Extraordinarily vivid story of the process of training a hawk. These birds are utterly without pity and hawking is a sport that has endured for millennia. Unfortunately T.H. White was completely ignorant of how to do this other than through reference books written hundreds of years ago, so he set out in the old style to “man” or break the goshawk to his will by depriving it of sleep for days on end, and himself in the process. The author was fantastically strong minded in groping his ignorant way forwards with the training process but was also in a very dark place himself. The book is a product of this and of its time; it was published in 1951. ( )

A very well written account of a half-assed attempt to man a Goshawk by the author of The Once and Future King. The author seems preoccupied, peculiar and cruel. I didn't really understand this book until I read Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk (q.v.). ( )

I started reading 'H is for Hawk', and realised I didn't want to read a book about a book by an author I thought of fondly without reading the book itself first. So off I set on a quest, to re-read the Once and Future King and then to read 'The Goshawk'.

It is an odd little book to our modern sensibilities. Journaling in (often tedious) detail his attempts to train his hawk Gos, many of the chapters are just called 'Monday', 'Tuesday' etc. The first half is about the training, the second half about what happens when he loses Gos, and then there are two brief sections at the end, , one which is 'I got another hawk and she managed to catch a rabbit', and a second which is a later afterword, saying 'here are the important things I had to hide in the main book, like I'm pretty convinced Gos is dead, I was a terrible hawk trainer and most of what I did was wrong, and the bit where I kept going 'probably sparrowhawks' was because they turned out to be Hobbies' The ending feels terribly rushed after the minutiae of the first parts of the book.

I have engaged enough with other perspectives on the book to know that basically all modern falconers think T H White is Doing it Wrong TM, and was even in those days, so it is a weird book of someone mostly doing the wrong thing and then failing at the thing they are doing. There is a sense of the bumbling interloper being helped out by the locals. Much of what he does feels hideously cruel to modern animal ethics, and indeed not necessary OK in his own time (the bit where he goes 'bird lime is banned, but I was so incompetent when I tried it I didn't catch any birds, so maybe that's all OK' for example!

There are some lovely bits of prose, as you would expect with White. I think my favourite is when he has to be up very early in the morning, and describes himself as being a slave to the orders of the night before, mechanically enacting them, which is just spot on. ( )

If you've ever been to a Renaissance Faire you might have witnessed the fascinating hobby of Falconry, if you found it as interesting as I did and maybe even dreamed of owning a raptor of your own this book shows how one famous writer set about learning how to do it all on his own with just three books one written in the 1600's as his guide. ( )

T H White - The Goshawk
A misanthropic man meets a misanthropic bird so let battle commence.
This is an autobiographical account of White's struggle to train a goshawk to be a companion and hunting bird. White was a man in touch with the natural world, who valued the friendship of animals rather than fellow human beings. He welcomed the challenge of training a goshawk, without any detailed knowledge of falconry, relying on his own observations and knowledge of the natural world. It is a rugged and curiously unemotional story, told straight from the falconer's glove.

The book was published in 1951, however it feels much older than that. It was completed some fifteen years earlier and so represents the epoch just before the second world war. The style of writing feels even older as there are few references to the modernist styles of Joyce, Lawrence or Woolf. White muses on his fledgling career as a writer at the start of his story after two earlier attempts at science fiction:

"But what an earth was the book to be about? It would be about the efforts of a second rate philosopher who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird."

The goshawk arrives trying to force its way out of a cloth covered box and the author's task has begun. After managing to settle the bird down he prepares to spend three days awake in order for the bird to tire itself into sleep. This seems to be a task that White has invented for himself and although he is right to say that there are no easy options, this course of action seems to be masochistic. Every time that White approached the bird it would 'bate': that is flap his wing enough to tumble off the perch and hang upside down fastened by his tress, finally he has success as the bird feels comfortable enough to sleep. The next six weeks are spent with the bird as almost a constant fixture on his gloved hand. White got used to doing most things with one hand using his free hand to write daily notes of his progress. The book is therefore a summary of these daily notes as Whites ambition is to achieve the five great milestones of falcon training: the moment when the bird first ate, the moment when it gave in to its master after the watch, the moment when it flew to his fist, the moment when it flew to him from a distance of 100 yards and the moment when it made its kill.

The bird proves difficult to master and White finds himself taking one step forward and then almost immediately two steps back. It increases his natural pessimism and the situation in 1936 with the fascists in power in Germany and Italy increases his bitter mood:

'In the end one did not need European civilisation, did not need power, did not need most of ones fellow men, who were saturated by both these: finally would not need oneself.'

It becomes a fierce struggle between man and bird as to who would be master and this reader felt that they probably deserved each other. The strengths of the book are the details of this struggle and White's observations of the countryside around him. It is the height of summer, but there are many days of bad weather and this book is a gloomy struggle: relentless and unrelieving. I had enough of White and his goshawk long before the end of the book 3 stars. ( )