H Is for Hawk Paperback – March 8, 2016 by Helen Macdonald (Grove Press)

I almost never read non-fiction; I am not sure I know how to appraise it. But I can recognize good writing. Try this: second page of the book, Macdonald saying that few people will have seen a hawk making a kill… "But maybe you have: maybe you've glanced out of the window and seen there, on the lawn, a bloody great hawk murdering a pigeon, or a blackbird, or a magpie, and it looks the hugest, most impressive piece of wildness you have ever seen, like someone's tipped a snow leopard into your kitchen and you find it eating the cat." Or again, on the next page: "Have you ever watched a deer walking out from cover? They step, stop, and stay, motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A nervous twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured that all is safe, they ankle their way out of the brush to graze." Such a simple direct style, almost conversational. And then, out of nowhere, she slips in the extraordinary image of the snow leopard, or the unexpectedly perfect verb, "ankle." Helen Macdonald, naturalist, historian, research fellow at Cambridge, writes in the great tradition of British nature writing, with a keen eye and fine-point pen. I doubt I will see writing this good again this year, whether in fiction or non-fiction.

On one level, Macdonald's book is the record of a season spent training a goshawk that she names Mabel. She is no stranger to falconry, having been fascinated by birds since she was a child. As a historian, she has read all the literature on this aristocratic sport. She has trained sparrowhawks and falcons from her late teens. But the goshawk is larger and rarer, with a reputation for being both more dangerous and more temperamental. She orders one from Northern Ireland and meets the seller off the boat on the bleak Scottish coast. "I grabbed the hood from the box and turned to the hawk. Her beak was open, her hackles raised; her wild eyes were the colour of sun on white paper, and they stared because the whole world had fallen into them at once." The saga of her attempt to enter into some kind of relationship with this bird -- patient waiting, sleepless nights, small triumphs, and devastating setbacks -- reads as an emotional roller-coaster described with the precision of a scientist. Yet what she is describing is herself as much as the bird; at times, she virtually becomes the goshawk, seeing the world through her eyes, losing the ability to communicate with other human beings.

The book is also a halting dialogue with the souls of two men, both dead. One is her father, a news photographer whose sudden death sends her into a tailspin; the book might almost be called "The Year of Magical Hawking." I found it just as powerful as Joan Didion's memoir and, for me at least, much closer to home. It is clear that this father-daughter relationship must have been an extraordinary one; the boy who would attempt to bring some order to the destruction of WW2 by obsessively listing the planes returning to Biggin Hill now teaching his daughter the patience required to observe the other kinds of aerial fighters, but also the wonder and variety of the earthbound world all around her.

The other man is the English writer T. H. White, who would become famous for his recreations of the Arthurian legend in THE SWORD IN THE STONE and THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. In between quitting his job as a prep-school master and achieving fame as an author, White moved to a cottage in the country and bought a goshawk which he attempted to train, writing about it many years later in his book THE GOSHAWK. It is, however, a book about a falconer who does everything wrong, treating the bird with an unintentional cruelty that leads only to failure. But Macdonald looks beyond the failure to the psychopathy behind it, the tragedy of a lonely boy treated cruelly by his colonial parents and cane-wielding schoolmasters to the point where he abhors violence yet lacks examples of love with which to replace it. Her portrait of White is extraordinarily perceptive, but it is her own life she must deal with. And here at least, she begins to succeed, as in this final quotation, from late in the book:

"I put White's book on the shelves, make myself a cup of tea. I'm in a contemplative mood. I'd brought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. Now it feels different: we share our lives happily in all their separation. I look down on my hands. There are scars on them now. Thin white lines. One is from her talons when she was fractious with hunger; it feels like a warning made flesh. Another is a blackthorn rip from the time I'd pushed through a hedge to find the hawk I thought I'd lost. And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she'd helped mend, not make."