Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald: A Review

It's so dark now and I cannot see myself. But the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.

I love essays more than almost any other genre. There’s a formal looseness to them that allows for clever improvisations and the clear voice of direct address which can be bracing in the right hands. When essays are at their best, they’re a place to try ideas out. Put them on and see how they fit. A place for provocations and poetry. At the end of a good collection of essays I always feel somewhat transformed. I’ve seen many things from many angles that nevertheless have come together, as if on the head of a pin, into a single point that sticks like a thorn in the side.

In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald has crafted something quite sharp.

Here, Macdonald follows up her universally acclaimed naturalist history by way of personal memoir, H is for Hawk, with a wide ranging and audacious set of short essays that explore, among other things, the many uses of nature for human sociality. Usefulness is an odd word to attribute to Macdonald’s posture towards the natural world as her relationship to it is personal, historical, and anthropological. She is unapologetic in her affection for the animals around her, no matter the habitat, as when she watches the sky high night migrations of birds from atop the Empire State Building in “High Rise” or when she shares a domestic glance across the way with a lone rook in “What Animals Taught Me.”

But when Macdonald contemplates the uses of nature, she does so to expand rather than narrow our contact with it, for she understands that ecological devastation — no longer looming, but in full swing as extinction rates accelerates, forests burn, and ice caps evaporate — is a product of our own alienation from the world. We see ourselves apart, even as we leverage animals and their habitats for our own ideological ends. In one of the book’s longer essays, “Swan Upping”, Macdonald points to the layers of cultural meaning we heap upon the natural other. How ancient rituals honoring the British monarchy make space for both the nationalist fervor that drove Brexit and the beautifully embodied knowledge of craftspeople who pass their expertise on and on through the generations. Vesper Flights is a book about the contradictory meanings we have given to the natural world around us, and our failure to engage those contradictions at a time when they need exploring more than ever.

Just like H is for Hawk, this collection of essays is ostensibly about the non-human world, but its push is deeply humane. Yes, she is a conservationist, in the sense that Macdonald advocates for preserving habitats — but she is also a romantic. She “wants the mess, the drifting feathers,” of a natural world and a natural history that always exceeds our capacity to fully know it. And so she draws on scientific, literary, historical, medical, and personal discourses because to Macdonald, the encounter with the natural is always an encounter with multiplicity. It is as if Vesper Flights stands between us, the readers, and the world around us — shouting in every voice Macdonald can muster to draw our attention. “Look! See how many ways the world around you amazes.”

And this is the central irony of Vesper Flights. As Macdonald says in “Ashes”, “knowing your surroundings, recognizing the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself up to constant grief.” We have, in other words, an emergency on our hands. But instead of sloganeering, Powerpoints, and poetry, Macdonald simply wants to do to us what the rook outside her home did to her: “all my self-absorbed anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else sent a glance across the divide and stitched me back into a world where both of us have equal billing.”

Unsurprisingly, the moments in Vesper Flights which veer away from bats and blossoms toward contemporary political commentary are some of its weakest. Take, for instance, “The Human Flock”, previously published in the New York Times, which dives into the connections between disrupted bird migration and human displacement, but in the end has not dug deeply enough for more than a quick dip in muddy waters. At these points you get the sense that Macdonald is still feeling things out, that there is more work to be done to find what the changing behaviors of animals have to tell us about Nigel Farage. You sense, along with her, that something is there — but it’s not always clear what it is.

Still — that is what the essay is for, I suppose. To test these kinds of pairings out. And on the whole, Vesper Flights is an unmissable collection of gorgeous prose and heartfelt environmentalism that begs us to work against that division between ourselves — humanity — and the natural world. This is hard work, Macdonald knows, made all the harder in these past few years and all their dwindling. And so, she says:

“All of us have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality. We need our books, our craft projects, our dogs and knitting, our movies, gardens and gigs. It’s who we are. We’re held together by our lives, our interests, and all our chosen comforts. But we can’t only have those things, because then we can’t work out where we should be headed.”

So we look to the birds to build something better.