Literary H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

[Bookpossum]

I have just finished the book and need to mull over it a bit as it's now late. I loved it and it was a five star book for me.

I'm still waiting on the list to get the ebook either from the WPLC or the FLP. Having read TH White's Once and Future King more than once (it was one of my favorite early teen books. A progression with age for fascination with the King Arthur legend, though my earliest reads substituted Guinevere's liaison with Lancelot with her being tricked into poisoning one of the Knights of the Round Table by Morgan le Fay) I am interested in reading this as much for the connection to TH White as for insights into hawking.

Originally Posted by BenG

The Sword in the Stone has a lot of medieval falconry and hawking in it including a chapter where Wart spends the night in the Mews as a merlin.

Yes I recall that bit as well as Wart's experience as a fish transformed back to human just as a pike is about to get him. And as a worker ant. Wonderful teen book that gets more adult as it progresses to the most famous part of the King Arthur legend.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

This is a fascinating mélange of disparate, yet related, topics -- rich swaths of personal grief, fascination with death, interspecies communication, literary biography, memory, a love story ... and that's only in the first 5 chapters. Rich, rich flavorful writing ... I envy the author the depth of her vocabulary -- and her word craftsmanship.

I agree with you. It's a very enjoyable read despite the focus on death both human and animal. So far the only criticism I have is that I get the nagging sensation that she could be slightly overstating or altering a few things here and there in her own story for effect. Not enough yet to affect my liking of the book, but enough for me to feel like mentioning it.

Originally Posted by issybird

A heads up: today, September 16, the audiobook of H is for Hawk, read by the author, is Audible's Daily Deal, on sale for $3.95.

Thanks issybird; I missed it but that's a great deal for anyone who did take advantage of it.

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I agree with you. It's a very enjoyable read despite the focus on death both human and animal. So far the only criticism I have is that I get the nagging sensation that she could be slightly overstating or altering a few things here and there in her own story for effect. Not enough yet to affect my liking of the book, but enough for me to feel like mentioning it.

That's interesting sun surfer. I didn't get that feeling, though clearly she has written the book quite some time after the events it covers. However, I think while some events such as difficulties she has when she takes Mabel out and the bird decides to fly further than she should, are probably an amalgam of different similar events, others would be very clear memories. For example, the first time she plays with Mabel:

An obscure shame grips me. I had a fixed idea of what a goshawk was, just as those Victorian falconers had, and it was not big enough to hold what goshawks are. No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible. I wondered if it was because no one had ever played with them. The thought made me terribly sad.

Something like that would be a clear, sharp memory because it was a revelation about the bird, and a feeling of sadness. I shared that sadness for all those many birds that were treated as grumpy killing machines rather than creatures with the intelligence to play.

One comment I liked, because it is so true of how many people view animals and how their reading shapes their opinion and attitude towards animals, so that they do not see the animal for itself. She refers to this in connection with a book by J A Baker about peregrine falcons:

I'd never believed in Baker's falcons, because I'd met real ones before I'd ever read his book: cheerful, friendly falconer's birds that preened on suburban lawns. But most of my bird-loving friends read Baker's book before they ever saw a live one, and now they can't see real peregrines without them conjuring distance, extinction and death. Wild things are made from human histories.

That last sentence seems to me to be profoundly true. As a very simple example, I have never been able to understand why people dislike ravens and crows, to the point of chasing them, throwing stones at them and so on. There is some sort of belief that they are evil because they are black, are birds of ill-omen or whatever. Yet they are handsome and very intelligent birds, and as interesting to watch as any other bird.

Another passage I marked is close to the end of the book, where she talks about the lessons she has learned from spending time with Mabel:

... there is a world of things out there - rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I am halfway through and really enjoying the book. It is quite an ambitious task with the various threads of biography and history that she is weaving with her own story of dealing with grief. I don't feel that it comes across as false or exaggerated but occasionally maybe like she is trying too hard if that makes sense. I think it is interesting that she has had a passion for birds and nature since childhood.

I found this great article from the perspective of another falconer and his review of the books (no spoilers are in it).

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/a-falco...h-is-for-hawk/

All falconers are stoics - or at least we try to be. We train ourselves to hide our innermost feelings. We have to, or we'd never get anywhere in the training of a hawk. To these birds, we must always present ourselves as an unshakable rock - ”an impassive, immovable presence in their lives. Emotions make raptors nervous. They're the only ones in this relationship who can show their feelings. Unfortunately, I think we falconers sometimes carry this impassivity into our human relationships, holding our feelings in check, hiding our emotional and spiritual anguish from everyone in our lives. In the darkest nights of our soul, we all too often stand alone - with a fierce, unloving raptor on our fist.

This is where Helen Macdonald was mentally and emotionally in the months following her father's death.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by BenG

The Sword in the Stone has a lot of medieval falconry and hawking in it including a chapter where Wart spends the night in the Mews as a merlin.

I have fond memories of this book from my childhood. I mentioned in last month's discussion thread that I had recently reread The Once and Future King earlier this year. From an adult perspective I was fascinated by the hawking discussions and that TH White had written a book about training a goshawk. That's what led me to Helen Macdonald's book and why I nominated H is for Hawk.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks very much for the link to the article and review, Bookworm_Girl. Lovely to see the photographs, which were presumably in the hardcover book, but not in the ebook.

It's a long time since I read The Once and Future King but I loved it, having always had a fascination with the Arthurian legends. One of these days ...

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

That's interesting sun surfer. I didn't get that feeling, though clearly she has written the book quite some time after the events it covers. However, I think while some events such as difficulties she has when she takes Mabel out and the bird decides to fly further than she should, are probably an amalgam of different similar events, others would be very clear memories...

One was early training when Mabel became obstinate for a while after doing so well. Helen more or less wrote that within hours she was freaking about doing a crap job and thinking it would never work out. Considering how clear she was beforehand with knowing exactly how difficult it could be to train a goshawk, and knowing already that hers was doing better than the norm, this level of dramatic hand-wringing over a minor setback was conspicuous to me. Then the coup de grace came - when her friends stopped by that day during the crisis she writes that they’d never know since she told them how well the training’s going.

An earlier one was the beginning when she started driving “without a clue” as to where was off to until she was halfway there. Little innocuous things like these lead me to think she may have a touch of a melodramatic or exaggerative inclination that slips out at times. There was even a point where she consciously reeled herself back in, writing something about no one in the park noticing her and the hawk and then writing that well of course people noticed.

[Bookpossum]

I think that's the difference between feeling and logic!

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I think that's the difference between feeling and logic!

Yep, totally agree Bookpossum! I think what brings these to my attention is the question of whether it's the writer Helen wanting a little heightened drama at points even if it's subconscious. It's more of an aside though because so far I'm still really enjoying the writing.

[bfisher]

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”.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by bfisher

I was fascinated by her discussion of The Sword In The Stone as a projection of T.H. White's tortured childhood.

I was fascinated with the moment in Chapter 8 where she feels that she is "turning into a hawk":

"I had put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away."

I was suddenly reminded of a passage in Ursula Le Guin's fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea.

The hero is called "Sparrowhawk" and in a moment of crisis he transforms into a hawk--the creature who most shares his nature.

"Ged had taken hawk-shape in fierce distress and rage . . . . The falcon's anger and wildness were like his own, and had become his own, and his will to fly had become the falcon's will. . . . In all the sunlight and dark of that great flight he had worn the falcon's wings, and looked through the falcon's eyes, and forgetting his own thoughts he had known at last only what the falcon knows: hunger, the wind, the way he flies."

There are interesting parallels in the two passages and I wonder if Macdonald had ever read Le Guin. Of course the theme is not that uncommon and the similarity is most likely entirely coincidental. But it shows the fascination authors have with the wild nobility of the hawk. Le Guin is a remarkable woman of wide interests and I also wonder if she ever had any occasion to study falconry.

[bfisher]

Yes, I remember the passage now; Ged flees from Benderesk and Serret as a hawk and nearly loses his human personality. Yes, there is a very close analogy there.

Reading of Helen's fear that Mabel may not return, as T.H.White's Gos did not return, I'm also reminded of the opening of Yeat's The Second Coming:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

[BenG]

The sparrowhawk (American Kestrel) is very similar to a Merlin. I'm sure Le Guin had this in mind when she named the character.

[Bookpossum]

Interesting point fantasyfan. I had forgotten that event inA Wizard of Earthsea. I love Ursula Le Guin's writing.