They are academics, recluses, tormented by unworkable yearnings-she for her dead father’s return, he for gay BDSM. Macdonald and White have other things in common. White, chronicling a failed attempt to train Gos, his ghastly, gorgeous bird of prey. It’s an early work by The Once and Future King author T. As she did, she also reread a volume from her childhood, The Goshawk. Macdonald, an experienced falconer, withdrew from people to train her murderess, transforming her fridge into a morgue for raw animal parts. Torn by grief, she acquired a goshawk-a huge, bloodthirsty dinosaur, “the birdwatchers’ dark grail”-to plug the wound. When Macdonald, a Cambridge lecturer, poet, and naturalist, was in her late 30s, she lost her father to a heart attack on a London street. White, beloved children’s author and broken sadist, is his own opposite-it shakes the symbolism from its feathers like rainwater. And then-while you are scrambling to grasp that T.H. It stands as well for the opposite of these. Not only does the creature Macdonald ties herself to in the wake of her father’s death come to represent the entire range of her grief, fury, and love, but it also stands for England, imagination, aristocracy, manhood, and T.H. If the title of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk evokes a tidy, elementary school correspondence, don’t be fooled.
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