H is for Harsh

I joined a book club through MeetUp that meets one Sunday night a month. At the January meeting, the group agreed to read H is for Hawk on my suggestion. Maybe 14 people attended tonight’s meeting. I’d say three people hated the book and made no bones about why (self indulgent, navel gazing, worst book I ever read). Maybe three said nothing. Most of the rest of the people were lukewarm. At the end of the meeting, we each rate the book on a scale from 1 to 10. I think three of us rated it above a five and the rest were four or below.

I walked away thinking this is not the book club for me. It’s fine if people don’t like a piece of literature but if the critique is as simple as: "I didn’t like her," "I’m not interested in birds,” or “it was well written, but just too depressing”--well you don’t walk away enlightened by sharing other readers’ experiences. I come at a piece of literature with my own idiosyncratic tastes and preferences and I go to a book club to learn from people who bring their unique knowledge and experience to bear. For a group of 14 people to dispense with the book in 45 minutes, as we did, reinforces that this in the wrong group for me.

I critiqued the book on four levels. I LOVED Helen Macdonald's writing. I’ll include just a taste from the early stages of training the goshawk. The author is trying to get the hawk to shift its fearful attention from her face to the piece of meat on her gloved hand. “You empty your mind and become very still. You think of exactly nothing at all. The hawk becomes a strange, hollow concept, as flat as a snapshot or a schematic drawing, but at the same time, as pertinent to your future as an angry high court judge.” I love visual metaphors.

Secondly, I enjoy learning new things. I knew nothing about falconry or its history; nothing about T.H. White, another falconer-academic who wrote the Sword and the Stone and the Once and Future King; and nothing about the geological and cultural history of the English countryside. The author is a historian, a naturalist, and a poet--what a combination to bring to bear!

The book is a memoir of the time after Macdonald’s father died. He was her hero/mentor/co-conspirator and she retreated into falconry to escape dealing with his loss. The third thing I loved about the book was the rolling revelation of what falconry means to her. It enables her to avoid human contact as she grieves; it allows her to live vicariously through a spirit animal that is also a distant, cool observer of life; it fills her lonely life and empty house; it provides an outlet for maternal feelings; it provides communion with historical figures she grew up admiring. She does the same with T.H. White’s life, looking at how his many psychological problems and political fears were served by his goshawk. I’m a firm believer that in our adult lives we manifest troubling vestiges of our past. I’m a big fan of those who gain awareness of the links between past and present.

Fourth and final comment: I did tire of her. I understand why other readers were put off by the drama that attended her every move. Walking up a hill, walking through a park--many simple actions were accompanied by a crescendo of explosive verbs and adjectives. But I allowed that she is a highly sensitive person navigating through an extremely difficult time. The world was hitting her very hard and that doesn’t make for easy reading. The only other person in the group who offered a high score for the book was a social worker, who has seen his share of human suffering. He said he appreciated the act of committing to the labour of capturing such suffering in every unlovely detail. When the meeting ended (after 45 minutes--can’t get over that), he came up to me to say he was a bit annoyed at how some of the book club members personalised their remarks (i.e. targeting the author, not me). He said he hoped I wasn’t put off. So there's at least one other highly sensitive person in the group.

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