Nothing but unicorns and rainbows in this post.
Every now and then, rarely, a book comes along that makes you want to grab strangers on the street and hold them by their shirtfronts until they promise — pinky swear, no mental reservations allowed — that they will get and read that irreplaceable book as soon as you let them get go.
I’m a few pages into that book. So I’m doing all that to you, grabbing hold as firmly as I can, to the limit our intertubes allow.
The work is Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk.* It is a work of intensely observed natural history, if that’s the way you take it. From another angle, it’s a memoir of grief. From any point of view, it’s a work of art. MacDonald’s prose is simply beautiful: resonant on the sentence level, unbelievably sharp — you’ll cut yourself on her images — and even in the slow entry I’ve allowed myself so far,** possessed of an accumulating beauty that reminds me of something I too easily forget, why it is I love the practice of words.
For a proper learned review, a lovely piece of writing in itself, see Kathryn Schulz’s elegant review at The New Yorker. Here’s a taste:
Macdonald’s story has a different ending. One day, crouching over a rabbit she has just killed, feeling like “an executioner after a thousand deaths,” she comes to see that she has been travelling with her hawk not further from grief but further from life. Scared by her own numbness and darkness, she begins to seek help: from loving relatives, attentive friends, modern psychopharmacology—all the advantages she had that White did not. Slowly, her grief starts to lift. As it does, she finds that she disagrees with Merlyn and Muir. “The wild is not a panacea for the human soul,” she writes. “Too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.” All along, she had wanted to be her hawk: fierce, solitary, inhuman. Instead, she now realizes, “I was the figure standing underneath the tree at nightfall, collar upturned against the damp, waiting patiently for the hawk to return.” Her father, she knows, will never rejoin the human world. But she can. Like a figure in a myth who followed a hawk to the land of the dead, Macdonald turns around and comes home.
For my part, I’ll just tease you with the first paragraph of the book. It’s a soft open:
Forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge is a landscape I’ve come to love very much indeed. It’s where wet fen gives way to parched sand. It’s a land of twisted pine trees, burned out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases. There are ghosts here: houses crumble inside numbered blocks of pine forestry. There are spaces built for aid-delivered nukes inside grassy tumuli behind twelve-foot fences, tattoo parlours and US Air Force golf courses. In spring, it’s a riot of noise: constnt plane traffic, gas guns over pea fields, woodlarks and jet engines. It’s called the Brecklands — the broken lands — and it’s where I ended up that morning, seven years ago, in early spring, on a trip I hadn’t planned at all. At five in the morning I’d been staring at a square of streetlight on the ceiling, listening to a couple of late party-leavers chatting on the pavement outside. I felt odd: overtired, overwrought, unpleasantly like my brain had been removed and my skull stuffed with smoething like microwaved aluminium foil, dinted, charred and shorting with sparks. Nnnngh. Must get out, I thought, throwing back the covers. Out! I pulled on jeans, boots and a jumper, scalded my mouth with burned coffee, and it was only my frozen ancient Volkswagen and I were halfway down the A14 that I worked out where I was going, and why. Out there, beyond the foggy windscreen and white lines, was the forest. The broken forest. That’s where I was headed. To see goshawks.
A soft open indeed. Action, of a sort, but (as yet) not terribly consequential. A character, with whom we haven’t had the chance to form a bond of sympathy. Lists.
And yet, as I read these few lines again, I’m sitting here gobsmacked, full of professional admiration, taking notes. So much good writing, so much promise, in what, told baldly, is an utterly unpromising scene. (I couldn’t sleep so I got in my car to look for some birds in a nasty bit of wasteland.)
What I’m feeling on this read is the rhythm. MacDonald’s a published poet, among other things, and she writes prose that recalls that discipline, with word-by-word attention to sound and beat, to build into a play of sentences that imposes a kind of music on top of sense. As I’ve dived further into the book I forget, sometimes, to pay attention to that kind of fine-grained technique. Instead, I’m being carried along by who she is and why she’s doing what she’s doing. As Schulz says, this is a “wondrously atypical book.” It delivers its goods polyphonically; there’s always another level to experience.
I’ll stop there, but I hope you won’t. I’m grabbing you, folks. I’m pulling hard on your lapels. I’m leaning in. I’ll speak slowly, so there’s no chance of a failure to communicate.
Buy this book. Read it.
You can thank me later.
*Amazon link for reference purposes. If you can support your local bookshop, it’s the policy of this blogger to encourage you to do so.
**I’ve had to stop myself from dropping everything — sleep included — and racing too fast through this one. It really is that good.
Image: Simone Martini, St. Martin of Tours, 1322-1326
Amir Khalid
Your intro calls out for a song.
ETA: The book looks very promising. I’ll wait for the paperback.
JPL
The NY Times reviewer agrees with you
Helen Macdonald’s beautiful and nearly feral book, “H Is for Hawk,” her first published in the United States, reminds us that excellent nature writing can lay bare some of the intimacies of the wild world as well. Her book is so good that, at times, it hurt me to read it. It draws blood, in ways that seem curative.
Thanks for the recommendation and I’ve bookmarked it.
OzarkHillbilly
Bookmarked, but I make no promises. I have about a hundred books bookmarked already.
wvng
Thanks for the suggestion. Ordered.
the Conster
I was on my way to the local bookstore today to buy all the Louise Penny books – I had picked up the 9th in the series of her Inspector Gamache series at the airport last fall, but my sister told me to stop, put it down and start from the beginning and not miss any word, they’re that good. So, I will buy this too and promise to read it. I’ve been watching the birds all morning – I’ve just been able to feed them every day now that it hasn’t snowed in a week. I also just read this about Gabi and her crows. Maybe I’ll watch Birdman, and the Birdman of Alcatraz and call it a day.
Elizabelle
Sounds wonderful. Thank you, Tom. Goes on the reading list and telling other friends about it list.
Mike J
Unrelated suggestion for your media consumption:
If you’re in NYC, a restored director’s cut of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World is being screened. Possibly the best science fiction movie ever made. If it’s not, it’s only because it might not be a science fiction movie. I love this movie. Wish I could see it.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
G has been listening to the audiobook of “Five Came Back” and it looks like I’ll need to buy it for my Kindle, because he keeps talking about it:
http://www.amazon.com/Five-Came-Back-Hollywood-Second-ebook/dp/B00DMCV8BI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425744469&sr=1-1&keywords=five+came+back
Elizabelle
Tom: would this book be an appropriate gift for a friend recovering from chemo/radiation? Wondering how someone contemplating their own brush with death would receive it? That’s a grief of its own. Would this book be healing?
mattH
Sounds a bit like Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams. A bit more raw maybe.
catclub
I read that New Yorker review and put the book on my list.
WaterGirl
@the Conster: I am a mystery reader, why have I never heard of Louise Penny?
WereBear
@the Conster: Thanks for letting me know about what sounds like just my kind of series. Added to my Way of Cats Wish List, which my fans use to tip me.
Tom’s recc is going on my main wish list (I keep my tip books under $10) and will mark it for one of those weekends where the kitties and I cuddle in bed and I can immerse myself. Such books are rare finds. I thank you!
henqiguai
Why? What’s so commanding about this book that *everyone* should read it? I read your post, I read the reviews, I read the summary. Nothing there. Perhaps because I don’t care, one whit, to wallow in the grief of someone else. Also, not being a writer, I’m not as enamored of the written word as a separate product; you, on the other hand…
Too late; I’m already in the process of hurting you for the laying on of hands. Wait, was that a rhetorical device? Oopsies.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne (tablet): That looks awesome! Wishlisted.
As it’s turning into That Kind of Thread, I wish to pass on two memoirs that are beautifully written and stick my mind still. The author is Emily Rapp.
Her first, Poster Child, is about her birth defect and how she grew around it, and is charming and tough and delightful. It made me seek out her second, The Still Point of the Turning World, which is about losing her child to Tay-Sachs disease.
I don’t know when I’ll be up for that one.
the Conster
@WaterGirl:
I hadn’t either, but when two different women whom I adore mentioned her, I had to pay attention. She’s a hidden gem for sure – both mine and husband’s heritage is Canadian, and my daughter went to McGill, so I have a soft spot for Quebec and Montreal, and the way of life there. We used to drop by to visit some relatives in the eastern townships on our way home from Montreal sometimes, and it’s one of those off the radar places that although touted as a tourist spot, no one goes to, so I’m excited to start from the beginning.
WaterGirl
@WereBear: I see you have a Craig Johnson book on your Amazon wish list. Have you listened to any of his audio books? They are wonderful, read by one of the best performers in the field, George Guidall. It’s like his books were written to be read aloud.
WereBear
@WaterGirl: No, I don’t generally listen to audiobooks, but Mr WereBear loves them. I’ll let him know.
WaterGirl
@WereBear: I go to sleep to an audio book every night. I cannot listen to them if the reader is not great, but it’s a way of clearing everything out of my head. I often don’t get very far before I fall asleep, but I can just pick it up again the next night.
They are also perfect for the kitties when it gets windy or stormy (which never bothered them before the tree hit the house). I just put them in the bedroom, close the blinds, and let the nice man read to them (loudly) while they hide in the closet or under the bed. It seems to help.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I’ve never been able to get into audio books. I also have never gotten into talk radio.
WereBear
@WaterGirl: Oh, that thing about the kitties is so wonderful! Cats do love human voices. Many people leave the radio on for their cats, especially if they have only one.
catclub
@the Conster: Four statements lead to wisdom.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I cannot stand talk radio.
I had to use great willpower not to write those 5 words in the way that our VICTORY! guy did.
WaterGirl
@the Conster: I just downloaded a sample of the first book of the series on my iPad.
The ability to read the beginning of a book before deciding to purchase is one of the things I love about my iPad.
Mike in NC
@WaterGirl: Geez, I must have close to 700 free book excerpts loaded on my iPad. I just wish the battery didn’t drain so fast.
J R in WV
I want to recommend another book about a raptor that I found moving: Wesley the Owl: the Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and his Girl.
Wesley was a barn owl found as a tiny slightly damaged infant, who was hand raised by a grad student bio major who came to adopt him when he couldn’t be returned to the wild. They lived together for the rest of Wesley’s life, which was rewarding on many levels, including a few scientific discoveries about barn owls.
Obviously, caring for a barn owl at home is a challange even for a trained biologist, and the issues she deals with in caring for Wesley are interesting as well.
dedc79
Everywhere I look, this book keeps popping up, and always with a strong endorsement. Time to buy it, clearly.
Tenar Darell
Thanks. Requested from library.
WaterGirl
@Mike in NC: wow! you may want to know what I discovered, which is that those sample books don’t transfer when you get a new iPad.
satby
@the Conster: I thought that sounded familiar… I just watched a movie on Amazon Prime based on one of her Inspector Gamache books: Still Life, a Three Pines Mystery. I didn’t know it came from a series of books.
parsimon
Thanks, Tom Levenson: I’ll give it a try.
Anne Laurie
Thanks for this, Tom!
I’ll cheat & add that Schulz’s review (& of course MacDonald’s book) also discuss T.H. White and The Once & Future King… which I’m sure is a favorite for more than a few Balloon Juice readers!
nalbar
Just finished it. A good book, but a little too much White. A bit self centered. Good, but not great.
nalbar
@Elizabelle:
IMHO, yes. It’s about recovery, and might be what a recovering person needs.
.
low-tech cyclist
Gotta admit, that opening gave me a serious case of geographical vertigo. Where the hell am I? When I start a book, I don’t necessarily need to know where I am, but if the author seems to be telling me that, then my brain isn’t gonna be very happy until it can make sense of it. So here was how that went for me:
Cambridge? Cambridge, England? Nah, can’t be, with the burned out cars and shotgun-peppered road signs. Sounds more like the American South or Appalachia.
Cambridge, Massachusetts? I used to know New England pretty well, and I’m having a hard time finding room for a place like that 45 minutes north of Hahvahd.
I’m no stranger to Cambridge, Maryland, but that doesn’t fit. Maybe there’s some Cambridge in Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee? (I know there’s an Oxford, Mississippi.) Then finally I get to the A14, and I guess we must be in England after all.
IOW, I didn’t find it to be a promising start.
And even now, going back and giving it a second reading with England firmly established as the location, it just seems like a dense block of text (has this person not heard of paragraph breaks?) and too much internal dialogue of a person that I’m already starting to find annoying.
We all have different tastes, I guess.
eyelessgame
Every noun is preceded by an adjective.
S’all I’m saying. Interesting writing style.
mzrad
Coleridge observed the “creaking” of a rook’s wing in flight and was thrilled to learn that an American biologist had confirmed this rather rare sound from a bird’s wing. See “This Lime-tree Bower, my Prison.” He’s speaking of the Quantock Hills in Somerset/southern Britain where he and the Wordsworths became friends while walking the hills and becoming artists of nature.
– http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173248