H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Part grief memoir, part how to train a goshawk guide, and part literary reflection, H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is a hard to pin down book. Macdonald's father dies and she gets what I took to referring to as her "impulse pet," a goshawk named Mabel. As she chronicles her own experiences with Mabel, she references T. H. White's own chronicle of his experience as a newbie falconer in The Goshawk.

Look, I'm American and don't really have a history with the tradition of falconry. Frankly, after reading this book, I think it's a bit cruel. The whole idea of taking a creature that it wild and forcing it to bend to your will is hard for me to swallow. I've written here about how I feel conflicted about whether or not I'm doing a disservice to my house cat (animals that domesticated themselves!) by preventing her from living her fullest life in the wild, so I'm guessing you can only imagine how conflicted I am by the idea of taking a creature that is in no way tame or domesticated. I don't understand and I often thought the entire process was unnecessary and I'm not sure what either party got out of it. 

But the writing in the book was delicious. 

"I once asked my friends if they'd ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes form WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books.  Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands." (page 116)

Take a minute and sit with that. What do you own that makes you think these things?  I live in a 100-year-old house and I often think about the other people who have lived here.  What did they love? What made them happy? How often did they crank up the music and dance? What made them cry?  I'm not going to find Roman coins in a field (oh, Europe), but sometimes when we're cleaning things out we get just a hint of the history and it makes it all so real.

She also talks about how when she gets dressed in "real" clothes, slaps on some makeup, and gets ready to go to the outside world, she feels like she's putting on a disguise (page 179 - 180).  I think of it as putting on my armor, ready for battle against the tide of expectations from outside the home. But thinking of it as a disguise also makes sense. I'm disguising who I really am in order to become acceptable for others who don't really want to accept the unvarnished reality of me.

So basically what I'm saying is that I have mixed feelings on this book. It's definitely worth a read, but the diversions about White weren't particularly interesting to me and I kept getting riled up about how much I thought falconry was just not morally okay.  I thought it was an honest reflection on grief, which I kind of need right now, so that was lovely. I just don't know. I don't think I'll ever read it again and I don't want people to NOT read it, but I also don't think I can wholeheartedly endorse it. I think, if someone I know suffers a loss, I might suggest this.  Or I might just send them a giftcard to Starbucks.