When Helen Macdonald's father died without warning, she did not reach for the usual machinery of mourning. A writer and lifelong falconer, she bought a goshawk, one of the most temperamental and ferocious of the birds of prey, and set about training it. H Is for Hawk is the record of that strange, half-mad project, and it turns out to be three books braided into one: a memoir of grief, a closely observed account of taming a wild predator named Mabel, and a meditation on T. H. White, the troubled author of The Once and Future King, who once attempted and disastrously botched the same task. Out of those strands Macdonald has made something genuinely new in the literature of loss.
The writing about the hawk is the book's astonishment. Macdonald renders Mabel with an almost frightening precision, the yellow feet and the mad eye and the coiled stillness before flight, and her prose tightens to match her subject, fierce and exact and shorn of sentiment. As she withdraws from human company into the bird's wordless world, the reader feels the pull of that withdrawal, the seduction of becoming something less burdened by feeling. Grief here is not tidied into stages; it is wild, disorienting, and a little dangerous, and the book is honest enough to let it be all three.
The T. H. White thread is the one element that divides readers, and fairly so. Macdonald uses White's failed falconry and tormented life as a dark mirror to her own, and while the parallels can be illuminating, the long detours into his biography sometimes interrupt the momentum of her own story just as it gathers force. A reader impatient to stay in the field with Mabel may find these passages a test of patience. They are doing real work, but they ask something of you.
Why you should read
- Readers who want an unsentimental, original book about grief
- Lovers of fierce, precise nature and animal writing
- Anyone drawn to memoir that refuses easy consolation
- Those interested in falconry and the wild world
What to expect
- Three braided strands: grief, a goshawk, and T. H. White
- Fierce, exact prose about a wild predator
- Detours into White's biography that divide readers
- An honest, demanding reckoning with loss
What makes the book endure is its refusal of consolation. Macdonald does not emerge from her grief tidied and improved; she emerges changed, having gone somewhere most of us never have to and come back able to describe it. The nature writing alone would earn the book its admirers, the way it makes an English hillside and a hunting bird blaze with attention, but it is the fusion of that wildness with raw human loss that lifts it into something rarer. Demanding and occasionally bleak, it is also one of the most alive books about mourning you will find, and it confirms Macdonald as one of the finest writers we have on the strange consolations of the non-human world. The prose rewards slow reading and occasional rereading, the kind of sentences you stop on, and the book lingers long after it ends, less as a story you remember than as a weather you once stood out in. It is not an easy read, but it is an indelible one.
