Book Review: H is for Hawk

H is for Hawk – so many people chose it for their book of the year that it is in huge demand at the library. I got it after a wait of several weeks and had to give it back tomorrow. And I have just finished it. It is truly worth the tears, even when you shed them on the tube, surreptitiously wiping your eyes.

A portrait of grief, bereavement, unadulterated incomprehensible mourning for a father, dying prematurely; and an attempt to escape from that or make sense of it, by seeking the wildest of endeavours – hawking. Helen Macdonald, a passionate lover of falcons and falconry, seeks solace of a sort through the taming and training of a goshawk, that most noble of hawks; an extraordinary relationship develops, a roller-coaster from terror to calm, confusion to companionship, even love? It is incredibly sensitively described, every heartbeat remembered, every step along a falconer’s ‘dark night of the soul’. She learns to read the bird’s emotions, and to begin to understand her own and come through.

The lessons she learns through this time are so deep – about wilderness, nature, death, blood “how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.... I’d brought the hawk into my world and then I pretended I lived in hers. Now it feels different: we share our lives happily in all their separation. I look down at my hands. There are scars on them now... one from her talons when she’d been fractious with hunger.... another a blackthorn rip... And there were other scars, too, but they were not visible. They were the ones she’d helped mend, not make.”

Absolutely beautifully written, poignant, fascinating, a true spiritual journey, a pilgrimage.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is published by Jonathan Cape ISBN-10: 0802123414; ISBN-13: 978-0802123411