Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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The critic William Empson influentially proposed that the “pastoral” as a literary form had a tension at its heart: it was about the people without being by or for them. Its tendency to idealise country life, country ways, country people, came in part from the fact that writers of pastoral wrote at one remove from the worlds they sought to evoke. When I started writing Emergency, something had been troubling me about the novels I was reading and their way of inhabiting the world. I read a lot of autofiction because I like a feeling of plainness in a story, but I noticed a similar structure in several books. They moved digressively, from one subject to another, via associations in the author-narrator’s memory or consciousness. It started to feel to me as though the world beyond the narrator was like this half-chewed substance, always pushed through the digestive system of the narrator’s thoughts. I wanted to tell a story that didn’t swallow the world in that way, one whose connections and encounters happen outside the human mind. And I had this sense of life pouring or rushing, with many different beings colliding with one another, stories converging and diverging. So, Emergency is a digressive novel which tells different stories about many characters (human and nonhuman), but each story takes off from a physical meeting. I thought of the book as a map. A story is set running, and we follow it until it crashes into something, where something else is going on, and then we follow that. We watch what happens to a litter of fox cubs during the days after their mother’s disappearance, and then move down to the stream that runs along the hill below their den. On the banks of the stream we encounter a solitary young man who has run away from the army and is hiding in the woods in a nylon tent. When he moves on he leaves behind an empty plastic noodle pot and we stay with that for a while… I imagined that over time, a picture of the area, and its workings, energy, and relationships, would emerge. It’s a novel and I made it up, but writing it felt like exploring something bigger than myself in a way that I couldn’t get at through another experience. When I had looked up the kobold on my computer in the Royal Society library, years earlier, I hadn’t noticed my computer as a material object at all. It was a thing which existed at some distance to the thing I was studying, which was cobalt mining. The laptop was merely a device. The insides of its body did not relate to the images on its screen. In reality, though, the relationships between things are weirder and more undisciplined than that. The material in my battery was a kobold – evil, mischievous, contaminating. It had been lying beneath my hand, almost, but not quite, touching me. It is inside everything I have typed. On my plate the hake’s scales, patterned with tightly-meshed fine lines, did not look so very different to the human skin. I flipped the fish-skin between knife and fork; it came away easily. The upper face was bluish and slightly rough but the underside was smoother, gelatinous and dark grey. This was the side that faced the flesh, which tasted of the sea. In 1997, the year that Sebald delivered his lectures, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich published Chernobyl Prayer (released in the US as Voices from Chernobyl), a tale of over fifty million radionuclides. The book is an oral history of the infamous nuclear disaster of 1986, as told to the author by survivors. It carries an oblique epigraph taken from the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili: “We are air: we are not earth.” War on the air is war on life.

Closer to home, I saw images of the corpses of sperm whales which had washed up on the coast at Skegness in England, some way to the south of where I live. I saw photographs of the bodies of pilot whales which had washed up, a few weeks later, on the coast in Fife in Scotland, some way to the north of where I live. I saw images of winter-resident waxwings arriving at a wetland reserve not far from my house. Usually only a few hundred waxwings settle there for the season, but this last year thousands and thousands and thousands of them came – when they appeared over the horizon, the sky grew dark. In the summer, a study published in the journal Nature reviewed 370,000 ecological records from 1960 to 2012, and found that the seasons themselves were slowly drifting out of place. For readers of Rachel Cusk and Jenny Odell, a lyrical work of autofiction that explores the dissolution of boundaries between the self and our earth as we head towards ecological catastrophe. There are more swoops across time, sudden interjections from a present-day adult speaker, one who remembers lapwings repeatedly rebuilding nests in the wheel-marks left by tractors and reflects that “I know what it’s like to keep on waiting for a baby that will never arrive”. This speaker’s smoke alarm beeps for weeks, until she stops hearing it; her recollection of a childhood neighbour’s vegetable garden is interrupted by the observation: “People say that growing plants is a calming thing to do but in my experience it is more often enraging.” Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.’ This book succeeds because of the chilly and beautifully sustained voice of its narrator, the precise embroidery of its sentences and paragraphs, its observations of the natural world and insistence that there is no distinction between humans and environments.’

These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology.’ None of this was exactly new information. Ever since I was a teenager I had known that there were ghosts inside my mouth, microbes in my digestive system. They were interesting, a bit. What changed, as the scientist talked to me and we watched the cakes and spaceships, corkscrews and street-sweepers move on-screen, was the fact that she gave a simple narrative of the human body, not only as something which hosted these odd hybrids, but also as something which emerged from within them. 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. Another creature’s experience is different, and we do not know how it is different”, writes Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body. This playful and original essay touches on the limits of our ability to imagine that experience. Hildyard, a novelist who was trained as a historian of science, tries to find the ways we intuit boundaries between our bodies and our ecosystems, between ourselves and other animals.’ Daisy Hildyard: Yes, a feeling of richness in the world is what I want – I want it for myself, and I want to write in a way that will create an experience of liveliness and richness around a reader. There are many ways of being in this world, human as well as other-than-human, that haven’t been captured or cared for much in my culture’s narratives, and there’s also a powerful – and interesting – fear of allowing these outsider experiences into our stories.

The writing in Emergency is slow and meditative. Still, the narrator’s lips are taut against ready-to-bare teeth – she has an unwavering commitment to expanding the realities of life on earth and the complicated relationship between man and nature.’ I found it impossible to see these images for what they were. Looking down the microscope or onto the projection screen, my mind remade the pictures on the scale of the visible world – the scale of my own body. I had frogspawn inside my mouth. Organelles, floating without any visible debt to gravity through the viscous interior of the cells, looked like cakes inside a spaceship. The microbe invasion was a street-sweeper pierced by a corkscrew. My mind was trying to make sense of what it saw but the images it created were psychedelic.

Emergency

Because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Around 90 to 95 percent of the tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. It was around the same time that I started noticing the other animals. In the newspaper I saw images of eleven hippopotami which floated, dead, down a river in Binga, Zimbabwe. Dozens of barn owls fallen onto the Interstate-84 in Idaho. Tonnes of fish silvering the beaches in Montevideo, Uruguay. Hundreds of reindeer strewn across a plateau in southern Norway, after a freak storm. I’ve found myself really interested in how that technology affects the way the analysts look at these occurrences… Their feelings about it. I think she finds it really hard to look at this stuff every day and then kind of… close the laptop and, you know, go and see mates or something, and it’s just a weird experience of being in the world that I think connects with a lot of us. Reading Ingalls’ novella about a lonely housewife and her amphibious anthropoid lover Larry feels a bit like losing one’s mind. Ingalls’ acerbic wit makes middle class manners, supermarket staff, radio adverts and Dorothy’s thoughtless husband seem as uncanny as Larry himself, for all his froggy glory. I shiver with delight just thinking about it.

Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.” The kestrel allowed her equilibrium to be disturbed. She tipped her body, carved a line in the air, and came to hover directly above the vole. Low sunlight projected her shadow away from her so that it fell beyond his horizon. Still the vole remained in the same place. I could see him intimately now – his features were precise and miniature: acorn-cup ears, thread-fine whiskers radiating in all directions, and tiny hand-shaped feet. His whole body was vibrating violently. He seemed unable to move. The kestrel had paused again and my gaze moved up and down, drawing a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building. I felt a sense of love arise inside me, as huge and widespread as the vole was small and specific, and it occurred to me that I could rescue him. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. In its insistence on the illusion of individuality and on the participation of human animals in the whole of earthly life, The Second Body might be an ancient text; in its scientific literacy and its mood of ecological disquiet, Daisy Hildyard’s book is as contemporary as the morning paper. If ecstasy means to go outside oneself, the word usually carries connotations of chaos and inarticulacy. Here, however, is a precise and eloquent ecstasy – and this slender book about who we are beyond our own skins is likewise much larger than itself.’

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DH: In the US, my book has been subtitled, ‘A pastoral novel.’ That wasn’t my idea, but I was happy for the book to be described like that because I see it as a belonging to the tradition of its form, it’s a respectful and loving extension of this, rather than a critique or a different mode entirely. 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. 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.”