[fantasyfan]

One of the things which bothered me about the book was why Macdonald spent so much time on the tormented T.H.White who was clearly incompetent as a trainer for a Goshawk. I'll just pass on a few thoughts which occurred to me as the book progressed. They represent my own personal response to the double layer of the narrative.

In the end I came to the conclusion that she and White were more similar than seems the case on the surface. Both are haunted by a father. Helen loved hers but his death was a terrible blow which left her emotionally and socially incapacitated. She uses Mabel as a means of escape--an escape from the horror of mortality which has taken one of her most profound relationships. Thus, her love for the hawk allows her to function in a different world but still one which causes her to become dysfunctional on a human level.

White had a terrible loveless childhood which left him emotionally scarred. He feared his father and even suspected that the latter wanted him dead. Thus, on a deep level, White isn't really interested in the art of Falconry; he wants to train Gos to love him. Gos becomes a replacement for a relationship he needed but never had. Further, White lived in a period when his intrinsic Gay orientation was not widely socially accepted. So is it not possible that Gos also becomes a sublimation on this level as well? Macdonald seems to think so.

In the end Gos flies away. White has failed but is able to transmute the experience into literature and Helen in her book, dramatises the recovery of her own identity, no longer feeding on the nature of Mabel for self-hood.

While I'm not at all interested in Falconry i(n fact, I rather disapprove of the practice}, I found that the struggle of Helen to find herself and the rather pitiable efforts of White to find love quite absorbing.