Helen Macdonald, een ervaren valkenier, had nooit de behoefte een van de allerfelste roofvogels af te richten: de havik. Maar dan sterft plotseling haar vader, de bekende fotograaf en valkenier Alisdair Macdonald, in Londen, midden op straat. Overweldigd door rouw en verdriet besluit Helen een havik te nemen om haar verlies te verwerken. Door het vurige dier te temmen verkent ze haar grenzen en verandert haar leven voorgoed.In De H is van havik beschrijft Helen Macdonald hoe ze haar havik, Mabel, stapje voor stapje tam maakt. Het is een roerend en humoristisch relaas over rouwverwerking en de aantrekkingskracht van een buitengewoon beest. Macdonald betreedt onontgonnen gebied met dit hartveroverende boek dat tegelijkertijd een memoir, een boek over de natuur en een spirituele queeste is, en waarin ze onderzoekt of de dood zich laat verzoenen met het leven en de liefde.

“.It would not be the usual naturalist's book about hawks. That would be bogus, he thinks. This would be real literature.” — Helen Macdonald, “H Is for Hawk”

What Helen Macdonald says above is about T.H. White and his book “The Goshawk.” Yet what she writes about White and his book is also true of herself and her bestselling 2014 book “H Is for Hawk.” She, too, strives for literature, not the usual naturalist's book about hawks.

And she succeeds.

White's book is clearly a model for her own. She refers to it frequently, in practically every chapter. His clumsy attempts to train a goshawk were, she sees, an attempt to come to terms with his homosexuality in an unforgiving age and his taste for sadism, which was even less forgivable. Macdonald is dealing with her own problems, most significantly the death of her beloved father.

She has always loved raptors and now decides to acquire a goshawk, one of the most challenging of all British birds of prey. Taming it and training it requires isolation, something she welcomes in her grief.

"As the hawk became tamer I was growing wilder," she writes. When Mabel, as she names the bird, captures prey, Macdonald forces herself to do the actual killing or her goshawk would start eating the bird, squirrel or rabbit while it was still alive. She stuffs pieces of the dead animal into her jacket pocket to feed Mabel later.

The author thinks a lot about the similarities and contrasts between humans and animals."Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human," she writes. Near the end of her book she says, "Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all."

Yet it has much to do with Helen Macdonald and the death in her family and a life that, like T.H. White before her, she is trying to make sense of. ( )

What I liked most about this book is that it's not straight forward. It's about Helen grieving her father, she seemed to be in a depressive because of her grief but also her life. I knew nothing about these birds prior to reading this book. Perhaps she went on a bit too much on White but overall it's a layered, interesting and beautiful book. ( )

Good writing; but needed a better narrative throughout the description of falconry; too long ( )

The narrative introduced many novel-to-me ideas and terms, whether from falconry or naturalism more generally, though these were never the point or primary focus. A fact somehow never kenned until stated baldly here: undomesticated creatures have no breeds or varieties, the species are identical to that thousands of years before. "Civilisations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same." [116] Obvious, yes, and also pedantic: identical only because science has not traced and documented the natural variation within the species, as it can with domesticated breeds. All the same, a distinction between domesticated and non-domesticated species that could have been readily apparent to me, yet was not.

We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost. [129] Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. [130]

A gratifying blend of memoir, grief portrait, naturalist's notebook, and examination of T.H. White's life, loosely linked with Macdonald's personal recounting of her own social anxieties. Not strictly chronological, shifting from one emphasis to another, even for the contemporary scenes, and while hopping from time to time & place to place, ultimately cohesive and immersive. ( )