mabel's staple food.
Macdonald does not shy away from this. A lifelong falconer, she defines her world early in the book, banishing any romantic notions of the falconry sport when she writes of a hawk 'murdering a pigeon'. In the same spirit, this book is raw in emotional tone too. As we see what hawks do, we see what grief does. It strips the world to a race of life and death, to basic needs, to negotiations with a creature that does not understand words or language but operates in a key of hunger, speed and instinct. Mabel has to be kept on a careful edge of hunger and satiation in order to hunt and fly. If Helen feeds her too much she won't have the appetite or prowess to perform. Too little, and she becomes desperate and aggressive.
And despite her falconry experience, Macdonald finds the training a harrowing process. Establishing a relationship with this creature is an ordeal of patience, nerves, and a challenge to everything she finds certain in her life - which, in her bereaved state, is very little.
As well as a passage through the valley of mourning, this book is also an exploration of a talismanic work from Macdonald's own past, The Goshawk by TH White. She first read it as a child, and was appalled by White's apparent ignorance, clumsiness and cruelty as his time with his hawk did not go well. Nevertheless, she has read it to shreds over the years, first because there were few books for a falcon-mad girl to read, but latterly because she saw something else. It wasn't about hawks, it was about a man, a homosexual, emotionally scarred man who was struggling to tame his own nature. Parts of her narrative examine White's life, decoding this figure whose book had been such a presence from her childhood days. And just as White was destabilised by his experience taming hawks, Macdonald finds herself pushed to desperation.Taming the bird becomes the centre of her life, and not just for its own sake. It is a rite of reckoning, of approaching a more inaccessible, unavoidable inner process.
I haven't yet mentioned Macdonald's prose - and I must. It is sublime, haunting, transforming, written with the heart of a poet. I could quote the entire book if I started picking choice passages, so I'll make do with just this, her description of walking the fields with Mabel flying behind her 'like a personal angel'.
And so this book will stay with you, as a challenging, mesmerising messenger.
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