The Goshawk
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The predecessor to Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, T. H. White’s nature-writing classic, The Goshawk, asks the age-old question: What is it that binds human beings to other animals? White, author of The Once and Future King and Mistress Masham’s Repose, was a young writer who found himself rifling through old handbooks of falconry. A particular sentence—“the bird reverted to a feral state”—seized his imagination, and, White later wrote, “A longing came to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word ‘feral’ has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, ‘ferocious’ and ‘free.’” Immediately White wrote to Germany to acquire a young goshawk. Gos, as White named the bird, was ferocious and Gos was free, and White had no idea how to break him in beyond the ancient (and, as it happened, long superseded) practice of depriving him of sleep, which meant that he, White, also went without rest. Slowly man and bird entered a state of delirium and intoxication, of attraction and repulsion that looks very much like love.
White kept a daybook describing his volatile relationship with Gos—at once a tale of obsession, a comedy of errors, and a hymn to the hawk. It was this that became The Goshawk, one of modern literature’s most memorable and surprising encounters with the wilderness—as it exists both within us and without.
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T. H. White (1906–1964) is the author of the classic Arthurian fantasy The Once and Future King, among other works. He was born in Mumbai, India, to English parents and educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge. His writings have had a strong influence on both J. K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman.
Simon Vance is the critically acclaimed narrator of approximately 400 audiobooks, winner of 27 AudioFile Earphones Awards, and a 12-time Audie Award-winner. He won an Audie in 2006 in the category of Science Fiction and was named the 2011 Best Voice in Biography and History and in 2010 Best Voice in Fiction by AudioFile magazine. Vance has been a narrator for the past 25 years, and also worked for many years as a BBC Radio presenter and newsreader in London. Some of his best-selling and most praised audiobook performances include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (an Audie award-winner), Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series (all 21 titles), the new productions of Frank Herbert’s original Dune series, and Rob Gifford’s China Road (an AudioFile 2007 Book of the Year). Vance lives near San Francisco with his wife and two sons.
