Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

Product Information

Emergency is an incisive kaleidoscope of past and present, nature and industry, stillness and pace, collapsing all into a tapestry of consciousness.’

Daisy Hildyard | Fitzcarraldo Editions Daisy Hildyard | Fitzcarraldo Editions

This is the best book I’ve read from a child’s perspective, and by some way. Everything else has been from an adult’s idea of a child, but I didn’t feel this one was. Reading it made me remember that the way the narrator of this book saw the world was how I had seen it once, too; that I’d forgotten its way of seeing without really noticing that I had. I don’t really know the word for this sense I’m describing; maybe it doesn’t have a name. But I was very glad to be reminded of it, that I was these things I have forgotten. 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. 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.’

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. HW: You write unflinchingly about suffering and torture in the book. The young girl’s need to love and protect a baby bird or animal and the need to manipulate or hurt it are collapsed together. Would you say why this is an important theme in the novel? 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.”

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

Is this a novel? Per the book flap, "...Daisy Hildyard reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era". The reinvention is subtle. And while I was not expecting this book to be about climate change, I did expect it to be about something. Could a book be too rambly? this was my problem with Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency. Theoretically I should love a book like this as the majority of it consists of detailed descriptions of nature be it rabbits or a three legged deer with a penchant for cakes and yet I couldn’t really get into the narrative. Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible." I’ve found myself really interested in how that technology affects the way the analysts look at these occurrences… Their feelings about it. I think she finds it really hard to look at this stuff every day and then kind of… close the laptop and, you know, go and see mates or something, and it’s just a weird experience of being in the world that I think connects with a lot of us. 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."There were invisibly tiny members of the mushroom family on the roots of all the trees - every plant that was alive was sustained by these miniature members of the mushroom family. 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.

Second Body by Daisy Hildyard review - The Guardian The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard review - The Guardian

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”)

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