Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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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. 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. 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 …

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard | Fitzcarraldo Editions

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." But Hildyard is also fascinated As I read this book, I kept thinking about two other books, one that I read very recently and one that was a firm favourite many, many years ago as I was growing up. 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.” 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.”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. 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. Emergency is advertised as “reinventing the pastoral novel for the climate change era”, and the rural landscape Hildyard depicts is no Arcadia. The countryside she describes is very much that of the Anthropocene. The narrator remembers looking forward to the seasonal spraying of the fields as a child because she was forced to stay inside with her friend Clare, their indoor playtime protecting them from the “invisible poisons”. Yet she also admires the beauty of the spraying, the “ballerina skirts of vapour” being exhaled by the farmer’s tractor. The chemical menace of the pesticides, the possibility that her bloodstream could be infected “by its tiniest ­contaminant ­component”, only adds to her awe. Past and present, nature and humanity, life and death intermix, ebbing and flowing in a stream of prose that carries the reader on an exhilarating and frequently provocative and violent ride.’

Daisy Hildyard | Fitzcarraldo Editions Daisy Hildyard | Fitzcarraldo Editions

I’m grateful to my agent David Godwin and to my publishers Fitzcarraldo, who made this book – I just wrote a Word doc – and they’ve cared for it so thoughtfully and generously, before and since its release. Your essays also talks a lot about the significance of individual actions – like, if I pop down to the shop and get a Fanta there’s a political significance to that choice. How do you think we grapple with that much responsibility? The beauty of Emergency is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own.”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. 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.’ 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.” 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.”