First things first, this is a lyrical account of how Helen coped with the death of her father. MacDonald turns the loss in to an ending with a flip of optimism as her goshawk, Mabel, is safely installed in an aviary where she will spend the moulting season. This is a painful parting, their intimacy is temporary as the bird assumes her avian coding. Training a goshawk is not a new hobby for Helen who had flown many falcons as a young woman. Because the gap left by her father is so huge, she needs something big, to distract her, to stop the ever present loss that wont leave her. The loneliness and isolation is a massive burden to bear, grief certainly is exhausting. With one’s immediate feeling is to scupper away from it, adding to the loneliness and edging her closer to madness, that feeling in heading out with the bird on her arm proves to be like a clearing in the clouds, akin to a burst of sun in early spring.
Her descriptive writing is startling and devilishly precise whether she is in woodland ‘washed pewter with frost’ or ‘chalky fields with a furry tint fillers’. She slowly and carefully cranks the tension so that one’s stomach and heart leap queasily towards each other. We are always waiting for the moment when Mabel will taste freedom, returning to Helen’s fist or is her owner doomed to spend the long night beneath a tree, listening for the telltale sounds of her bells. The author says “being out with Mabel and watching her fly free and hunt like a wild hawk was an extraordinary and transformative experience”. The subject combines three different forms of writing-memoir, biography and nature writing. The book progresses in fits and starts, but chronologically so, as Macdonald parallels the awful and sad story of T.H.White and Gos with hers and Mabel’s. It fits comfortably into creative-fiction genre because using novelist techniques including dialogue, poetic imagery and a narration arc, she illustrates a lot of facts about her life and much research about falconry and T.H.White.
I love the way she weaves multiple ideas and themes through it, freedom being a core one. “ the hawk was everything i wanted to be, solitary, self possessed, free from grief and numb to the hurts of human life.” She writes of how she becomes one with her hawk, thinking and seeing like a hawk. The altruism wish list ultimately comes to an end when she realises that falconry is a balancing act between wild and tame, and not just for the hawk. The book draws on nature as the carriage for spiritual renewal, is an unflinchingly honest account of Macdonald’s struggle with grief in the process of taming the hawk, and her own untaming. It’s difficult not to find the story a beautiful evocation of how a sudden death of a loved one can rip your sense of control over the world reminding one that you are powerless in the face of mortality and that everything you love and cling to is transitory.
For MacDonald, wilderness is what she seeks, finding comfort in entering a world of the hawk, a world in which life and death are simpler and more open. There’s a wonderful passage in which she likens her experience to that of Alice falling down the rabbit-hole, able to reach out and touch the things around her but still always falling past them them to the darkness below. It demonstrates how there are different ways of surviving in a world where control can be lost swiftly and unexpectedly. Its a gift, plus you learn heaps about hawks. The book is hard work at times because the author is an academic and her sentences are thick with barely pronounceable verbs and descriptions like brumous, coruscating and the like. Its worth persevering though, as the reward is an expanded vocabulary and the pleasure derived from reading many exquisite sentences.
Her courage to be honest and vulnerable is impressive. As the memoir reaches an end, she finds a note written on a card by her father, and in that moment she recognises a different feeling in her heart, that her grief has been transformed into love.
