Book reviews: the birds and the bees and T.H. White

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h is for hawk

As I mentioned in my previ­ous post, I’ve arranged the book reviews in groups loosely on the same theme. Here’s the first set. More to come.

H is for Hawk Helen Macdon­ald
The Bees Laline Paull
The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1) T.H White
The Witch in the Wood (The Once and Future King, #2) T.H White
The Ill-Made Knight (The Once and Future King, #3) T.H White
The Candle in the Wind (The Once and Future King, #4) T.H White
The Book of Merlyn (The Once and Future King, #5) T.H White

H is for Hawk Helen Macdon­ald

helen macdonald

(Photo of H. Macdon­ald from the Times)

When Helen Macdonald’s beloved fath­er dies suddenly and unex­pec­tedly, she feels totally adrift, and looks for a chal­lenge to pull her out of her increas­ingly unful­filling life as a academ­ic. Grow­ing up, she loved bird­watch­ing and the books of T.H. White, and as an adult became an accom­plished train­er of birds of prey. Recall­ing White’s The Goshawk, where he has a nervous break­down, and decides to quit his teach­ing job and become a hermit in order train a goshawk (a bird with a wild and feral repu­ta­tion), but makes a complete mess of it due to lack of exper­i­ence, turn­ing the book into an epic struggle against himself and his troubled psyche as much as against nature and the bird, she decides to try train­ing a goshawk, using her exper­i­ence to make a success of it this time. Expect­ing to totally lose herself in a battle of wills against a fear­some unknow­able creature like T.H. White did, she ends up with friendly Mabel who likes watch­ing tv and chas­ing rabbits, and the battle is with grief and sense of iden­tity. The book also entwines Macdonald’s story with a biography of White, a strange and tortured man, with aston­ish­ingly awful parents. Scarred by his trau­mat­ic and emotion­ally cold upbring­ing, and strug­gling with his sexu­al­ity in a repress­ive era, his main bond was with anim­als. The writ­ing of the book is beau­ti­ful and austere (and one of the best books I’ve read this year), and really immerses you in the strange turns both Helen Macdon­ald and T.H. White’s lives take.

The Bees Laline Paull

beeswax

(honey­comb image from Wiki­pe­dia)

This is basic­ally Water­ship Down, but with bees, and a touch of the Handmaid’s Tale- I don’t think I’ve ever read a book writ­ten from the point of view of a bee before. Flora 717 is a larger than aver­age bee, who was supposed to be assigned to clean­ing duty as an untouch­able, but ends up doing all kinds of differ­ent jobs around the hive, strug­gling to fit in with the strictly regi­men­ted (and some­what dystop­ic) bee soci­ety. In partic­u­lar I really enjoyed the way the world is described through smells and pher­omones and the body language of the bees and flowers. Grow­ing up, I used to live next door to a beekeep­er, and when I lived in Brighton, there was a house a few streets away that sold honey from their own hive, and I’ve always liked the serene, focused, dili­gent atmo­sphere that the idea of beekeep­ing conjures up (maybe it’s not so calm in real life when you have to deal with angry bees). Beekeep­ing is some­thing that interests me, but I don’t think living in garden­less flats in London on short-term, unpro­tec­ted tenan­cies is a good situ­ation to get into beekeep­ing!

The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1) T.H White
The Witch in the Wood (The Once and Future King, #2) T.H White
The Ill-Made Knight (The Once and Future King, #3) T.H White
The Candle in the Wind (The Once and Future King, #4) T.H White
The Book of Merlyn (The Once and Future King, #5) T.H White

I used to love the Disney version of the Sword in the Stone, but some­how never read the books as a child, which is really strange. So after read­ing H is for Hawk, I decided to read them for myself, espe­cially as the Disney version of books is usually pretty bowd­ler­ised. The first two books are a total delight, mixing a 1066 and All That style approach to history with captiv­at­ing sections about nature and anim­als, clearly writ­ten by someone who knows and under­stands wild­life well (and with a section where Arthur is turned into an ant, which The Bees strongly recalls). I’m sad that I didn’t read them as a child. As the books contin­ue though, and the focus changes to the affair between Lancelot and Guinev­ere, everything gets murki­er, and there’s lots of sections of a strange jumbled psycho­ana­lys­is of the char­ac­ters and their motiv­a­tions. I still kind of like the approach T.H. White takes of going “oh of course you know Thomas Malory back­wards, let’s skip over this entire bit, and then focus on this part that I’m going to inter­pret and explore” though even if it makes for some strange or disjoin­ted story-telling struc­ture at times, and often feels like him using the tradi­tion­al form of the King Arthur stor­ies to explore but not quite solve or under­stand his own person­al issues.

I’ve always liked how the King Arthur stor­ies mix togeth­er prob­ably real/​conflated histor­ic­al figures like Merlin, prob­ably very old myths and legends, and whatever was currently fash­ion­able in medi­ev­al times, and then with an extra layer of 19th century writers like Tennyson adding in their own fanci­ful and romantic ideas of what medi­ev­al meant, result­ing in stor­ies that can be retold and rein­ter­preted in count­less ways (often very cheesy ways, I must admit).

Once I was on holi­day in Corn­wall, and we visited Tint­a­gel Castle, which is King Arthur’s birth­place in the story. There was a local book­shop that also sold refresh­ments. I went in to buy a much needed drink on such a hot day, and have a quick browse of the books, most of which were either King Arthur themed or about New Age topics. Wait­ing at the counter was an Itali­an tour­ist who spoke excel­lent English. He asked the shop owner if they had any special editions of the Mort d’Arthur, the epic poem by Malory, maybe some­thing with illus­tra­tions or an attract­ive bind­ing, as he wanted to buy it as a gift for a friend back in Italy who was a profess­or of Medi­ev­al Liter­at­ure. The shop owner didn’t have anything like that in stock, but undeterred and using the loud patron­ising voice of Basil Fawlty talk­ing to foreign guests, went into quite a sales spiel for Mists of Avalon, a super-cheesy 80s soft erot­ica novel type book (which also manages to be quite po-faced New Age/​2nd wave at the same time) telling the story from the perspect­ive of Morgan the witch, which has a famously trashy screen version with Angel­ica Hous­ton (it’s basic­ally the 80s hippy 50 Shades of Gray). Despite the Itali­an man’s polite declin­ing of the book on the grounds that it was too modern and not really the sort of thing he was look­ing for, she contin­ued trying to push it, saying it “provided the miss­ing femin­ine element” and was “very sensu­al”. At that point I had to leave the shop and burst out laugh­ing. I don’t think she was success­ful in selling the book.

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