Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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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?

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: 9781662601477

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”. 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. 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. 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.’ In Jena, near Leipzig, Hildyard seeks out the advice of three academic biologists – Luis, Nadezhda and Paul. Nadezhda teaches her about fungi, Luis about the origin of life. He is described as knowing more than Hildyard about almost everything, but she is puzzled by his optimism about the future of humanity, and discomfited when he explains that the definition of life is open to debate: “Stop,” I said. “You don’t actually know what life is? ... You need to get your act together.”

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This article was originally published in September 2022. Daisy Hildyard On Writing For The Climate Crisis

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard — a complicated hymn to nature

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? 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. 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."

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March 2023 ‘Writing the novel felt like following rather than inventing the stories of that place’: Daisy Hildyard on ‘Emergency’ Hildyard doesn’t offer the narratives of therapy, social criticism or self-development to be found in other English pastoralists …. 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.” 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”)