Guest review by Linda Sargent: ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD by Patrick Bringley

 

"A truly life-affirming book full of riches to be savoured ... I loved it."

Linda Sargent is a writer who worked as a publisher’s reader for David Fickling Books for twenty years. She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website. Over the past few years, she has been working along with Joe Brady and Leo Marcell, on the graphic novel Tosh's Island, published in October.

In Elizabeth Jennings’ poem, Into the Hour, she writes, “Grief’s surgery is over”, going on to use what may seem a surprising phrase of reaching “the time when grief begins to flower” and how through this process “Grief finds its good way home”. This book on dealing with profound loss, epitomises so many aspects of the poem. When Patrick’s brother, Tom, at twenty-six and just two years older than him, dies it is (unsurprisingly) a shattering blow. In the immediate aftermath, visiting an art gallery with his mother, the author, young and making his way upwards already on the ladder of the New Yorker magazine, experiences a sudden, profound echo of the atmosphere spent during his time by his brother’s hospital bed, “one of speechless mystery, beauty and pain” (p.31). And there he makes a decision to retreat into a calmer and, as it transpires, more healing and sustaining space for himself.

He leaves the New Yorker and gets a job as a Museum Guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here, over ten years, he meditates on the many works of art held there, from the huge collection of ancient and classical works, paintings, sculptures and treasures from across the world, to more modern pieces, including quilts and furniture. And he takes us, the readers into this world along with him, giving us a chance to explore the pieces in a deeper and more meaningful way. It’s an open way too, he doesn’t preach, he shares. As well as his exploration and linking of art, life and the patterns of grief, the author also forms bonds and friendships in the community of other guards at the Met, a diverse and fascinating group. During this period, Patrick marries and now has two children and these biographical moments are expertly and lightly threaded through. Mostly, it focuses on the importance of having time to reflect, really reflect, on the way art and beauty can provide support during periods of struggle and grief. He manages to bring home the way even the greatest of art can function on this inclusively human level, at one point observing that in the end “all art is local”. He also talks about the “simplicity of stillness” amongst all this art, but adds: “…it is also about the head-down work of living and struggling and growing and creating”. Indeed. A truly life-affirming book full of riches to be savoured and I loved it.

There are illustrations in every chapter by Maya McMahon referencing some of the pieces he mentions. And at the end there is a comprehensive list and links to all the works of art mentioned.

All the Beauty in the World is published by Vintage.

Linda's graphic novel Tosh's Island, with Joe Brady and Leon Marcell, is published by David Fickling Books.

More of Linda's choices:

12 Birds to Save your Life: Nature's Lessons in Happiness, by Charlie Corbett

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

    

Guest post by Leslie Wilson: ELIZABETH HEYRICK - THE MAKING OF AN ANTI-SLAVERY CAMPAIGNER by Jocelyn Robson

 

"She wrote in language which is still relevant, if not to the abolition of slavery, certainly to our attitude to the climate crisis."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and three for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. The first two deal with Nazi Germany: The War’s Not Over Yet is published as a Kindle e-book and is set at the time of the Russian blockade of Berlin in 1948. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany.

1809: A forty year-old woman hears of a bull-baiting that is to take place in Bonsall, in Derbyshire. Appalled, she gets herself to Matlock, two and a half miles distant, tries to get local dignitaries to stop the event. They refuse. By the time she gets back to Bonsall the bull is already tied, and the dogs about to be released. The crowd has been drinking for hours; bets have already been placed. The woman speaks to the crowd, appealing to them to give up their entertainment. She has no success. So she tries something else. She manages to find out who is the bull’s owner and buys the animal from him. The bull is saved. 

In carrying out this action, Elizabeth Heyrick transgressed against the approved behaviour of women at this period; she shouldn’t have been at such an event at all, let alone interfering with the pleasures of men. The story demonstrates her courage and determination, which was to be further manifested through the rest of her life.

She was born in 1769, into a middle-class, dissenting family with radical tendencies. Attractive and elegant, she fell in love with John Heyrick, a descendent of the poet Robert Herrick, and married him at the age of nineteen. The marriage turned out badly. Heyrick, though idealistic, was also a gambler and had a violent, unstable temperament, for which Elizabeth blamed herself, though her family blamed her husband (her brother even challenged Heyrick to a duel because of his treatment of his wife, but nothing came of it).  They spent several periods apart and there were no children. In 1797, she came back from church to find him dead on the floor from a fatal heart attack.

This dreadful shock precipitated her into a period of depression and self-starvation, but she had a supportive family, no financial troubles (though she donated her Army widow’s pension to charity), and a circle of engaged, intelligent female friends, some of whom were Quakers. Though she continued to suffer depression, she found a role in life: campaigning for the oppressed.

Heyrick herself became a Quaker in 1807 (two years before she prevented the bull-baiting) and also probably taught for a while in a Quaker school for girls in York. Quakers were then in what is known as the ‘quietist’ period, and it was rare at this stage for outsiders to become convinced, so Elizabeth was exceptional in this respect also. However, quietism must not be understood as inactivity. Though Quakers had owned slaves in the past, and many of them through their business activities had been connected with the profits of slavery, uneasiness about slavery grew throughout the eighteenth century and in 1772, the American anti-slavery campaigner John Woolman had convinced the London Yearly Meeting of Quakers to include an abolitionist statement in the Epistle which was sent out to British Quakers after that national meeting. Subsequently many British Quakers became dedicated anti-slavery activists, and briefed campaigners such as William Wilberforce.

Women were also permitted to minister during the silent Meeting for Worship, and many of them (including two of Heyrick’s friends) were ‘recorded’ as ministers, which doesn’t mean that they became paid ministers or led the Quaker meeting; simply that they were recognised to have a calling to stand up and speak in the largely silent Meeting. Though women did play a subsidiary role within the Society of Friends, they nevertheless had far more opportunity to speak and be heard than in many other denominations; certainly more than the Church of England, which did not allow women to speak at all. For a woman like Heyrick, the Society of Friends could be seen as a natural home.

She became the author of eleven hard-hitting pamphlets; against animal cruelty, against social injustice in Britain, and against slavery (these all written in the 1820s).

The slave trade was abolished in the same year that Elizabeth became a Quaker, but chattel slavery was not. It was argued that if the trade was abolished, slave owners would be kinder to their enslaved workers, and even that abolition would come about gradually (Heyrick regarded this idea as propaganda on the part of the planters, who were certainly good at protecting their interests). She wrote in language which is still relevant, if not to the abolition of slavery, certainly to our attitude to the climate crisis.

‘The slave-holder knew very well, that his prey would be secure, as long as the abolitionists could be cajoled into a demand for gradual instead of immediate abolition. He knew very well, that the contemplation of a gradual emancipation, would beget a gradual indifference to emancipation itself. He knew very well, that even the wise and the good may, by habit and familiarity, be brought to endure and tolerate almost any thing.’

She was never a woman to pull punches. She wrote: ‘We that hear, and read, and approve, and applaud the powerful appeals, the irrefragible arguments against the Slave Trade, and against slavery, - are we ourselves sincere, or hypocritical? Are we the true friends of justice, or do we only cant about it? – To which party do we really belong,’ – to the friends of emancipation, or of perpetual slavery? Every individual belongs to one party or the other; not speculatively, or professionally merely, but practically. The perpetuation of slavery in our West Indian colonies ... is a question in which we are all implicated.’

During the 1820s, women became increasingly active in the campaign to abolish slavery, and formed their own societies, in which Elizabeth was active. Her pamphlets were, of course, read by the members of these societies. One of the issues which particularly concerned them was the sexual abuse of enslaved women; ‘moral degradation’  was the word used; it was of its time, but everyone knew what it meant. ‘I have known them gratify their brutal passions,’ the freed man Olaudah Equiano writes about the white captors, ‘with females not ten years old.’  

Meanwhile, the national Anti-Slavery Society, with its male membership, was still sticking to the aim of gradual abolition. Eventually, the women had enough.  Prior to the Gentlemen’s Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting, they said they would donate £50 (equivalent to around £3,300 today) to that society if they were willing to give up their use of the word ‘gradual’ in their aims. The women’s contribution to the outcome was never (are we surprised?) mentioned, but the society did indeed give up the word ‘gradual’, in spite of objections from William Wilberforce.

 Elizabeth died in 1831, before the 1833 Act was passed which abolished slavery in all British dominions. She would have been outraged at the payment of compensation to the plantation and slave owners, a sum which has only recently been paid off by British taxpayers, but which has enriched many a British family. ‘The slave has a right to his liberty,’ she wrote, ‘a right which it is a crime to withhold – let the consequences to the planters be what they may.’

 Exceptionally among white anti-slavery campaigners, Elizabeth Heyrick regarded the enslaved people as equals, regardless of skin colour.  She defended the uprisings against the planters, regarding them as justified; she denounced floggings and cruel punishments, both in the West Indies and in Britain. She spoke out for a decent living wage for the working classes. Through careful research and an exciting access to a preserved archive, Jocelyn Robson has opened up for us the life of an extraordinary and precious woman. She is to be congratulated.

Elizabeth Heyrick: the making of an anti-slavery campaigner is published by Pen and Sword History.

Photograph by Corinne Lambert

Recently, sculptor Corinne Lambert was commissioned to make this piece, Abolition (Remembering Elizabeth Heyrick) which is now in the permanent collection at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The presentation was covered by BBC Leicester - read the piece here. 

Guest review by Fiona Mountain: THIS THING OF DARKNESS by Harry Thompson

 

"An immense, brave, tragic and hauntingly profound story, richly told. I honestly believe it’s one of the best historical novels ever written."

Photograph by Hugh Dickens

Fiona Mountain is an award-winning novelist. Her debut novel, Isabella, tells the haunting love story of Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian and his cousin, Isabella Curwen, and was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award. It was followed with Pale as the Dead and Bloodline, which combine history with mystery and feature 'ancestor detective', Natasha Blake. Bloodline is the winner of an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Fiona grew up in Sheffield and moved to London aged eighteen, where she worked for the BBC for ten years. She now lives in the Cotswolds with her family.

This is historical fiction at its finest; a based-on-fact novel with gripping, page-turning pace which at the same time engenders a fascination for its subject that is sure to send readers hunting out biographies to find out more about the real life protagonists and events surrounding them.

This Thing of Darkness recounts the legendary, world-changing voyage of HMS Beagle, shining the spotlight on the brilliant young captain, Robert FitzRoy, whose fate has been obscured by his famous passenger, Charles Darwin.

FitzRoy and Darwin were intellectual equals and it’s the deep friendship they shared which drives the novel and provides the source of conflict as the two friends turn into enemies, their ideological differences slowly tearing them them apart, leading one to great acclaim and the other to tragedy. The two men disagree over God’s creation and as Darwin grows in stature, FitzRoy slowly and painfully fades under the burden of his traditional morality and practical responsibilities. This Thing of Darkness is a thrilling seafaring adventure which fans of Patrick O'Brian will appreciate. As the Beagle sails around the Pacific there is plenty of violence and danger and storms at sea. But fundamentally it’s a novel about ideas and relationships.

Harry Thompson achieved success as a writer of comedy at the BBC: one of his credits being the creation of Have I got News For You. This is his only novel, written a few months before his untimely death, aged 45. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and it’s a phenomenal achievement and legacy. The breadth and depth of the research is incredible, immersing readers in the life on board a ship on a voyage of discovery. The characterisation, the complexity of the debates and the sheer power of the story arc is sublime, and as all the best historical fiction should do, it makes you question thoughts and beliefs and look at the world and your place in it with fresh eyes. It teaches you and leaves you wanting to learn more.

An enigmatic figure, the fourth great-grandson of Charles I, Robert Fitzroy was a man ahead of his time. He believed in equal rights for those who, in Victorian drawing rooms, were considered to be savages. I was fascinated to learn that he’s the father of meteorology. He showed how storms can be predicted and he began telegraphing shipping forecasts and installing storm warning systems which saved countless lives at sea, but his work was delayed in England because ship owners lost money when their boats didn’t go out because of the forecasts.

The theory that was borne on The Beagle led to Darwin losing his belief in God. Emotionally fragile, Robert FitzRoy, a secret manic-depressive, eventually lost his life to suicide.

This is an immense, brave, tragic and hauntingly profound story, richly told. I honestly believe it’s one of the best historical novels ever written.

This Thing of Darkness is published by Headline Review.

MODERN NATURE by Derek Jarman, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"The New York Times described his film The Garden as 'a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury', which could apply equally well to this journal."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review.

"I have re-discovered my boredom here," Derek Jarman writes, finding at Prospect Cottage, his Dungeness home, an escape from the celebrity he earned through his films and his activism. "All around the traps were set. Traps of notoriety and expectation, of collaboration and commerce, of fame and fortune. At first a welcome trickle, something new. Then a raging flood of repetition, endless questions that eroded and submerged my work, and life itself. But now I have re-discovered boredom, where I can fight 'what next' with nothing."

Well, not exactly nothing. Beginning after Jarman's diagnosis as HIV positive (which gave, at that time, a grim outlook) his 1989-90 journal conveys a time filled with interviews, film projects and visits to London exhibitions and social events, interspersed with the making of his iconic Dungeness garden, constantly planting, propagating and making sculptures from objects found on the shore. The contrasts are stark, moving from the many demands on him in London to the quieter, reflective times at Dungeness. He writes of  "the separation of my two lives ...  work here (in London), sunsets and sunrises there." Always in the background is his sorrow at the death of friends from AIDS and the foreboding of his own, which by the end of the journal seems close, although he lived for another three and a half years, regaining enough health and energy to film Edward II, Wittgenstein and Blue.

Having visited Prospect Cottage and somewhat fallen under the strange spell of Dungeness, its flat horizons, big sky and sparse vegetation, I found that these sections appealed to me most, beautifully evoking that distinctive terrain with the nuclear power station looming in the background. "There are no walls or fences. My garden's boundaries are the horizon," he writes, and of the night sky: "So flat is the Ness that those stars that lie at the horizon touch your very feet and the moon tips the waves with silver ... The nuclear power station is an ocean liner moored in the firmament, ablaze with light: white, yellow, ruby." Both my visits have been in calm July sunshine; the place must be very different in harsh winter weather. Once in this memoir Jarman feared that the cottage roof would be torn off in a gale, while on another occasion a lightning strike at the power station sent him and other residents into a panic, rushing to pack for a hasty evacuation (which, fortunately, wasn't needed).

Derek Jarman is an engaging diarist, full of contradictions and charm. The boldly unconventional film-maker, rebellious activist and one of the first public figures to be open about his HIV diagnosis expresses a wistfulness for pre-decimal coinage and describes himself as too shy to try on clothes in shops; as a student at King's College in London he felt "frightened and confused," convinced that he was the only gay in the world. Almost every writer or artist will identify with the self-doubt he experiences: "All the way back on the train I was plagued with misgivings about The Garden. Looking at the rushes over the last six days, I discovered not one sequence that worked. Glaring faults everywhere ..." At the same time he feels a compulsion to write. "I find it difficult to write each day, but if I don't I'm swamped with guilt. Where does the compunction come from?" So strong was it that even when he temporarily lost his sight while being treated in hospital he dictated his journal entries to his devoted companion Keith Collins (referred to by his nickname HB in the book). 

Those us who were around in the 80s may remember how the AIDS epidemic was viewed by some who saw it as a punishment for homosexuals. "Last week a doctor in the mainstream of research with a leading drug company said that looking for drugs to combat the virus and to prolong the lives of those already infected posed an ethical problem, as keeping them (read me here) alive only exacerbated the situation. Better we should all die quickly. Every day, in many little ways, we are subjected to this terrorism. Our relationships unsanctioned, beyond the law." No wonder there is always anger simmering beneath the surface of Jarman's writing.

As it's a journal, events are understandably related without context, which can sometimes confuse the reader with a great many names, places, and visits whose purpose is unclear. Interspersed with these almost daily records are reminiscences from his childhood, spent in various countries with the RAF father with whom he had a difficult relationship. But it was early in childhood that his fascination with plants and gardening began: at four his parents gave him an illustrated Edwardian book, Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them, an unusual gift for so young a child but one which provided a lasting influence: "Flowers spring up and entwine themselves like bindweed along the footpaths of my childhood." The early part of Modern Nature refers constantly to plants in folklore, in herbalism, in classical literature. "If fate had turned out different," he writes, "I am sure I would have been a professional gardener, rather than an enthusiastic amateur."

In between making videos for the Pet Shop Boys, filming The Garden, beginning to research Edward II and frequently staying at his London flat, he spends his time at Prospect Cottage walking the shores of the Ness, collecting and arranging the driftwood, stones and found objects which give his garden its unique character. He reports constantly on the progress of his seedlings and cuttings. Even at his lowest, when friends' deaths are reported with horrible frequency, he finds solace in his plants. "I plant my herbal garden as a panacea, read up on all the aches and pains that plants will cure - and know they are not going to help. The garden as pharmacopeia has failed. Yet there is a thrill in watching the plants spring up that gives me hope."   

The New York Times described his film The Garden as 'a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury', which could apply just as well to this journal.

                                                           

Modern Nature is published by Vintage.

Derek Jarman photograph from Wiki Commons. Others by Linda Newbery.

For more of Linda's nature and garden writing choices, see:

Natural Selection: a year in the garden by Dan Pearson

Q&A with garden designer Cleve West on The Garden of Vegan

The Invention of Nature: the adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the lost hero of science by Andrea Wulf

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The Flow by Amy-Jane Beer

Guest review by Pippa Goodhart: FIERCE BAD RABBITS by Clare Pollard

  

"Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!"

Pippa Goodhart has written over a hundred and fifty books for children. Best known is her picture book You Choose, illustrated by Nick Sharratt. Her most recent children’s novel, The Great Sea Dragon Discovery, set in her home village of Grantchester, won the Young Quills Award for best historical children’s novel for 10-13 year olds. More on Pippa's website. 

This book is a fascinating, heart-stretching, humanity-sharing, amusing read for anybody interested in children or books. Or, come to think of it, anybody who has ever been a child. It’s about picture books, but, more than that, it’s about story and about what makes us who we are.

Clare Pollard is a poet who became a mother. Sharing books with her two young children and remembering her own childhood experiences of story, she adds academic study and a perceptive mind to considering the books many of us know and love. She writes so lucidly, with humour, moving fast through her rich material, carrying the reader onwards.

We get something of a cultural history of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, reflected in what we present to children. It’s gob-smacking to learn that both Franco and Hitler were scared enough of the potential influence of The Story of Ferdinand that they banned and burned it. What was the scary power of that little story for children written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson? Simply that Ferdinand, the bull, is a character who would rather sit and sniff the flowers than fight. The book was published in 1936. In the US it became a best-seller, knocking Gone With The Wind off the top of the sales chart.

We learn of Eric Carle digging trenches for Nazis aged only fifteen, really understanding what extreme hunger is like, before idly playing with the hole punch on his desk and coming up with his classic Hungry Caterpillar. So many classic children’s picture books have links to the Second World War. Eric Hill, ex-RAF, realised that he’d given Spot the dog aircraft markings with the placement of spots on his coat! There are many more stories behind the stories to discover when you read this book.

I loved getting something of the personalities and lives of children’s book creators. The enterprise of Beatrix Potter, not just self-publishing when publishers turned down her Peter Rabbit story, but also creating and selling merchandise based on her artwork. We hear that Alison Uttley, creator of saintly Little Grey Rabbit, was herself of a bitchy tendency, calling Little Grey Rabbit’s illustrator, Margaret Tempest, ‘a humourless bore’, and neighbour Enid Blyton, ‘a vulgar, curled woman'. In contrast, we have charming Jan Pienkowski regularly meeting-up with Helen Nicoll, the author of his Meg and Mog books, at Membury Service Station, always taking with him a small bunch of flowers for the table they sat at to discuss the next book!

But there are sadder things. It’s so poignant to learn that the Babar stories which open with Babar weeping over his dead mother, was written and illustrated by young father, Jean de Brunhoff, when he knew himself to have TB, and that his own children would soon face the death of a beloved parent. Other examples of stories behind stories had me in actual tears.

And there’s just the quirky interest to be found. Did you know that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) had a stammer, so referred to himself as ‘the dodo’ as in Do-Do-Dodgson? Hence the dodo in Alice in Wonderland? Do you know what name Winnie the Pooh really had, if only AA Milne had listened more carefully to his son? Did you know that John Ruskin urged Kate Greenaway to undress the ‘girlies’ in her pictures? Urgh! I leave you to read and discover these things out for yourselves.

We also touch on picture book history through the development of different printing techniques, the start of children’s sections in libraries, the introduction of novelty elements of flaps and shaped pages, and more.

As Clare Pollard says, picture book stories are perhaps an area of culture shared more generally than almost any other. And they are important. Picture books, she says, ‘are teaching our children how they should be’. We know that the ones which strike a chord with children are loved and remembered for a lifetime.

I re-read this book over a couple of days, relishing reminders of favourite books and favourite book creators, some of whom I’ve been lucky enough to meet in my Heffers Children’s Bookshop days in the early ‘80s up to now being a picture book writer myself. Just about anyone will meet old book friends in this book, and find things out about those old friends they never knew before. A treat!

Fierce Bad Rabbits is published by Penguin.

Guest review by Nick Manns: H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald

 

"The notion of ‘looking’ is a key term in this book, and a suitable one for someone on a quest."

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder and director of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester.

'Grief has no distance,’ wrote Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking. ‘It comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.’ The ‘dailiness of life’ is that touching trust in stability; of everything in its place and all being right with the world.

With Didion that confidence crashed when her husband dropped dead one evening from a heart attack and she spent months trying to navigate a changed reality. With Helen Macdonald, her old world finished with a phone call: when her mother told her that her father, apparently recovering from a trivial injury to his arm, had suddenly died. His heart had stopped.

Whereas Didion struggled to believe John Gregory Dunne was really dead (she needed to be alone,' she wrote, ‘so that he could come back’), Macdonald describes her grief in Biblical terms: ‘the rain fell and the waters rose and I struggled to keep my head above them’. Worse still, this was a world that was indifferent to her suffering: ‘planes still landed, cars still drove, people still shopped’ and ‘nothing made any sense at all.’ She finds herself in Auden land, where the misery of the bereaved cannot be assuaged: clocks can’t be stopped; catastrophes are always someone else’s problem. Icarus drops into the water and no-one notices.

The likeness to Didion isn’t limited to a shared experience. As the American author believed (at some level) that her husband was still around (heading towards the front door), so Macdonald holds a similar fantasy about her father, except that she wasn’t hanging around for the doorbell to chime or for the phone to ring.

Although most readers (who aren’t writing book reviews) will probably pass by incidental details, a pleasure of this book is in the hints and clues that Macdonald builds into the narrative. Early on, whilst walking the blasted heath of the Brecklands – the broken lands – of Norfolk, in search of goshawks, she comments: ‘The goshawk is the birdwatcher’s dark grail.’ They’re rare and hard to see. And she adds, ‘Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often.’

Of course, the notion of the ‘grail’ is often the focus in stories of chivalry – of a search for something precious in the Christian tradition. The journey to attain the grail (or achieve some worthwhile end) may be uncertain and perilous. In Macdonald’s case, like Sir Gawain, she must find her own way and use her own resources. The ‘broken lands’ of East Anglia are as good a place to start as any.

Throughout – and running as a parallel narrative – she shares with us the tale of another traveller, who went before, and we realise that finding the grail or receiving grace isn’t a given. Although there are no maps to this terra incognita and no guarantees, in good medieval tradition, she takes guidance from those who had asked the important questions and knew the likely trail. For Freud and Klein, the grail for each of us is authenticity and this is earned through self-knowledge.

In the early days, after the fateful call from her mother, Macdonald had groped her way out of ‘madness’ by connecting with the certainties of her childhood. She says: ‘When you are broken, you run. But you don’t always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards’. She recalls that years before, when working in a falconry centre, an injured goshawk had been brought in for assessment. The bird was not seriously harmed and they took her outside and then, like a magic trick (or something out of Philip Pullman), ‘She opened her wings and in a second was gone. She disappeared over a hedge slant-wise into nothing. It was as if she’d found a rent in the damp Gloucestershire air and slipped through it.’

Years later, following her father’s death, and after a series of dreams about hawks, she drove to Scotland, to meet an Irishman, who would hand over a young female goshawk. Although she had been advised against this project (‘Hiding to nothing,’ comments her friend), she was by this time an experienced falconer and disregarded the note of caution. And yet. The travelling box is opened and the bird ‘came out like a Victorian melodrama: a sort of madwoman in the attack.’

Her training of the incongruously named ‘Mabel’ dominates the rest of the book. We’re educated in the process of feeding the young bird and how Macdonald painstakingly built trust. This is a creature that is given ‘roughly torn day-old chicks’ and bits of rabbit. She’s also a creature straight from the menagerie of Ted Hughes: ‘I see it all; I own all this world and more.’

The notion of ‘looking’ is a key term in this book, and a suitable one for someone on a quest. As a child Macdonald describes herself as a ‘watcher’ who would climb the hill behind her home, crawl under a rhododendron bush and ‘look down on the world below.’ This habit of quiet observation is reinforced by her companionship with her father, who worked as a press photographer and transmitted the need for patience.

At one point Macdonald recounts a dream in which she looks down on a Second World War bombsite and sees a boy amidst the rubble. He turns and she sees it is a figure of her father as a child, who points to an approaching aircraft. She later reflects: ‘I’ve come to realise that we were watching the same things: or at least the things that history conspires to make the same. Since the dawn of military aviation, birds of prey had been thought of as warplanes made flesh…Hawks fly and hunt and kill: aircraft do the same.’ She concludes: ‘I must have inherited being a birdwatcher from Dad.’

There’s also something of the photographer in the exactness of her metaphors: long-tailed tits in a willow were like ‘animated cotton buds’; the feathers down the front of the young goshawk are the colour of ‘sunned newsprint.’ She describes fieldfares as ‘netting the sky …like a 16th century sleeve sewn with pearls.’

To understand Mabel, to train her so that they can become a hunting partnership, she reads widely and returns to the work of T. H. White. She had read The Goshawk as a child, and as then, so now, she is disturbed by the cruelty meted out by White in his attempt to make his wild bird biddable. This cruelty contrasts with her own sensitivity and kindness to the young bird in her care.

For Macdonald, ‘running towards’ the source of her feelings, enabled her to get in touch with important elements of her childhood: she was able to make sense of her life by inspecting her past. White’s past included neglect at home and physical abuse at boarding school: a history in which the school sanctioned the punishment of younger children by older pupils. As a gay adult he tried to ‘pass’ as a straight man (with upper class pretensions.) His repeated attempts to form relationships with women were predictable failures. Macdonald sees his efforts to train ‘Gos’ as an (unconscious) desire to tame the ‘wild’ parts of himself. She writes: ‘White found himself in a strange, locked battle with a bird that was all the things he longed for but had always fought against.’

Whereas White’s training methods would today elicit a call to the RSPCA, Macdonald is able to empathise with Mabel: she’s a ‘baby’ who could be ‘happy’ or ‘contented’. She doesn’t have to control this creature but to collaborate with it: she isn’t conflicted in her role. White was both stern schoolmaster and wild child: both roles which would be depicted in his children’s novel of Arthurian adventure, The Sword in the Stone.

White never resolved the different parts of himself: the relationship with Gos (spoiler alert) ends tragically: the hawk escaped. Macdonald notes that he remained alone all his life. At the end of her book, Macdonald can symbolically ‘let go’ of Mabel (the hawk spends several months in an aviary so that she can moult) and Macdonald emerges from crushing grief: she ‘lets go’ of her father.

This ending takes us back to the start of the book: she notes that Melanie Klein had commented that children deal with states of mind akin to mourning and that adults return to this emotional world whenever grief is experienced. Macdonald tells us that as a child she comforted herself that White’s Gos wasn’t really dead, he was ‘out there’ in the woods and she had wanted to go and ‘bring him back’. As an adult, she had wanted to ‘slip through that rent in the air’ and fly her hawk to find her lost father.

In the early days of training Mabel, Macdonald had riffed on lines by John Keats: ‘My arm aches and a damp tiredness grips my heart’. The poet had been meditating on the beguiling charms of a nearby nightingale, a ‘deceiving elf’, who might help him escape ‘the weariness, the fever and the fret’ of life. At the very end of her book, Macdonald fully returns to the human world: she recognises that goshawks are ‘things of death and blood and gore’. The world we inhabit is shared – but separate. She concludes, ‘Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks.’

H is for Hawk is published by Vintage.

See Nick's previous reviews:

The Antidote: Happiness for People who can't stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkmann

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THEBES - THE FORGOTTEN CITY OF ANCIENT GREECE, by Paul Cartledge

 

"The core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press. 

In what we know as Greece, their Hellas, the prominent power bases are celebrated: Sparta in the south, the formidable militaristic people, ruled by two kings; Athens, the fledgling democracy and agitator-in-chief in the centre and to the north, athwart the main invasion route, in Boiotia we find Cartledge’s aptly named ‘forgotten city’, Thebes. 

Variously oligarchy and democracy, Thebes was a political and social counterweight to its more prominent distant neighbours and often at odds with them in the matter of solidarity against a common foe. Indeed, as Cartledge tells us, its strategic position led to the surrounding region being called the orchestra (theatre’s dance floor) of the war god Ares. It was here that the resisting Greeks, forever quarrelsome, were, by great good fortune, marshalled under the Spartans, acknowledged masters of battle, in the climactic engagement which ended Persia’s attempt to subsume all mainland Greece/Hellas into its huge empire: Plataea, 79 BC, which unquestionably conserved Greek civilisation and culture for us. Hobbes called it crucial in world history. Consider: philosophy, tragedy and comedy, literature and political template…why bother to plumb the origins of Greek culture? The answer is here in Cartledge’s compelling account.

It may be that his more scholarly descriptions of how so much knowledge passes to us via archaeology, archaic inscription and tablet do not detain the average reader. Doesn’t matter: the core is here, vital to how Greece, its states and peoples, came to be and what made them tick.

All cities look to their mythic foundation – ours, formulated by a mediaeval monk, was long since overlaid by ecclesiastical fictions, but ancient Greeks leaned much to myth, their word for story. Myth…in our parlance so often misused as meaning fairy tale. Not so to them: their myth is the very foundation of human understanding, it underpins all feeling and human response. Thebes claimed origin from no fewer than three mythic beings whose significance still resonates: Heracles, the strongman demigod, symbolic of human links with the divine, an important thread of our relationship with the universal pulse of nature and its manifestations, he whose celebrated Labours mirror our own travails and fortitude in coping with them; Dionysus, god of wine, ecstatic pleasure and passions, a good time, and Apollo whose cultural importance is wide-ranging within the influence of our arts. This may come across as a nonsensical construct, but in the ancient world mythic stories - Helen, addressing the lords of the Greek Trojan expedition, bids them sit and feast and ‘take joy in telling stories’. (Iliad IV 238ff) those stories are their life’s inspiration. For myth was central to the Greek examination and analysis of human sentience and behaviour, exploring and addressing the darker currents of the psyche and unconscious. They questioned things and fastened on the difficult, often frightening shifts of human nature; an admirable candour. What Cartledge terms our imaginary thought-world, echoed in myth.

Central to the Theban myth are the personages illustrated on the cover of this excellent study: Oedipus and the Sphinx, most potent elements in our own comprehension of the human psyche. Their myth/story drives three plays written by the outstanding Athenian tragedian, Sophocles. Other Athenian tragedians also looked to the myths of Thebes in their work, plays which thrill in their writing and action, and this alone gives some idea of the importance of a place so often overlooked in more general accounts of the basic ‘why Greece?’

Consider: a multiplicity of divine beings as representative of the great and teeming foison of Nature in this eco-age? Homer talks of ‘the earth that feeds us all’. It makes a lot of sense to me and Cartledge is an excellent guide to the evolution of such a forceful idea. The gods are capricious, argumentative, partial and problematic in their loyalties…why so? Because the people who conceived of their existence and behaviour exactly resemble them.

Greece, as the Romans named it, was eventually swallowed in the Imperium Romanum and we owe much of what survives of their literature etc to that subjugation. As the Latin poet, Horace, puts it: captive Greece took its untutored conqueror captive and introduced an uncultivated people to the arts and culture (Epistles II i 156ff).

This book is no homily but a fair-minded account of how embedded matters Greek are in our own culture - and best we acknowledge that, surely? Cartledge states that he aims to point out and to emphasise that ‘Apollo and Dionysus are both still vigorously at work deep within our collective and independent pysches.’

Thebes - the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece is published by Picador  

See also Graeme's review of Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard