Helen Macdonald and the need to see what's going on in the world

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This was published 3 years ago

Helen Macdonald and the need to see what's going on in the world

By Sophie Cunningham

ESSAYS
Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald
Jonathan Cape, $35

Vesper Flights is full of profound insights, extraordinary writing and meditations on the power of observation. Helen Macdonald is one of the few writers who allows us to glimpse other ways of seeing while always being aware of the limitations of such desire: Macdonald is not, as she learnt when young, an otter. Nor is she a hawk – a hard-won understanding that she documents in her previous book, the superlative H Is for Hawk.

Helen Macdonald's mission in Vesper Flights is that we see clearly what is going on.

Helen Macdonald's mission in Vesper Flights is that we see clearly what is going on.Credit: Anthony Harvey

In the titular essay of this collection of both new and previously published pieces, Macdonald describes swifts who fly so high – on missions known as vesper flights – that they can see the earth’s curve, and the formation of weather systems. “At these panoptic heights they can see the scattered patterns of the stars overhead … Stars, wind, polarised light, magnetic cues, the distant rumble of clouds a hundred miles out, clear cold air, and below them the hush of a world tilting towards sleep or waking towards dawn.” She gives us a swift’s-eye view.

Macdonald describes this rich collection as her “Cabinet of Wonders”, and there is no doubt she is the most generous of writers: she falls in love when in proximity with all creatures, be they human, avian or plant. She shares her learnings in a way that feels like a gift.

The effect of these pieces, which vary from slight observations to profiles to the revelatory, is to feel taken into her confidence. This sense is a result of the intimacy of her observations, a quality that is a constant, no matter how expansive the territory they stake out.

Macdonald is precise, illuminating, vivid as she watches swan upping, swift rescuing and crawls through mud to be as one with a herd of cows.

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She takes us on an expedition to a high-altitude desert in Chile; we join her as she watches falcons swoop through the night in Dublin. She even takes us inside one of her own migraines. Macdonald does this carefully, and with purpose, for one of the symptoms of a migraine is not knowing you have a migraine. One of the symptoms of climate change, Macdonald reminds us, is similar. Now that we’re in it, we have no perspective. We can’t protect ourselves from its ravages.

Macdonald’s mission, in short, is that we see clearly. “The landscapes around us grow emptier and quieter each passing year. We need hard science to establish the rate and scale of these declines, to work out why it is occurring and what mitigation strategies can be brought into play. But we need literature too; we need to communicate what the losses mean … We need to communicate the value of the things, so that more of us might fight to save them.”

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Joining Macdonald on this mission can be painful at times. Reading Vesper Flights, in lockdown, knowing that environmental damage continues apace and many of us may no longer be able to visit the vanishing landscapes she describes, broke this reviewer’s heart.

The one reservation I had about the collection was more about the publishing project than the work itself. There are 41 pieces in this collection – it’s a lot – and I found myself becoming desperate for some narrative form. Macdonald is more than capable of this, and indeed one of the pleasures of this collection is getting a sense of how good she is on humans and their associated stories as well as the world of animals.

Maxwell Knight and a couple of his friends.

Maxwell Knight and a couple of his friends.Credit: Adrian Greer

A Cuckoo in the House is a fabulous essay on cuckoos and a spy called Maxwell Knight, who raised one as a fledgling. Both bird and man had secretive sex lives and both were secret agents who lived a lie of sorts.

All Macdonald’s observations on humans and their absurdities are gripping. Which is all by way of saying that every one of these essays could have been an entire book, or, at least, a far longer essay. This sense of endless small bites becomes hard work. There is the effort of engaging with a new story followed by the pang of regret as each piece finishes.

The result is a book better dipped into than one read from cover to cover, and once I came to think of Vesper Flights as a book of poetry rather than prose, it began to work better for me.

Sophie Cunningham is the author of City of Trees (Text) and editor of Fire Flood Plague: Australian Writers Respond to 2020 (Vintage).

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