H Is for Hawk

Macdonald is a historian and an experienced falconer. When her father, a press photographer, dies without warning, she buys a goshawk — the most difficult bird in British falconry — and withdraws into training it.

Running alongside is her reading of T. H. White's The Goshawk, a 1951 account of a man who attempted the same thing with almost no knowledge and considerable cruelty, and whose failure Macdonald uses as a mirror.

She chose the hardest bird deliberately, at the point when she was least able to manage anything.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The prose is precise about the technical practice — weights, jesses, manning, the exact discipline of getting a wild predator to accept a human — and that specificity is what keeps the grief from becoming abstract.

The White material is the structural risk and the book's best idea. It gives Macdonald a way to examine what she is doing without narrating her own psychology directly.

The book is about the appeal of becoming inhuman: the hawk feels nothing about death, and Macdonald wants that. She is clear-eyed that this is an escape rather than a cure.

It is also about landscape and about who is permitted to feel at home in the English countryside, a thread Macdonald handles carefully through White's politics and her own position in it.

The attraction of the hawk is that it is not bereaved, and she knows exactly why she wants that.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The falconry is described with real precision — weights recorded to the gram, the mechanics of manning a bird, jesses and creance, the slow negotiation by which a wild animal accepts a human's presence. The technical material is not background: it supplies the book with the only structure available during a period when nothing else had any.

Macdonald is explicit that she chose the most difficult and least tractable bird deliberately. Goshawks have a reputation among falconers for nervous ferocity, and her attraction to that is diagnosed rather than celebrated — she wanted something that would demand total attention and would not offer comfort in return.

She did not want a companion. She wanted something that would require all of her attention and give nothing back.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Running alongside is an account of T. H. White, who wrote a book about his own disastrous attempt to train a goshawk decades earlier. Macdonald uses him as a counter-example and a warning: a man using an animal to work out something about cruelty, damage and his own childhood, and doing considerable harm to the bird in the process.

The book's psychological argument is that the hawk's appeal was the absence of grief, memory and obligation, and that Macdonald pursued that state to the point of withdrawing from people almost entirely. She describes the pull toward becoming something that does not mourn with unusual clarity, and does not present it as healthy.

Her father was a press photographer, and the book's account of him is bound up with looking, waiting and the discipline of attention — the qualities that falconry also demands. The loss is sudden and the grief is not narrated directly so much as visible in what she does instead of narrating it.

The Cambridgeshire country the hunting takes place in is written with attention to what it actually is — farmed, bounded, historically managed — rather than as wilderness. Macdonald is a historian and is alert to the politics of English nature writing and its attachment to an imagined unspoiled countryside.

It refuses the shape its material invites: the hawk does not heal her, and the recovery, when it arrives, is unglamorous and mostly involves other people. Read it for the prose, which is exact, and for the honesty about wanting to stop being a person for a while.