H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

And so, the end of the year and the start of a new one. Christmas and then the bit beyond. A time when the world gets a little bit thin and unsure of itself. December slides from all purpose and helter-skelter intent to something pale and thin and I love it. I love the strangeness of it, the doubt that even time has upon itself.

Some books read well under such circumstances and some don’t. H Is For Hawk reads spectacularly well at this point in the year because it’s a book about losing control. Grief. The pale grey light of winter. Knowing who you are and then losing it entirely only to slowly, palely, find it again. It’s about a bird and the way that knowing it and flying it helps to bring yourself back to life. It’s about the strangeness of academic life and the humanities, that wilful association with the text, the dislocation of the self with the now, and it’s about the strange, deep tension of having a job and a family and then, having nothing but the finest of grips upon the cliff as you try to stop yourself from falling into the void.

H Is For Hawk is breathlessly perfect writing. It is fearless and crazed and unapologetic and raw with sadness and Macdonald does not apologise for one inch of it. It’s often uneasy and painful to read and you can feel intrusive and voyeuristic but then you realise that the writing is so brilliant and acute that there’s no way you can let it go. Macdonald is transcendent here and finds brilliance in nearly every paragraph. It is just such good, good, good stuff.

Threaded throughout the text is a parallel story, of sorts, a crack in the mirror, that tells of another person and their bird. This is TH White, author of The Once and Future King and more and possessor of quite a few questionable decisions. Macdonald positions their story against that of White’s and it’s fascinating because the two threads begin to influence and ricochet off each other and in the middle of it all, that fierce stomach punch of grief that brings Macdonald to their knees, a star in the heart of their universe, burning out, and they can’t even begin to work out what comes next because they’re too busy being burnt out by what happens now.

H Is For Hawk isn’t an easy read, nor is it a particularly gentle one, but it is rather breathtaking and wonderful and starkly perfect. Read it when the world is thin about you and the sky is raw and grey, and all seems strange and new and unknown, and it will bring definition and clarity, even to the palest of skies.

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