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That was a wonderful book. Kudos to everyone who nominated and voted for it.
There are several threads in this book - grieving for a suddenly-dead parent, training a goshawk, a long-dead writer, and the relationship of humans to the wild - which aren’t all clearly related. I think that she did a splendid job in linking her story of training a goshawk with the story of T.H.White, and in describing how humans relate to the wild in these contexts.
The only odd note for me in this book was that the thread of grieving for her father wasn’t strongly connected to the other threads. However, there were some fine expressions of the grieving process, as in “Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes”.
There were many other things I liked about this book. The prose was engaging and ofter bright; there were great lines like “I’d never met men like these. They wore tweeds and offered me snuff.” and “...the gloriously titled Harting's Hints on Hawks. All the boys’ books.” and the wonderful inversions of “Take her outside. Man her in the streets.”
The finest thing in this book is how Helen Macdonald made T.H.White’s life a part of her story. At one point, she quoted Sylvia Townsend on T.H.White - “I have never felt such an imminent haunt”. The ghost of T.H.White haunts this book, as she described so movingly “When I trained my hawk I was having a quiet conversation, of sorts, with the deeds and works of a long-dead man”. Her interpretation of White and Gos was so compelling that as soon as I finished “H is for Hawk” I flew immediately to White’s “The Goshawk”.
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