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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. In her finely-observed and precise descriptions of the environment Hildyard elides the easy distinctions between the man-made and the natural world, asking the reader to look harder.
Emergency by Daisy Hildyard — a complicated hymn to nature
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. 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.The exhilarating narrative explores the complex boundaries between the natural and man-made world in rural life. HW: You wrote this novel during the early days of the pandemic, when lockdown was particularly strict in the UK. Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her AHRC-funded MRes focused on taxonomic literature in the second half of the seventeenth century, and was awarded the Marjorie Thompson Prize and the Drapers' Company Postgraduate Prize.
Daisy Hildyard’s new novel reflects the ambivalence and
Life is the boundlessness and porosity that Hildyard sets out; flux between a state of slow emergence and sudden emergency, always and unstoppably unfolding. This alertness to the ambivalent connections between opposed states – the wild and the farmed, life and death, beauty and ugliness – are a hallmark of Hildyard’s writing. Hildyard has evidently lived away from North Yorkshire and is at ease in a cosmopolitan world of letters. 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 can’t speak for other languages, though I’ve read about very different relations with the environment that come through indigenous grammars.Along with the inevitable disappearance of some of these characters as they make their way to the local abattoir.