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Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald review: in danger of metaphor fatigue
This follow-up to H Is for Hawk is elegantly done – but isn't it limiting always to see nature as an allegory for human affairs?
Swifts are the closest experience most of us have of something uncompromisingly wild. The raucous gangs of adolescent birds strafe the streets and can pass so close that you feel the whoosh of their wings. But you never see their dark goblin faces.
Swifts abound in paradox. They’re our familiars, nesting in our buildings, animating our towns, the very essence of summer high spirits. I once watched a live broadcast of the shelling of Beirut, criss-crossed by their oblivious silhouettes, a potent allegory of life versus entropy.
But swifts are also creatures of almost incomprehensible otherness. They don’t come to earth for at least two years after fledging. They drink, wash and mate on the wing. Helen Macdonald describes them as “the closest things to aliens on Earth”. She recounts how at dusk they make their “vesper flights”, climbing from the rowdy acrobatics of the streets to sleep invisibly in the upper air.
Every swift watcher has tried to witness this happening, but the birds seem just to evaporate. Radar shows them cruising at 8,000ft and then, astonishingly, coming down to feed again in the middle of the night. The flock images on the screens were called “angels” before it was discovered what they were.
The poetic name for this phenomenon is an apt title for this collection of essays, as what links them is a preoccupation with how our perception of other creatures shuttles between viewing them as autonomous beings with their own agendas for life, and appropriating them as our “proxies”, the more-than-human endowed with human meaning. The 40-odd pieces, many beginning life as newspaper columns (though their provenance isn’t given), are chiefly stories of encounters with wild creatures and places, doused for their allegorical significance.
There are comforting seasonal rites; watching glow-worms, foraging mushrooms. There are sketches of peregrines nesting on the cliffs of an inner city, of the wild fens of her Suffolk home, of the primal terror of a total eclipse. They are vivid, deeply informed, emotionally supercharged, and can startle you with their rush of attention: birds call, memory lurches, an obscure scientific insight makes sudden sense. In a heathland dusk she notices that a nightjar’s churring dips in pitch as it breathes in.
This acute watching is often folded back into human experience, so the stories become fables. Observing nests makes for a meditation on ideas of home. The flocking of starlings and cranes prompts a reflection on the companionship of crowds and the plight of refugees. The nuptial flights of black ants and the spiral of birds that feed them create an epic diorama about connectivity.
The compulsive desire “to see ourselves in the lives of animals” becomes an increasingly dominant theme. Macdonald dislikes bird-hides because of the way they distance humans from the natural world, and does not consider how birds might view them, as a protection from us, an overturning of the usual power relationship. She deconstructs a book on the cuckoo by the ornithologist-spy Maxwell Knight (the inspiration for James Bond’s “M”) and concludes that the bird is a complex symbol of his duplicitous professional and personal life. She joins the annual Swan Upping ceremony on the Thames, in which the birds are counted and ringed, and in the course of an engaging sociological portrait, sees the swans as symbols of English nationhood, of the monarchy, of – in Stanley Spencer’s painting of the ritual – the social schism caused by the Great War…
At this point I fell into metaphor fatigue. I longed for a bird that was just itself, not a token of class war or a sop to emotional neediness. In an otherwise delightfully nimble essay on hares, Macdonald calls the biffing matches between does and bucks “an animal analogue” of domestic abuse. She makes specious comparisons between human and animal migration. And this, uncritically: “We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves.”
But 10 million species of those animals are insects, whose catastrophic global decline is chiefly due to our unwillingness to view them outside human frames of reference. I wonder if, in the future, we will regard this insistent urge to use wild beings as “proxies” as a kind of cultural appropriation, and begin to see the living world as a commonwealth, not a colony.
Macdonald is right that we can’t help thinking in symbols and metaphors. But maybe we need to rein this reflex back, and have more respect for nature’s own narratives. In the incomparable rock paintings of the Paleolithic era, our species’ first representations of other animals, there is no hint of them being seen as some kind of mirror.
The book’s many moments of symbolic enclosure become literal in an apologia for the keeping of songbirds in cages. Macdonald defends the practice because it is principally working class, and so “levels up” with toffs’ pinioned waterfowl. She also reveres it as an artisan “craft”, though her descriptions of the petting, forced crossbreeding and manipulated behaviour sound more like grooming in its less pleasant sense. For another kind of working-class bird lover, William Blake, it famously “puts all Heaven in a rage”.
For me, the mystery of Macdonald is why someone so manifestly entranced by wild life should want so insistently to possess and domesticate it, from the goshawk of H Is for Hawk, through the captive falcons she helped breed for export to the Gulf States, back to her childhood menageries. She talks of a deep-seated loneliness, resulting from losing a twin brother at birth. Less fancifully she argues that catching, holding, keeping a wild animal “turns it into something much easier to love” – except, of course, that these liaisons can never have the animal’s consent.
The title of the concluding essay, “What Animals Taught Me”, hints at yet more of the Victorian naturalist’s vision of nature as a source of moral parable. But Macdonald relents a little, acknowledges a life spent using wild beings as an emotional refuge, and admits that she now takes solace from knowing that the “world… is not all about us”, or about her. A rook flies over her house and they look at each other, two creatures not locked in some allegorical entanglement, but brief and independent neighbours.
Richard Mabey’s latest book is Turning the Boat for Home. Vesper Flights is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy of either book, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop