Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.’ Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.” The narrator as a child explores the local area, a farm, a quarry, the local woods and interacts with the adults she encounters. There are also descriptions of school and school friends. There is a great intensity and depth to this and the descriptions are lyrical. There is a description of the narrator watching a vole and a kestrel in the quarry, who had not yet seen each other. But then there is also a teacher at the primary school where children note the bruises and occasional fractures of a female teacher, who is clearly the victim of domestic abuse. Then there is Ivy the cow at the farm, who we follow over a period of time, with her own idiosyncrasies. Along with the inevitable disappearance of some of these characters as they make their way to the local abattoir. Most of the stars I have given this book come from this combination of “this is what I do now” and “this was how I grew up”.

Daisy Hildyard On Writing For The Climate Crisis – Interview Daisy Hildyard On Writing For The Climate Crisis – Interview

But Hildyard’s every portrait of human experience is qualified with a reminder that humans are only one animal species among others, animals only one kind of life-form, and the planet full of things that are vital without being alive. In the first of the memorable vignettes of animal life in this book, Hildyard’s narrator kidnaps a baby rabbit from its mother despite the warnings of grown-ups that “the rabbit would eat her babies if they had a strange smell on them.”I was less angered by the framing of the story as memories presented from COVID isolation. I was still a bit mystified. The pandemic added nothing to the novel. She did mention the potential "spillover" theory at one point, making the supremely obvious connection between climate change and a global pandemic. Thanks, I wasn't aware. If that was the only reason for mentioning COVID, turning the book into a multi-issue novel, I would have preferred that she just left it out. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” In a recent interview Hildyard explains that “in this novel I was trying to tune into some quietened voices or sounds or perspectives across different human identities, across distances, and also from non-human beings. I wanted to expand the realities available to the story.” Definitely. What’s admirable about her is that she’s so clearly not interested in that, but just the contents of what she’s saying, how she gets it across. And that’s impressive in anybody, but particularly in such a young person. And we’re obviously here to talk about the London Literature Festival – can you tell me a little bit about what you’ll be doing? Emergency is a strange and luminously original novel. Daisy Hildyard writes about childhood with a kind of ecstatic detachment, dissolving the boundaries between past and present, and between human and animal life. I find her work exhilarating and subtly provocative. There is, as far as I’m aware, nothing else quite like it in contemporary English-language fiction.’

EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard - Fitzcarraldo Editions

I’ve got to say that Daisy Hildyard succeeded in writing a lovely “pastoral” novel–even if she failed spectacularly at writing a climate change novel.

A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era. In Jena, near Leipzig, Hildyard seeks out the advice of three academic biologists – Luis, Nadezhda and Paul. Nadezhda teaches her about fungi, Luis about the origin of life. He is described as knowing more than Hildyard about almost everything, but she is puzzled by his optimism about the future of humanity, and discomfited when he explains that the definition of life is open to debate: “Stop,” I said. “You don’t actually know what life is? ... You need to get your act together.” And so, for several reasons, I really enjoyed reading this book. The language used is also very readable and engaging (I loved phrases like the water that “sparkled with escaped sunlight”). Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.’

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: 9781662601477

A quiet, complicated hymn to nature . . . [Emergency] is a novel with an elastic strangeness, gliding seamlessly between the familiar and the surreal . . . In the wake of the biggest natural melodrama of recent times, Emergency is a thoughtful, poised reflection on how much change we humans, among the animals, can ever bring to bear." The stories made me feel something that I can’t get at, head on. There is a passage in Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history Chernobyl Prayer which I’ve found myself returning to recently, which has something to do with it.HW: There is so much more I want to talk to you about, but I’ll close with this: what’s next for you? With everything that is swirling in our world right now, how would you describe where writing is coming from inside of you, and what next you feel compelled to say? Emergency is a quiet novel that explores with remarkable subtlety the deep and fraying interconnectedness of life on earth. Hildyard writes with the precision and associative leaps of a poet . . . It’s something new that will linger long after you’ve finished reading.” What is problematic about the absent narrator is how this alienates the reader. This may be purposeful on Hildyard's part, a performative palpability intended to convey the awful insularity in our future. Dwindling resources and a ruthless competition to survive have historically had the effect of solidifying boundaries, separating and causing the demise of many millions. 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. There is something energetic in Emergency, something mystical about the human and non-human really meeting. . . Emergency reminds us, through its young protagonist, that we often miss so much of the world, so much of reality.”