Book review: When friends perch on fists

Unravelled by the loss of her father, H is for Hawk follows Helen Macdonald as she finds solace in the company of a bird

Last September, someone who was about to become a father, and who I knew remotely, died in an accident; shrapnel got to his neck. In the weeks that followed, I was visited time and again by this notion that his wife - met her only once - should read Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (in which the author's family gets wiped out by the 2004 tsunami). I wanted her to find solace in it. But it's strange to give books on bereavement to people you don't know well enough.
Still, there are books I have either given or recommended to friends grappling with the death of someone loved. Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk just took its place next to my standard reccos: The Year of Magical Living by Joan Didion, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and the aforementioned Wave.
The story is basically that the author is crumpled with grief at losing her father. Since childhood, she's loved hawks, so she gets herself one. The book is her journey of taming Mabel ("and her own untaming", as the blurb on the Vintage edition says).
Macdonald's father was a photographer, a 'watcher', who at age 16, in 1956, maintained plane-spotting diaries - hundreds of pages and thousands of aircraft described. "It has all the burning pedantry I remember from my childhood obsession with hawks." She took on from him the quality of being still, being a watcher. She has trouble looking at the last photograph her father took. "The boy that is my father is gone."
".I was in ruins. Some deep part of me was trying to rebuild itself, and its model was right there on my fist. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life."
She feeds Mabel rabbit, and watches "disarticulated pieces of chicken disappear fast down her throat". At one point she writes, "I must try to be happier. For the hawk's sake I must." The hawk is sensing her melancholy. She has to snap out of it. "But the narcissism of the bereaved is very great."
Reading the book, I learnt that hawks eat rabbits and chicks, and that you can even play catch with them. That their food lies in freezers at the homes of urban falconers. I learnt about 'flying weight', and jesses and hoods, that walking a hawk is called 'carriage', what 'to bate' means, and what anthropologists say about hanging too much in the company of wild things; how you take on their spirit. The abundance of nature and animal trivia is a treat to anyone even half into this kind of stuff. But even if not, there are some beautiful truths articulated:
"For some people, a hawk on the hand of a stranger urges confession, urges confidences, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken to us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers. people on holiday. 'We are outsiders now, Mabel,' I say, and the thought is not unpleasant. But I feel ashamed of my nation's reticence. Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn't entirely normal."
I've already recommended the book to a friend, who, even after 10 years, is mourning a parent gone too soon. But you don't need to be grieving or have even the slightest curiosity about hawks to marvel at this one.
H is for HAWK
Helen Macdonald
> 300 pages
> Publisher: Vintage Publishing
> Available at Jashanmal
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com