I saw that NYRB tweeted about the new quote page for The Peregrine recently. It reminded me of the wonderful book by Helen Macdonald called H is for Hawk (and the notes I wrote down about the book sometime in September 2016).
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I read H Is For Hawk, in the midst of reaching for answers and missing them in a vacuum, much like the tone of the book. In the book, the author Helen Macdonald loses her father suddenly and misses him — his memories, his voice, and his presence in her life — and feels the pain of his absence, deeply and indelibly.
She turns to falconry, rearing a Goshawk — a left-over dream of an 8-year old girl who saw a goshawk on a book cover with its “plumage scalloped and scaled in a riot of saffron and bronze.” As Ms. Macdonald puts it, “the hawk was inevitable.” Attracted to its wildness, its inclination to solitude and its ethereal beauty which was “like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud”, Macdonald valiantly struggles through the process of being an austringer — finding parallels in the loneliness, relentless self-doubt and (an ultimately futile) struggle of T. H. White in training a goshawk.
Many readers find Ms. Macdonald’s description of TH White’s cruelty to the beast and his personal struggles as the weakest sections of the book, compared to the truly evocative narrative of her bereavement, and her vivid descriptive imagery of the unkempt savagery of her bird. Her language is indeed sparse, delicate, and delightful. Personally, I identified with her deep fascination with TH White — Her bird Mabel to his Gos — their series of self-defeating choices engendering seclusion from the society, and an all-consuming struggle to understand a majestic bird that only carries murder in its mind. Ultimately, it is this identification of solitude, the string of companionship across decades bound only by the meditation of one’s own choices, that exalts H is for Hawk from being just a member of the genre which some berate as misery memoirs.
As I read, I thought of the dead rabbits and their wrung necks. As Ms. Macdonald struggles through the unbending sorrow of all their deaths, I wondered if the act of killing them saved their suffering. The deaths reminded me of the day when, as a rural child, I saw some hens sacrificed at the altar of village deities. I watched with shock, alternating between repulsion to look away, and morbid curiosity to know. Chickens, headless, fluttered involuntarily high in the air, bouncing off the ground awkwardly in their cathartic moments. The noise of those flapping wings drowned the death-throes of voiceless necks. Those hens were supposedly for the Gods. But, on that day we were the gods. We decided on the birds’ lives and their eventual destinies. They were flies and we were wanton boys.
Mabel may be all blood and gore, and only capable of “conversation of death”, but through Mabel’s story, and through the deaths of all its preys, Ms. Macdonald reminds us of the humanity that lives in all of us. Ms. Macdonald intensely ponders and concludes that “Hunting makes you an animal, but the death of an animal makes you human”.
Fully understanding a Goshawk’s savagery is utterly beyond us, as our natures truly diverge. However, we are capable of choices. Unlike the hawk, we rake and shake the world in grief. We ransack the earth, turn it upside down, to understand life. Our actions cause tumultuous rumblings. In our pain, and in our living, we touch, brighten and darken, many lives and our stories pass on.
Through Mabel, and through Ms. Macdonald’s captivating words, I indeed saw the dreams of a father — all his childhood notebooks on airplanes and the photographs of bridges in London — come to life with us through his daughter.