Is it the feathers that do the trick? The severely truculent expressions on their faces? Or is it their ancient origins? Or the places where they live?
Whatever their secret, birds of prey have exercised an extraordinary hold on human beings for tens of thousands of years. In the bad old days, their fans ranged from ancient Teutonic kings to Hitler’s right-hand-man Hermann Göring. Today, it seems to be artistic types and country-lovers who keep the flag flying. Or, do I mean keep the tail feathers fluttering?
In this exhilaratingly honest and passionately broadminded book, the poet and Cambridge academic Helen Macdonald combines her ‘sorry story’ of hawk addiction with the similar trials and tribulations suffered by the great T.H. White, whose love-hate relationship with his own poor bird is fascinatingly recorded in his book The Goshawk, first published in 1951.
White and Macdonald have much in common. For all the acolades heaped on his masterpiece The Sword in the Stone (1938), White saw himself as a ‘third-rate schoolmaster’ and according to the author was a sadistic homosexual, hopeless drunk and ‘one of the loneliest men alive’. As for Macdonald herself, she is also an emotional mess or, in her own wonderful words, ‘an empty wasp’s nest’ and ‘someone tailor-made for a secret life’, who often feels like Alice falling down her rabbit hole.
The important thing is that White and Macdonald have both turned their backs on humanity in favour of hawks. More than that: they have both found themselves in their hawks. In the author’s case, she even claims to have turned herself into a hawk, ‘nervous, highly strung, paranoid and prone to fits of terror and rage’, who eats greedily or not at all.
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