H IS FOR HAWK:

One of my favorite books when living in Istanbul in the 1970's was T.H. White's THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, which led me to read his account of training a goshawk, the book called simply, THE GOSHAWK.  It made me want to get a hawk and train it myself.  I never did alas which leads me to Helen Mac Donald's work, which alludes to White and THE GOSHAWK through out her work, to my delight.  It took me awhile to figure out it was a memoir, not a novel...duh!

It starts with Mac Donald's major depression, a result of the death of her father, the major influence in her life, a photographer, who taught her how to observe.  And she loses her job as a lecturer at Cambridge, the house they allowed her to live in, so there are major changes in her life.  As a remedy to these changes, the sadness she cannot seem to shake, and because she will now have much more free time, she decides to tame a goshawk on a whim and orders one from Germany.  The goshawk arrives and the story begins, as Mac Donald takes us into the world of birds of prey, of the long, often difficult path towards gaining the confidence of a bird of prey like a goshawk, one of the most difficult birds to tame.  She installs the bird in her new digs, and Mabel, the bird's name, becomes the central figure in Mac Donald's life, taking over for her father in a way.  As she faces failure after failure, in her quest to train Mabel, she reconnects with T.H. White and his two novels which I mentioned above.  They give her solace, as her difficulties are similar to those faced by White.  And slowly, patiently, she trains Mabel to perch on her arm, to kill when released, and bring the prey back to Mac Donald to feast.  There's always the fear that Mabel, still not fully trained, will just fly away. The training of Mabel becomes an obsession so that Mabel and Mac Donald slowly become one, as Mac Donald begins to think like Mabel, and isolates herself from friends and family, in her quest to train Mabel.  And slowly, the goshawk becomes a way out for Mac Donald, a way to put the past behind, the death of her father, and move forward.  This is as much a look in the mind of Mac Donald, her depression, as it is a treatise on how to tame a goshawk.  Mabel is, clearly, a magnificent killing machine, her natural way.  She just is, that's her nature, the way her DNA has made her.  And Mac Donald, too, finds her DNA, who she is supposed to be, as she learns as much from Mabel as Mabel learns from her.

I enjoyed the book, the allusions to White's works, the struggles of Mac Donald, mirrored by the taming of the bird, to become oneself, what one is destined to be.  In the end, Mac Donald learns to embrace herself, just as Mabel does.