Essays that test the boundaries of our relationships with animals and, above all, birds
In the introduction to this collection of 41 “new and collected essays”, Helen Macdonald suggests that we think of her book as a Wunderkammer – one of those ornately constructed cabinets of curiosities that became so fashionable from the 16th century onwards. In each cubbyhole you would find a natural or man-made object that was placed with no regard to formal classification. The pleasure came instead from spotting continuities and distinctions between unlikely neighbours – an enamel miniature next to a feather, a miniature musical instrument adjacent to a piece of coral. Macdonald hopes her essays might function in the same idiosyncratic way, although she suggests a more literal translation of Wunderkammer. Rather than a collection powered by “curiosity”, with its greedy needing-to-know, she prefers “wonder” which speaks instead of receptive rapture.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Macdonald’s work feels passive or diffuse. One of the great pleasures in this collection of pieces is seeing how determinedly she picks away at conundrums first encountered in H Is for Hawk, her hugely successful memoir of 2014. At the heart of that book lay her attempt to escape the messy world of human grief by training a falcon to soar above the earth as her beastly proxy. Macdonald is still testing the possibility of crossing the species barrier. On one occasion, while working in a falcon-breeding centre in Wales, she clucks softly at an incubating egg and weeps when the tiny grey gremlin inside the shell calls back. Another, fiercer, time she goes gonzo, smears her face with mud and crawls on her belly in an attempt to infiltrate a field of bullocks.