Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

Product Information

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. 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.’

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

For all its slowness and delicacy, this novel is a high-wire act, chancing the reader’s suspension of disbelief and commitment to a story that is manifestly moving only towards the familiar mess of the present day. As emergencies go, it’s gradual and plotless and thus almost more realistic than the form of the novel can bear. 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. And so, for several reasons, I really enjoyed reading this book. The language used is also very readable and engaging (I loved phrases like the water that “sparkled with escaped sunlight”). Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible." DH: In the US, my book has been subtitled, ‘A pastoral novel.’ That wasn’t my idea, but I was happy for the book to be described like that because I see it as a belonging to the tradition of its form, it’s a respectful and loving extension of this, rather than a critique or a different mode entirely. 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.Emergencyexplores some of the ideas in fiction thatDaisy Hildyard wrote about in heressay The Second Body, publishedbyFitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. Her debut novel, Hunters in the Snow, came out with Jonathan Cape in 2013 andreceived the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards.She lives in York with her family. Daisy Hildyard has confronted our new nature and, bravely, compellingly, makes our shared emergency visible.’ 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”) 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. It is not as depressing as i may have made it sound!! Plenty of beautifully descriptive nature prose that kept reeling me in to continue.

Daisy Hildyard ‹ Literary Hub Daisy Hildyard ‹ Literary Hub

And in terms of the power of your own language, if someone were to read Emergency , is there one thing you’d want them to take away from it?I was less angered by the framing of the story as memories presented from COVID isolation. I was still a bit mystified. The pandemic added nothing to the novel. She did mention the potential "spillover" theory at one point, making the supremely obvious connection between climate change and a global pandemic. Thanks, I wasn't aware. If that was the only reason for mentioning COVID, turning the book into a multi-issue novel, I would have preferred that she just left it out. This year the prize-winner was announced at a live event. Daisy Hildyard was unable to attend but was informed and accepted the award saying:

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

And we’re obviously here to talk about the London Literature Festival – can you tell me a little bit about what you’ll be doing? 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. 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. 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.Emergency is a book to be relished, its precise, subtle prose devoid of romanticism yet passionate in its own way. Hildyard’s writing is a feast for the senses: vivid and beguiling, pragmatic and unflinching, and deeply thoughtful.’ 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”.

Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: A portrait of our ‘weird and Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: A portrait of our ‘weird and

So for the essay, I’ve been speaking with people who monitor conflict in the environment, analysts or people who works for NGOs, who use very complex satellite technologies to look at landscapes from a distance and try to work out what’s happening in them. This article was originally published in September 2022. Daisy Hildyard On Writing For The Climate Crisis 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

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….” During Hildyard’s reminisces, she seems to take the flimsiest excuses to present worn out and extremely obvious takes on climate change. These tenuous connections left me baffled and wondering if Hildyard just really wanted to write about her childhood, the pandemic, and climate change, and wasn’t patient enough to either write three different books or spend more time fitting those puzzle pieces together. My favorite example of the artless connections was watching a fox shit in a field and comparing it to corporations shitting on society through dumping sludge and trash everywhere. There’s also this totally bone-headed comparison: 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?