Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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March 2023 ‘Writing the novel felt like following rather than inventing the stories of that place’: Daisy Hildyard on ‘Emergency’ 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. 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.’ 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.”

Emergency | The Rathbones Folio Prize Emergency | The Rathbones Folio Prize

HW: The novel ends with a tangible emergency, a fire. But the book is full of what I would call slow emergencies, moments of danger and violence and death that happen almost through a veil, like the smoke alarm vaguely beeping so long you stop hearing it. This feels like the kind of emergency we are all living with now, all the time. There’s a slipperiness to our experience of the world that you convey so well. Can you say more about what your book reveals about human nature in relationship with nature nature? and this is a theme that is integral to Emergency, which also is a pastoral novel prompted by Covid and for the era of global warming. 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.’ 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. 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.”

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And there is much to enjoy in the ideas and themes the author explores – although in each case the execution (perhaps appropriately) explores a boundary –the boundary between excellent narrative linkage and rather clumsily executed segues. Parts of the book are sweet/poignant/funny, other parts are mildly subversive, and there are elements of violence and other so-called 'dark' material, but for me there is very little here that is truly dark and even then it is definitely not dark enough. When it comes to climate catastrophe literature, it needs to be a hell of a lot darker (and braver) than this. One of the narrator’s early related childhood memories is of a bus driver who repeatedly and deliberately fluffed his gear choice when climbing a hill – and unfortunately for me this served as a metaphor for some not always brilliantly executed gear changes. Riffing on the famous sentence from Middlemarch, Hildyard writes that “I like to think that I would go mad if I tuned in to everything, all the time, the squirrel’s heart beat or the roar of growing grass, but this is most likely a lie… the business of relentlessly prioritising and deleting the details of the world is the mad element.” Hildyard’s precise prose and roving vision inspire an expanded, saner attention to the world around us, to the connections and emergencies which ordinarily escape us, or even seem beyond the range of perception. Hildyard suggests that what situates us in the natural world is our shared existence alongside the nonhuman, in a state of interplay between being reshaped around the consequence of others, and our ability to respond; flux between our own power and the heft the world exerts on us. There isn’t anything instructive to read from this – the world of Emergency is instead a portrait of our “weird and messy earth song”, problematised by the narrator’s own confessions of the limits of her empathy.

EMERGENCY by Daisy Hildyard - Fitzcarraldo Editions

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. The beauty of Emergency is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own." 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 the slow, steady and inevitable unfolding – of emergence. In the way that bodies mimic other bodies they are around lots, in Emergency it feels as though each individual life is a palimpsest, one overlapping another, human and nonhuman. Since then I have noticed how expressions of care for the environment are often outlets for hatred of other humans, both in the accusation out we that we are bad for other species, in which the accuser rarely seems to understand themselves to be a part of any we, and also in the protection of a privileged experience of greenery over the voices and essential needs of the poorer indigenous and local people. In England, the phrase local people is a byword for a community that is corrupted by its ignorance and incest — not only poor and undereducated, but repellently so. Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.’As I read this book, I kept thinking about two other books, one that I read very recen Parallel to this creature, high above the pool of water on the quarry bed, there was a female kestrel, floating. The two creatures were at eye level with one another. The kestrel tilted and allowed herself to rise, just a little faster than the animal. Then the animal disappeared from my view, coming up through the ground; meanwhile the kestrel continued to ascend towards the clouds until, abruptly, she stopped. She stopped absolutely – as though somebody had pressed pause. Only the way her position varied very slightly, tilting one way and then another, showed that she was holding herself against a current.