Vesper Flights: a book review and reflection

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

I have been waiting eagerly for a copy of Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald. If you have read my review of her H is for Hawk, you will understand why. Early reviews of the new book were also positive – “powerful essays,” said The Guardian; “soul-stirring,” said USA Today; “a beautiful and generous book,” said npr. The Goodreads community gave it 4.2 out of 5.

I was fortunate enough to get a copy of Vesper Flights for Christmas. It is a collection of 41 essays, and Helen Macdonald writes “I hope that this book works a little like a Wunderkammer. It is full of strange things and it is concerned with the quality of wonder.” Many of the essays have an autobiographical component. Several moved me to tears.

A Wunderkammer painted by Domenico Remps around 1695 (click images in this review to zoom)

The essays in the collection are:

1. Nests – a reflection on bird’s nests
2. Nothing Like a Pig – coming face-to-face with a wild boar
3. Inspector Calls – a beautifully written and touching account of an autistic boy meeting a parrot
4. Field Guides – a visit to Australia, and praise for field guides

The hairpin banksia gets a mention in essay #4

5. Tekels Park – reminiscences of a childhood spent among nature in Tekels Park
6. High-Rise – a wonderful account of the surprising amount of life that can be found in the night-time sky
7. The Human Flock – about migration
8. The Student’s Tale – about a refugee
9. Ants – about nuptial flights in ants

A winged queen ant (photo credit)

10. Symptomatic – about migraines and impending doom
11. Sex, Death, Mushrooms – “Many toxic fungi closely resemble edible ones, and differentiating each from each requires careful examination, dogged determination and often the inspection of spores stained and measured under a microscope slide.”
12. Winter Woods – walking through woods in the winter
13. Eclipse – an eclipse is an emotional experience
14. In Her Orbit – with Nathalie Cabrol in the Atacama Desert, site of the now-defunct Carrera Solar Atacama (this chapter is based on a New York Times article)

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile (photo credit)

15. Hares
16. Lost, But Catching Up
17. Swan Upping – swan upping on the Thames as social commentary
18. Nestboxes – are they for the birds, for us, or both?
19. Deer in the Headlights – this essay highlights the problem of deer-vehicle collisions (the UK gets about 1 per thousand people per year); Australia has a kangaroo-vehicle collision problem of similar magnitude, but that issue is perhaps viewed a little differently
20. The Falcon and the Tower – about urban peregrine falcons, specifically in Dublin (see also this short documentary film)

The towers of the decommissioned Poolbeg Generating Station in Dublin, with a magnification of the western (leftmost) tower. These towers, around 207 m high, are home to the peregrine falcons described in essay #20 (photo credit)

21. Vesper Flights – the central and title essay, based on a New York Times article, is about swifts
22. In Spight of Prisons – all about glow-worms, Lampyris noctiluca
23. Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres – golden orioles and bearded reedlings
24. The Observatory – “a swan had come towards me and offered me strange
    companionship at a time when I thought loneliness was all I could feel.”
25. Wicken – Wicken and other fens, which I imagine inspired the home of Puddleglum in the Narnia stories

A hide at Wicken Fen (photo credit)

26. Storm
27. Murmurations – “Words to accompany Sarah Wood’s 2015 film Murmuration x 10”
28. A Cuckoo in the House – about cuckoos and the man who inspired the character ‘M.’ Yes, that ‘M.’
29. The Arrow-Stork – the arrow-stork and the study of bird & animal migration
30. Ashes – on tree diseases
31. A Handful of Corn – as a famous song says: “Come feed the little birds, show them you care, and you’ll be glad if you do; their young ones are hungry, their nests are so bare, all it takes is tuppence from you.”

32. Berries
33. Cherry Stones
34. Birds, Tabled – a fascinating exploration of the morality of bird-watching versus bird-keeping and the class conflicts involved (a number of reviewers online have taken issue with this chapter, specifically)
35. Hiding
36. Eulogy
37. Rescue – a beautiful account of bird rescue and wildlife rehabilitation
38. Goats
39. Dispatches from the Valleys – a heavily autobiographical chapter, raising all kinds of spiritual questions (but not really answering them)
40. The Numinous Ordinary – “I kept trying to find the right words to describe certain experiences and failing. My secular lexicon didn’t capture what they were like. You’ve probably had such experiences yourself – times in which the world stutters, turns and fills with unexpected meaning.”
41. What Animals Taught Me – “When I was a child I’d assumed animals were just like me. Later I thought I could escape myself by pretending I was an animal. Both were founded on the same mistake. For the deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own.”

Not surprisingly, about half the chapters in this book are about birds, in some way or other:

At its best, this book is as good as the superb H is for Hawk, but is not consistently so (indeed, it scarcely could be). While some of the chapters are truly wonderful, others have a moralistic tone that I thought was a little more heavy-handed than it needed to be, and which became a little repetitive after a while. In the last chapter Helen Macdonald offers a corrective: “These days I take emotional solace from knowing that animals are not like me, that their lives are not about us at all.” Or, as C.S. Lewis once put it:

“Come out, look back, and then you will see … this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch.”

Helen Macdonald has a genuine talent for showing the reader what she saw, and the reader of a book like this will feel appropriate things in that situation. Perhaps the more moralistic tone is the inevitable, and possibly appropriate, nature of an essay written for a newspaper or magazine. The fact that this book is a collection of such essays would then explain why it feels a little repetitive at times.

My recommendation: buy this book, but only read a few chapters each week. And think about them.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald: 4 stars

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H is for Hawk: a book review

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

For quite some time, I have been waiting eagerly for my copy of H is for Hawk to arrive. I became aware of the author, Helen Macdonald, through her blog, so I knew in advance that the writing would be superb. Early reviews of the book reinforced this belief – “lyrical,” said The Guardian; “a soaring triumph,” said The Telegraph; “a dazzling piece of work,” said The Financial Times.

H is for Hawk is a nature book, but an intensely personal one – like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, perhaps, but much more so. Grief-stricken by her father’s death, Helen Macdonald decides to follow in the footsteps of the (rather disturbed) author T. H. White by training a goshawk. Macdonald describes the goshawk species this way:

“In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail. You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision… Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”

A female goshawk, Accipiter gentilis

Raising large predatory birds is an unusual way of dealing with grief, but we all cope with loss in different ways. The author was indeed “looking for grace,” and it is at least possible that grace takes wingèd form. Macdonald first meets her goshawk, later named Mabel, emerging from a cardboard box:

“The hawk’s wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark-tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porpentine. Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”

Juvenile (left) and adult (right) goshawks

Training a goshawk requires intense observation of the bird’s appearance and behaviour, and Macdonald’s wonderful prose beautifully captures the results of her observation. To take just one example:

“The feathers down her front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there’s a strange grey tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river.”

The gaze of this goshawk “filled me with dread,” according to photographer Steve Garvie

Goshawks are not, in any sense, domesticated animals. They are very, very wild, and Macdonald finds that “Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human.” She loves Mabel, but without sentimental misunderstandings (and without the unconscious cruelty of T. H. White). She understands that a predator’s role in the natural world is to kill and eat prey. At one point she describes her goshawk as “the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle.” Such a clear understanding of the fact that predators predate is essential to good wildlife management. Nature is what it is, not what we would have it be: “there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves.”

A goshawk nest with four young birds (photo: Rainer Altenkamp)

I had high expectations of this book, and I was not disappointed – it is one of the best books I have read in a long time. But what of grace? For goshawks in general, it came in the restoration of the British goshawk population. “The wild can be human work,” as Macdonald writes. T. H. White, on the other hand, never recovered from the pain of his dysfunctional childhood. Mabel the goshawk grew to adulthood and flew for many years. And Macdonald herself? I’ll leave the reader to decide whether wild predatory birds can indeed bring healing from pain and grief. However, I was reminded of a certain young wizard who, “in fierce distress,” transforms into a great hawk in order to return to the land of his birth. “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”

Naturally, this brief review can scarcely do justice to a book as complex as H is for Hawk. But anyone interested in birds, in people, in grief, in England, in T. H. White, or in brilliant, lyrical writing that swoops and soars like the goshawk herself – anyone interested in such things should read this book. I’m giving it a very rare 5 stars.

For lengthy excerpts from the book, along with photographs of Mabel, see here and here. Macdonald has also written Falcon, although that is a very different kind of book.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: 5 stars