H is for Hawk - Helen MacDonald

I started reading this book exactly a year after its publication on July 31st 2014, as a reward for finishing my dissertation. It is not often that I pick up a bestseller, but I was instantly won over by its finely-tuned poetic prose and raw, rugged style. Despite some J. A. Baker inspired flights of fancy, Helen MacDonald is more grounded than the majority of nature writers and is unafraid to use expletives and offer up her emotions for scrutiny. The story is simple; a true account of MacDonald's grief at the passing of her father, and the therapeutic purchasing and training of a goshawk. It is a retreat into nature witnessed all too often, but she approaches the subject with a vulnerable candour that breathes fresh life into the genre. Her narrative is interwoven with the life of T. H. White and his book The Goshawk, published in 1951, pushing the theme of mirroring. I was not sold on the frequent parallels with White's training as the artificiality of this literary device was a little too keenly felt at times.

The book starts off very strongly, offering up a compelling and beautifully written account of hawking and healing, but unfortunately it begins to falter towards the end. Some of the later events come across as forced, as though MacDonald were running out of interesting anecdotes. This is a common problem with non-fiction, how to construct and maintain a sense of purpose and momentum when every day life is mundane, full of chance, and ungoverned by tight plotting. Some interesting topics are explored, such as the idea of 'wildness' and what it means to be human. The copy I picked up comes with a bonus extra chapter which was rightly excluded from the original publication, since it contains little more than Helen and her hawk's surprise at a peacock crossing the motorway. I was pleasantly surprised by this touching book, but as always, its bestseller status is greatly overhyped. Nature writer Mark Cocker (whom I reviewed last year) was a big fan of this book.

Rating: 3/5