Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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But Hildyard is also fascinated by interconnectedness and this shines through in the narrative. This is a topic that occurs a lot in the writing of one of my favourite authors, Richard Powers. This is why I opened my review with a particular quote from the book which put me in mind of “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s book is a non-fiction exploration of the interconnected world of fungi. Hildyard and her husband were awarded compensation by the government, which she used to take a cheap flight to a Mediterranean island with her daughter (“In a technical way I believe in climate change, but I do not much act as if I do … I didn’t want to spend this money on more things”). Walking in the warm evening air she comes upon beached lifeboats, an immigration Portakabin, some Red Cross tents and “a queue of humans, some wearing blankets, waiting to be seen”. The connection is left implicit between her own experience, internally displaced by climate change, and that of migrants on the Mediterranean beach. 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. Emergency reads more like an autobiography or the diary of a young woman who thinks that capturing the mundane and minuscule moments of life translates into thrilling reading.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard | Goodreads

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?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. 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 beauty of Emergency is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own."

‘Writing the novel felt like following rather than inventing

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? 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. 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.

Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency is a pastoral novel for the age of dissolving boundaries…The slowness and gentleness of the text, its pace and its language, make you consider its title. There are emergencies and ruptures, but less of the urgent kind. More at play is a slow, steady and inevitable unfolding – of emergence.’ what feels like a tidal wave of random information crashes over me every moment. I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned into everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heartbeat or the roar of growing grass….” 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.

EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard - Fitzcarraldo Editions

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? DH: I’m working on a novel that holds whole (fictional) biographies, to think about how life rises and falls and is shaped from birth to death, collecting different experiences of place and time. I’ve been close to some deaths and serious illnesses recently. It seems hard enough to hold in mind the shape or shapes that a lifespan can make. So I don’t feel like writing about little amputated chunks of lives, as stories and novels tend to – I want to write about what lives look like because I’d like some help with seeing that myself. It’ll have to be a big novel, telling whole life stories of a man, an oak tree, maybe a Greenland shark if I’m up to it. I don’t know much else about the book, but it opens on a high floor of an office tower in central London in the early hours of a Sunday morning. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. 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”. These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology. Their structure feels disjointed, and their register wilfully banal, but perhaps their very fragmentation is a comment on modern disconnection and disaffection. They seem to come from a place of perplexity and anguish, bewilderment struggling towards expression.

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Emergencyexplores some of the ideas in fiction thatDaisy Hildyard wrote about in heressay The Second Body, publishedbyFitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. Her debut novel, Hunters in the Snow, came out with Jonathan Cape in 2013 andreceived the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards.She lives in York with her family.

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I think there are scenes I’ll remember – maybe because they felt like my memories – but this is not a book I’ll revisit, and I don’t know who I would recommend it to. The setting is well-created here, the descriptions of the natural world are very evocative and the obviously based on experience anecdotes had me nodding my head – they were so right! Getting the first computer in the classroom, wooden desks with lids, being rewarded with a pen for good handwriting, Segas and Gameboys and ‘Is Adam playing?’ A keenly observed book of naturalism, [Emergency] is about a place, an era and the tenuous epoch of childhood which are all as fragile and fleeting as they are eternal in symbol and memory. I loved this book. When I finished it, I started over at the beginning." HW: I really admire the bold experiment with form in this novel – the collapsing of past and present and of voice, and the way that seemingly unconnected events run into one another without separation. It flows, and yet I know it was probably difficult to construct. There is also a memoir quality to it. I’d be fascinated to hear more about how the structure of the book came to you, and why it felt important to call it a “pastoral novel.”

Daisy Hildyard

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. I feel the lag that Alexievich describes, it drags on much of the fiction that I read, and I also see it in news reports, history books, in everyday conversations, in the justice system, and in my own mind. I saw it in the underpass fisherman and the teenagers who had never been to the beach. I want to catch up, to feel and to convey some sense of the feelings and the facts of experience now. I had this book noted down as one to look out for. The main attraction for me was the setting – rural Yorkshire in the nineties. Hello! I was there! 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 …