H is also for human

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.