Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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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. 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. 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.”

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

We explore the unnamed narrator’s world, which does not extend beyond her own village but also, of course, sits within global networks like everywhere else. The tabs from her cans of Fanta are found later in the stomachs of dead birds; at school the children learn about the Chernobyl rains; the animals she knows are milked, slaughtered and sent away. Family life is stable enough, although both parents work in precarious jobs and money is tight. Some of the village’s free-range children torture animals, corporal punishment is informally tolerated at school and there is ample opportunity to learn about pain and violence within and between species of all sorts. The villagers casually accept racism and snobbery all the time. If this is a pastoral novel, it follows Fiona Mozley’s Elmet and Max Porter’s Lanny in its convincing insistence on the gothic darkness of modern country life as well as the beauty of the English countryside. As emergencies go, it’s gradual and plotless and thus almost more realistic than the form of the novel can bear 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….” HW: In all of your writing you explore themes of our boundaries with the natural world, with time and space and the particular forms of matter. In this you have a basic distrust of language, and of the filtering and prioritizing that it requires. Can you tell me more about what the writing process is like for you, and how you translate your relationship with the natural world into words?These are fretful, questioning essays with occasional flashes of beauty, demanding of readers that they think about anthropogenic disruption of climate and ecology. Their structure feels disjointed, and their register wilfully banal, but perhaps their very fragmentation is a comment on modern disconnection and disaffection. They seem to come from a place of perplexity and anguish, bewilderment struggling towards expression. 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."

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: 9781662601477

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.’ This article was originally published in September 2022. Daisy Hildyard On Writing For The Climate CrisisOn 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. My problem with Emergency was the structure. It’s like someone talking to you without pausing. One long breathless chat. Although the actual descriptions are memorable, they tend to get lost in the book, as every topic is squished and compressed, leading to an exhaustive read.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard — a complicated hymn to nature

A bit of a morbid turn but I found your language around animals, particularly dead animals, interesting, like how you refer to it more as bodies and corpses. You don’t often hear that framing. I had this book noted down as one to look out for. The main attraction for me was the setting – rural Yorkshire in the nineties. Hello! I was there! 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.”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. 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.” 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.” DH: People have different feelings about language, but I get a sense that many of us, perhaps especially those who are invested in environmental or ecological relationships, dislike and mistrust it at the moment. Language is a problem because of the fact that it segregates humans from other species, and it’s corrupted/corrupting because of the ugly histories that have formed and shaped it. (I’m writing about English here. I can’t speak for other languages, though I’ve read about very different relations with the environment that come through indigenous grammars.).

The Royal Society of Literature Reveals Winner of the 2023

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) But Hildyard is also fascinated 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. Daisy Hildyard’s debut novel , Hunters in the Snow, came out with Jonathan Cape in 2013 and received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives in York with her family. I hope so. Certainly one thing among other things; I wouldn’t say, you know, the novel is going to solve the climate crisis. But yeah, I have faith in language to do some change in its own way.One spring evening, when I was old enough to be outside and alone, I was sitting above the quarry on the edge of the village when I saw a panel of clay drop away from the facing vertical side and fall into a pool of water. Behind it the interior of an animal’s burrow was revealed in relief, like a bombed house with one wall removed. Inside, instead of wallpaper or dangling wires, there was one globe-shaped hollow lined with fluff and leaf mould, and passages leading from it which all ran through the roots of the turf, with one exception: the long tunnel which dropped down into the earth, then turned at an angle, in a stretched V-shape, and began to rise again. Within the passage, heading upwards, there was a small animal – brown and furry, whether it was mouse, a shrew, or a vole, I couldn’t see. When I started writing Emergency, something had been troubling me about the novels I was reading and their way of inhabiting the world. I read a lot of autofiction because I like a feeling of plainness in a story, but I noticed a similar structure in several books. They moved digressively, from one subject to another, via associations in the author-narrator’s memory or consciousness. It started to feel to me as though the world beyond the narrator was like this half-chewed substance, always pushed through the digestive system of the narrator’s thoughts. I wanted to tell a story that didn’t swallow the world in that way, one whose connections and encounters happen outside the human mind. And I had this sense of life pouring or rushing, with many different beings colliding with one another, stories converging and diverging. So, Emergency is a digressive novel which tells different stories about many characters (human and nonhuman), but each story takes off from a physical meeting. I thought of the book as a map. A story is set running, and we follow it until it crashes into something, where something else is going on, and then we follow that. We watch what happens to a litter of fox cubs during the days after their mother’s disappearance, and then move down to the stream that runs along the hill below their den. On the banks of the stream we encounter a solitary young man who has run away from the army and is hiding in the woods in a nylon tent. When he moves on he leaves behind an empty plastic noodle pot and we stay with that for a while… I imagined that over time, a picture of the area, and its workings, energy, and relationships, would emerge. It’s a novel and I made it up, but writing it felt like exploring something bigger than myself in a way that I couldn’t get at through another experience.