Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize
Winner of the 2014 Costa Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize
Shortlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize
`In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they're the birdwatchers' dark grail.'
As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest.
When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel for GBP800 on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.
`To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don't see the hawk's body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. The hawk's apprehension becomes your own. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away.'
Destined to be a classic of nature writing, H is for Hawk is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her own untaming. At the same time, it's a kaleidoscopic biography of the brilliant and troubled novelist T. H. White, best known for The Once and Future King. It's a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to try to reconcile death with life and love.
Sometimes books come along at the perfect time and are thus possibly made better than they otherwise would have been; circumstances lifting them up and giving them more resonance.
This isn't that.
This book is brilliantly written. The prose is subtle and perfect. I wish I were more adept at writing to do justice to a review.
I frankly resisted reading this book for a month or more because I am not generally fond of reality/autobio writing. I've never been up close and personal with falconry (and have always thought it and the sportspeople who practise it were terrifying and the sport melancholy in about equal measure).
I came in through the door marked T.H. White. I've been a squeeing fangirl since I was very young.
