Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. If first responders moved with the meandering pointlessness of this novel, we would have a true emergency on our hands. Now, I do not mind a slow, meandering, and meaningful novel, BUT this is beyond the pale. Emergency is a crucial intervention. It drives a stake into the heart of the pastoral genre . . . This is what nature writing should be: absurd, overwhelming, and chaotically alive with the din of the world.” Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.” Hildyard doesn’t offer the narratives of therapy, social criticism or self-development to be found in other English pastoralists (Helen Macdonald, Ronald Blythe or Adrian Bell). Her style is more reminiscent of such contemporary poets as Kathleen Jamie and Alice Oswald, with their quiet and attentive watchfulness to a non-human reality they only half-understand. Her prose calls for, and frequently earns, the same respectful attentiveness from its readers.’

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The pandemic narrative’s in vogue right now, for obvious reasons, and although I thought Hildyard’s attempt was less awkward than a number of examples I’ve already encountered, it was far from seamless. The contemporary sections didn’t flow as well as the Yorkshire ones, they came across as grafted on, inserted to make a point rather than smoothly integrated into the wider narrative. The narrator’s comments on white culture, to take just one example, were surprisingly clumsy, a very basic attempt at exploring broader questions of white privilege. In addition, the juxtaposition of the child who’s fully immersed in her local networks and the isolated adult whose life's been upended by global events, didn’t quite come off for me; and sometimes threatened to resurrect the kind of Cider with Rosie, conservative fantasies of prelapsarian, rural childhood which Hildyard seemed otherwise intent on dispelling. But although I had mixed feelings about aspects of Emergency, I still found it fascinating. I liked Hildyard’s prose style and use of imagery; and I admired the ambitious combination of novel of ideas and conventional coming-of-age story. Ultimately, there was enough that was memorable, moving or thought-provoking to capture my attention, and it's a novel I could easily see myself re-reading.Yeah, I think there’s a bit of a movement towards that, even in academic circles. We used to refer to animals as ‘it’, but increasingly we’d give animals some personal pronoun. I think these little changes in language can be a sign – a hopeful sign. I think.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard | Fitzcarraldo Editions

HW: In all of your writing you explore themes of our boundaries with the natural world, with time and space and the particular forms of matter. In this you have a basic distrust of language, and of the filtering and prioritizing that it requires. Can you tell me more about what the writing process is like for you, and how you translate your relationship with the natural world into words? I did not read that essay but have some knowledge of it as the book had (particularly in its last essay) significant overlap with Caleb Klaces (her partner’s) 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize longlisted “Fatherhood”) Or maybe an expansion in my understanding of the exterior world? But yeah, definitely. Maybe in some sense it’s a diminishing sense of the importance of my own consciousness, because it’s like… you notice all this other stuff that’s going on outside. It’s nice to also notice all this liveliness everywhere.The book also explores class and race prejudices in the childhood era – not ones exhibited by particular offenders but ones gently endemic and implicit to the assumptions of the village. Again this can seem rather forced. I think the sense of the liveliness of everything. That everything has a story going on around it. Almost every novel I’ve ever read, and I love to read novels, has a very contracted world, and there’s so much that these stories leave out. But in any story, there’s other stuff going on, you know – minor characters have stories going, and then also the plants, animals, you know, the earth itself. But we don’t habitually notice them. And it’s just such a delight to notice them. So I hope that within and beyond my novel, whether it’s the contents of the novel or just the feeling of busyness and liveliness, that’s what people feel and think about. Because it’s great. It’s really, really nice. The Encore Award was first presented in 1990 to celebrate the achievement of outstanding second novels. The Award fills a niche in the catalogue of literary prizes. The RSL has administered the award since 2016.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard review – a dark pastoral

Perhaps this is Hildyard's method of conveying a sense of our collective mortality. If so, bravo. But nonetheless, as a literary work, this gloomy sense of quarantine and the inability to connect with the narrator causes the novel to drag a little. It is hard to maintain interest in a narrator we do fully feel in our presence.

Daisy Hildyard

So for the essay, I’ve been speaking with people who monitor conflict in the environment, analysts or people who works for NGOs, who use very complex satellite technologies to look at landscapes from a distance and try to work out what’s happening in them. Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.’ I heard my own frustrations that I have as I live in a village myself, surrounded by intense agricultural farming. It is so often overly romanticised to the point of seeming luxurious. - ie jane- eyre-esque estates… but what about the council houses built for the factory workers standing in pesticide blue skies? In refusing to privilege human drama over natural processes, Hildyard captures the ecosystem’s delicate interconnectedness and suggests a new way of writing about our toll on the environment.” in the way a story is about something and sometimes as you read something meandering, feeling bewildered and a little bit annoyed for a long time, you suddenly catch a glimpse of a point – the point …