Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald: A review

I would have bought the book for its cover alone, a picture of a swift in flight. I have a lifelong love of swifts, those magical birds that live their lives entirely on the wing, except for when they are nesting and brooding eggs or chicks. They eat, drink, mate, and even sleep in the air. They have tiny little feet that are too weak for perching but are able to cling to the vertical side of a chimney or similar opening and in such places, they build their nests and rear their young until they too are ready to take to the air. Macdonald's swift is the Common Swift of Europe. On this continent, we have the Chimney Swift which nests in my part of the world, and the Vaux's Swift of western states. There are slight differences between them but all three live their lives in the air. Macdonald's new book, a collection of essays about nature and our relationship to it, includes an appreciation of the swift in the essay which gives the book its title, "Vesper Flights." 

Macdonald's last book was H is for Hawk which told how she coped with her grief over her father's death by sublimating it into the training of a magnificent Goshawk for falconry. Through that process, she learned a lot and not just about hawks. She learned lessons about herself and, more widely, about the human species. In this book, she broadens her outlook to much of nature and once again she learns that studying nature can teach her lessons about her own species. Her varied topics include riffs on fungi, migration patterns, hares, global warming, birds' nests, and even goats. But through it all, there is a sense of sorrow and an overarching theme that might be stated as an elegy for the world of nature that we know as the sixth known great extinction in the history of our planet inexorably continues.

In one of the most affecting essays, Macdonald writes of the meadow that she knew as a child, the meadow that inspired her to take up her life's work as a naturalist. She revisited the meadow occasionally through the years of her adulthood until one year she went there and the meadow was gone. It had been turned into lawn. She writes:

"When habitats are destroyed what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are. Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather passed from existence in a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can't say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was."

When contemplating the lessons of nature and the violence done to it, Macdonald admits she is often overcome by emotion. She writes that she wept at seeing that her meadow and all the lives it held had been destroyed. She weeps also when she holds a falcon egg to her face and makes a clucking sound and hears that the chick inside that is near hatching responds to her. Feeling sad over the turn of her life she sits down next to a river and after a while, a swan walks out of the river and sits down beside her its feathers touching her leg and she finds the release of tears. And then there is the joyous experience of watching birds in flight, of watching animals be themselves in nature.

The subjects of her essays, most of which are quite short, often only a few pages, are, as I said, varied but they do tend to be heavily weighted toward the world of birds as in her descriptions of birdsong and its uses or in the quick cobra-like strike of a heron stabbing at a fish or the flight of the Common Swift.  In all of these, Macdonald expresses her gratitude that this "other" world exists and goes its own way independent of humanity. It's a gratitude that I share.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars  

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: A review

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Helen Macdonald, as she tells it in H Is for Hawk, was an awkward, unlovely, unpopular child. But though her life in the outside world may not have been so auspicious, she had a rich interior life that allowed her to escape from all that. She had an obsession: birds.

She was fascinated by birds in general, but the ones which held the strongest attraction for her were the raptors, the magnificent killing machines of the avian world. She read everything she could find about the birds and about humans working with those magnificent killing machines and training them in the sport of falconry. Her most passionate desire was to be a falconer when she grew up.

Helen, unlike many of us, had parents who did not discourage her obsession. They accepted it as normal and encouraged her in it. Her father, a professional news photographer, took her into the fields and woods to observe birds and to look for raptors. He taught her to focus as through a lens, in order to put herself outside the frame and maintain distance from the subject.

Helen was especially close to her father. He was the much-loved, much-adored center of her life, the person who gave her her grounding in the world. When he collapsed and died unexpectedly on a London street while working, Helen's world also collapsed. She had lost her center and didn't know how to find her way. She was floundering. She retreated to her world of obsession.

She had long worked with hawks in various types of situations, but she had never owned one or trained one on her own. At length, she decides that this is what she must do. She will train a hawk. But not just any hawk - a Goshawk, one of the most high-spirited and difficult to train birds of prey.

She receives her bird, which she names Mabel, and just like that, she has found a new center for her being. The training begins.

As she works with Mabel, she rereads an old book by T.H. White called The Goshawk. It recounts his experience in trying to tame and train a Goshawk. He had no idea what he was doing and his "training" methods were more like torture. Macdonald is appalled by his book but also mesmerized by it and by what it tells her about the man.

She reflects on the man and his life as an outsider, a repressed homosexual, a sadist. She ruminates on the connections between the man's personal life, the influence of World War II, his experience with the Goshawk, and how all of that came together to impact and shape his writing about the tales of King Arthur in The Sword in the Stone. She weaves all of these topics together and they become the prism through which she looks at her own life and her experience of grief, and, in the end, she pulls it all together and begins to make sense of it so that she can get on with that life.

This is a highly praised and much-honored book and, in my opinion, it deserves all of that. It is an amazing, almost unclassifiable book. It is a memoir and yet at times it reads with the urgency of the best fiction. I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a page-turner though. It is slow in parts, but there's nothing wrong with that. It just gives one time for reflection, time to absorb what one is reading.

My only quibble with the book was a certain irritation and impatience with Macdonald herself. She completely gives herself up to grieving. She's able to do that because she is single with no family depending on her. She does have a mother (the widow of her father who died) and a brother and yet she is so self-absorbed with how the death of this man has affected her that she seems to have no understanding or empathy for what it has meant to these other people who loved him. Her grief insulates her and cuts her off from other human relationships. In the depths of mourning, she is as much a loner as T.H. White ever was.

In the end, this is a book about Nature, the human and the avian kind, and about the profound and complex relationships that can develop between two species. I could never be a falconer, because I believe wild birds should be free. In fact, it distresses me to see an animal caged or tied up. But there is no discounting the effect that working with Mabel had on Helen Macdonald. At a time when she was spinning out of control, it helped her to find her way back, get her life back on track. H Is for Hawk. H is also for healing. 


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