{"id":5326,"date":"2014-11-04T11:47:10","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T11:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5326"},"modified":"2015-01-28T12:28:31","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T12:28:31","slug":"h-is-for-hawk-by-helen-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5326","title":{"rendered":"H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Jonathan Cape 31 July 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp, hardback, \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Si\u00e2n Miles<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This extraordinary book is a rare and stunning composition: a trio of close harmony and resounding power combining biography, scientific paper, and elegy.\u00a0 If that sounds a bit uphill, read on, please.<\/p>\n

The elegy is for a much-loved father; the scientific paper is on the training of a goshawk; the biography that of the relatively mature T.H.White, author amongst other works of The Sword in the Stone<\/em>.\u00a0 The overarching and sometimes achingly beautiful theme linking all three aspects of H is for Hawk<\/em> is how, and more importantly, how not<\/em> to combine research with everyday life.\u00a0 In it, Helen Macdonald combines the scientist\u2019s rigorous precision and accuracy with the inner vision of a true poet. It is a remarkable achievement and often a deep pleasure to read<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s late father was an acclaimed photo-journalist, brought up in post-war England where he and his friends played in bombsites and collected the ephemeral remains of ordinary domesticity; cigarette packages, bus tickets, etc., anything of which a desirable and hopefully complete series could be made.\u00a0 His own individual interest was in plane-spotting and he assembled, sometimes at his delighted peril, a compendium of notebooks recording every man-made thing he saw move in the sky.\u00a0 Macdonald sees this as a young group\u2019s means of recreating and reascribing meaning to their physically shattered lives. She is clearly drawn and enchanted, in her dad\u2019s case, by his early, later sustained and enduring attempt to occupy a bird\u2019s eye view.\u00a0 Saint-Exup\u00e9ry-like and with some of the latter\u2019s spirituality, he imitates or aspires to the view sub specie aeternitatis; <\/em>the aviator\u2019s view. \u00a0\u00a0His relatively early and unexpected death, like his own experience of war, both devastates and later enriches his daughter\u2019s understanding of peacetime.<\/p>\n

She becomes an academic – he fondly refers to her as my daughter, the absent-minded professor<\/em> – and teaches, at Cambridge, the history of science.\u00a0 In parallel to this trajectory, and having already become a competent falconer, immediately after her father\u2019s death she adopts a goshawk, as similar to the sparrowhawk<\/em> as leopard is to the household cat<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 By dint of near self-sacrificial rigour in its lengthy and painful training, she learns to come close to knowledge of all its mental and physical processes. Through their interaction over many often sleepless nights, weeks and months, she achieves invisibility and the longed-for capacity to forget herself; a welcome and comforting condition for a deeply grieving human.<\/p>\n

Pivotal to Macdonald\u2019s intellectual and physical understanding of this attempt to identify closely with another species is T.H.White\u2019s The Goshawk <\/em>on <\/em>which <\/em>she heavily relies for both information and support.\u00a0 He was a schoolmaster at Stowe and of necessity a closet homosexual.\u00a0 After a week-long consultation of his papers, now lodged in Austin, Texas, she makes strong connections between his attempt to enter the wild outside the ordered world of classical English tradition and her own frantic desire to escape the reality of deep and permanent loss. Cruelty and sadism are explored in the context of discipline and devotion.<\/p>\n

All this goes on for 260 pages or so out of 300, couched in the most poetic, imaginative and richly persuasive prose.\u00a0\u00a0 Macdonald\u2019s sensitivity to English weather, landscape and natural habitat is extraordinary; she is a word-painter of the subtlest palette and an audiorecorder of peerless quality.\u00a0 The reader is transported, time after time, into scenarios whose dramatic intensity is matched only by the familiarity and diurnality of their settings.<\/p>\n

If there is one thing which mars this treat of a book it is its organization. Towards its end, and in this reviewer\u2019s opinion, late in the day, the d\u00e9nouement finally comes. We learn that all the displacement activity of the goshawk-training, the exploration of White\u2019s life, the attempt to move on<\/em> is as nothing compared to the author\u2019s final understanding that her father is dead and that she will neither see nor speak to him ever again. The entire book is a journey towards that acceptance. People die.<\/p>\n

The ciphers with which she attempted to keep him alive fade into insignificance compared to the incontrovertible fact of death. Si le grain ne<\/em> meurt<\/em>. The <\/em>comforting and sometimes dangerous Western myths of immortality and mutability so seductive to all are sidelined in favour of human and social \u00a0solidarity. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WINNER OF THE 2014 SAMUEL JOHNSON and 2015 COSTA PRIZES<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Si\u00e2n Miles<\/p>\n

Macdonald becomes an academic – her father fondly refers to her as ‘my daughter, the absent-minded professor’ – and teaches, at Cambridge, the history of science. In parallel to this trajectory, and having already become a competent falconer, immediately after her father\u2019s death she adopts a goshawk, ‘as similar to the sparrowhawk as leopard is to the household cat’. […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5332,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions\/5332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}