Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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That sentence comes close to being the book’s motto. There is a cow called Ivy, “an attention-seeker and a troublemaker”, a bull called “49327100 G-R-A-Y” with the charisma of a born leader, and a dog called Soldier, her underbelly “bald and mottled brown and purple, with swollen teats”. The kitchen houses a spider, “elegant – long-legged, with a body tapered like a teardrop”, the hedge nearby a clever nesting lapwing “sensing things in ways I cannot reach”. 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.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard — a complicated hymn to nature

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. 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.’ 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. If first responders moved with the meandering pointlessness of this novel, we would have a true emergency on our hands. Now, I do not mind a slow, meandering, and meaningful novel, BUT this is beyond the pale.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. Her in-laws live in Birmingham; she and her husband took turns driving between there, to spend time with their daughter, and alone in Yorkshire cleaning the house of slime and sewage. “In spite of all the help that was offered, nobody offered to help in such a way that would allow us to keep our family together, which was all I thought I wanted at the time.” 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 pandemic narrative’s in vogue right now, for obvious reasons, and although I thought Hildyard’s attempt was less awkward than a number of examples I’ve already encountered, it was far from seamless. The contemporary sections didn’t flow as well as the Yorkshire ones, they came across as grafted on, inserted to make a point rather than smoothly integrated into the wider narrative. The narrator’s comments on white culture, to take just one example, were surprisingly clumsy, a very basic attempt at exploring broader questions of white privilege. In addition, the juxtaposition of the child who’s fully immersed in her local networks and the isolated adult whose life's been upended by global events, didn’t quite come off for me; and sometimes threatened to resurrect the kind of Cider with Rosie, conservative fantasies of prelapsarian, rural childhood which Hildyard seemed otherwise intent on dispelling. But although I had mixed feelings about aspects of Emergency, I still found it fascinating. I liked Hildyard’s prose style and use of imagery; and I admired the ambitious combination of novel of ideas and conventional coming-of-age story. Ultimately, there was enough that was memorable, moving or thought-provoking to capture my attention, and it's a novel I could easily see myself re-reading. 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.”

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: 9781662601477

Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.” Hildyard has evidently lived away from North Yorkshire and is at ease in a cosmopolitan world of letters. But her writing places no distance between herself and the landscape of her childhood, in which she has returned to live in adulthood. Nothing is idealised here, nothing idyllic. The countryside is where people live and work and die, hardy but vulnerable. A quarry at the edge of her village stands for the vulnerability of the village community to the winds of the international economy, the quarry’s size determined by “the requirements of Norwegian motorways and new cities in China”. I did not read that essay but have some knowledge of it as the book had (particularly in its last essay) significant overlap with Caleb Klaces (her partner’s) 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize longlisted “Fatherhood”) 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? Emergency by Daisy Hildyard (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize. The winner is announced on Monday 27March at the British Library.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. 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.’ Daisy Hildyard’s ​​ Emergency, shortlisted for this year’s Rathbones Folio Prize,is a pastoral novel for the age of climate catastrophe, dissolving the boundaries of human and animal, local and global.The Rathbones Folio Prize judges called it ‘a profoundly conceived novel that breaches our own myopia’. You can read an extract from the novel here, find out about some of the novel’sliterary influences here, and below, read more about the ideas explored in the novel.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard | Goodreads Emergency by Daisy Hildyard | Goodreads

I can understand why you would dislike language on these terms, but personally, I’ve never been able to feel it. I like talking with people and I like listening. I also I like writing and reading. Even the faults of language and the volatility of trying to put things into words are flaws to appreciate – I think – in a culture that has a scary love of perfection. The idea that language divides human from nonhuman has never felt very real to me, either. Sometimes next-door’s cat comes into my yard to piss. This morning I tried using words to tell her to stop and she got the message. (Maybe it’s in the way I spoke to her, my body and so on, but every articulation has its way and its physical form, words are always placed.) 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.

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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.” 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.’ Hildyard’s novel appears to be working through many of the ideas she’s previously outlined in her more explicitly academic, non-fiction work, particularly her recent articles and lectures on negative ecology and her earlier published essay The Second Body. Briefly, her interests lie in the intra- and inter-connectedness of everything. The ways in which these interdependencies undermine our commonplace notions of the individual or the solitary: the microbes that our bodies host; the impact our bodies have, not just locally but globally, through what we do or what we consume; or more recently, unexpectedly highlighted by the pandemic, the increasing significance of what we don’t do, our negative acts. On the same programme there was a special report on a place closer to my home in the north of England. The Barrowcliff housing estate is on the edge of Scarborough, around a mile or so from the seafront. It is in the 1% most deprived areas of England. The report covered a trip to the beach for young people on the estate, organised by a local community centre. Some of the kids, who had lived on Barrowcliff for their whole lives and were now in their early teens, had never been to the sea.