Emergency: Daisy Hildyard

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Distractedly, still looking with disturbing directness into the sun, she told me that Clare wasn’t yet home because she had gone to her grandmother’s house after school. In her latest novel Emergency (2022), Daisy Hildyard rethinks what an emergency is through stories about dissolving boundaries in rural Yorkshire, while also reinventing the pastoral novel for the era of the Anthropocene. 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. In this, an account of a bombing campaign, it’s Sebald’s attention to the habits of the flowering lilac, rather than his depiction of charred bodies, that feels out of place.

After they left, the footage showed spider crabs and rock crabs creeping out over the corpse, which had, in the still water, taken on a strangely woolly appearance. Can you say more about what your book reveals about human nature in relationship with nature nature? They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues.

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. Only a revolutionary or confused historian would consider Chernobyl, the transatlantic slave trade, and World War II in the same study. This is a heartbeat in comparison with Sharpe’s time frame; the residency time of traces of human blood in the ocean is 260 million years. At the time of her conversation with Alexievich, Lyudmila was living on a block in Kiev to which many former employees of the nuclear plant had been relocated.

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.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. Over the course of the war, Zuckerman took a particularly innovative approach to his investigations. The beauty of Emergency is in its attempt to glimpse an expanded paradigm of meaning, which encompasses but isn’t limited to our own. There was something formal that I needed from this experience in my story – a counterpoint between the narrator, who is an isolated woman in a quiet house, and the almost obscenely profuse and flourishing world of stories she’s telling about the outside world – the world she’s interwoven with, or against. She talks to us about what she’s writing now, how she copes with the enormous responsibility of climate change, and Greta Thunberg.

She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. He includes a grainy photograph of charred black forms on cobblestones, and he also mentions that the lilac and chestnut trees had a second flowering in the spring of 1943. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. DH: Covid exposed interconnectivity to many people in new ways, or changed interconnectivity from something known, in an academic way, to something that was actually (and often cruelly) apparent or felt. Watching the footage, I wondered why the fact that the environment was still highly radioactive was unmentionable.A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era. This story is narrowly individualist and self-focused, distinguished by separation from nature nature, and many of our stories are hung up on it, but it just isn’t up to the task of exploring what a human life is right now. If you have ever swum in the ocean at Lisbon or Atlantic City, Cape Town or Rio de Janeiro, Monrovia or La Rochelle, Paramaribo or Galway, you’ve swum in this blood. 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.

Airborne pesticides continue to circulate; a ring pull found by the narrator as a child washes up decades later in a seabird’s corpse.She begins this narrative with disconcertingly technical terminology of transverse waves and perpendiculars, describing how the passage of a slave ship through water would create a wake—a V shape spreading outward behind the ship and disrupting the motion of the waves, moving across expanses of ocean with a ripple effect, diminishing as it widened. Attenborough, a nature broadcaster in his nineties, was reflecting on the changes in the environment that have been brought about over his lifetime. The sodium of human blood, her colleague explains, would have a residence time (“the amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean”) of 260 million years.