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Emergency
Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power.
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.
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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published August 2, 2022
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1935 people want to read
About the author
Daisy Hildyard
7 books51 followersDaisy studied English at Oxford, graduating in 2006. 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. Her PhD, also funded by the AHRC, will investigate some early Royal Society projects. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.
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February 26, 2022
Daisy Hildyard’s story centres on a narrator living through lockdown, alone in her urban flat, she looks out onto a neighbouring block, scenery and people she comes to know intimately, yet always at a distance. In her mind she travels back to her childhood, growing up in a small Yorkshire community during the 1990s. It’s a rural village yet poised between industrial and agricultural, a quarry running through it as central to its continued existence as the local farms. These memories are distinct, described in a style closer to the conventions of memoir than fiction, filled with sharply-focused recollections of her school, teachers, neighbours and friends which expose the complicated power dynamics between peers, children and adults, and humans and their wider environment. In some ways her story harks back to the pastoral subgenre strongly associated with writers like Flora Thompson and Laurie Lee but Hildyard subverts expectations by producing something much edgier, and harsher. This is especially obvious in her rendering of the shifting relations between the man-made and the natural world: the impact of encroaching technologies; the narrator’s role as witness to the destruction of wildlife habitats when the quarry’s taken over by a global mining company. It’s also evident in her portrayal of the intense and extensive interactions between the child narrator and the other species within her sphere, animals, birds, trees, fungi.
Hildyard’s novel appears to be working through many of the ideas she’s previously outlined in her more explicitly academic, non-fiction work, particularly her recent articles and lectures on negative ecology and her earlier published essay The Second Body. Briefly, her interests lie in the intra- and inter-connectedness of everything. The ways in which these interdependencies undermine our commonplace notions of the individual or the solitary: the microbes that our bodies host; the impact our bodies have, not just locally but globally, through what we do or what we consume; or more recently, unexpectedly highlighted by the pandemic, the increasing significance of what we don’t do, our negative acts.
I was impressed by Hildyard’s painstaking depiction of the machinations of the natural world and local eco-systems, her intricate, sometimes breathtakingly vivid, representations of plants, animals and landscapes. Although I was uncertain at times about some of her underlying arguments particularly as she seemed, in a rather contradictory way, to be retaining aspects of notions of human versus animal, rather than human as one animal species among many. This was an issue for me as a reader, someone for whom speciesism has been a concern for some time, and I was particularly puzzled by her take on animal sentience and the domestication of animals reared for food: perhaps because Hildyard’s clearly drawing on aspects of her own experience, and that of Hildyard’s as the daughter of a beef farmer’s vastly different from mine as a city-spawned, advocate of an emphatically meat-is-murder position. I also found the flashbacks to the narrator’s childhood more convincing and absorbing than the sections set during the Covid pandemic.
The pandemic narrative’s in vogue right now, for obvious reasons, and although I thought Hildyard’s attempt was less awkward than a number of examples I’ve already encountered, it was far from seamless. The contemporary sections didn’t flow as well as the Yorkshire ones, they came across as grafted on, inserted to make a point rather than smoothly integrated into the wider narrative. The narrator’s comments on white culture, to take just one example, were surprisingly clumsy, a very basic attempt at exploring broader questions of white privilege. In addition, the juxtaposition of the child who’s fully immersed in her local networks and the isolated adult whose life's been upended by global events, didn’t quite come off for me; and sometimes threatened to resurrect the kind of Cider with Rosie, conservative fantasies of prelapsarian, rural childhood which Hildyard seemed otherwise intent on dispelling. But although I had mixed feelings about aspects of Emergency, I still found it fascinating. I liked Hildyard’s prose style and use of imagery; and I admired the ambitious combination of novel of ideas and conventional coming-of-age story. Ultimately, there was enough that was memorable, moving or thought-provoking to capture my attention, and it's a novel I could easily see myself re-reading.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Astra House for an ARC
Rating: 3.5
Hildyard’s novel appears to be working through many of the ideas she’s previously outlined in her more explicitly academic, non-fiction work, particularly her recent articles and lectures on negative ecology and her earlier published essay The Second Body. Briefly, her interests lie in the intra- and inter-connectedness of everything. The ways in which these interdependencies undermine our commonplace notions of the individual or the solitary: the microbes that our bodies host; the impact our bodies have, not just locally but globally, through what we do or what we consume; or more recently, unexpectedly highlighted by the pandemic, the increasing significance of what we don’t do, our negative acts.
I was impressed by Hildyard’s painstaking depiction of the machinations of the natural world and local eco-systems, her intricate, sometimes breathtakingly vivid, representations of plants, animals and landscapes. Although I was uncertain at times about some of her underlying arguments particularly as she seemed, in a rather contradictory way, to be retaining aspects of notions of human versus animal, rather than human as one animal species among many. This was an issue for me as a reader, someone for whom speciesism has been a concern for some time, and I was particularly puzzled by her take on animal sentience and the domestication of animals reared for food: perhaps because Hildyard’s clearly drawing on aspects of her own experience, and that of Hildyard’s as the daughter of a beef farmer’s vastly different from mine as a city-spawned, advocate of an emphatically meat-is-murder position. I also found the flashbacks to the narrator’s childhood more convincing and absorbing than the sections set during the Covid pandemic.
The pandemic narrative’s in vogue right now, for obvious reasons, and although I thought Hildyard’s attempt was less awkward than a number of examples I’ve already encountered, it was far from seamless. The contemporary sections didn’t flow as well as the Yorkshire ones, they came across as grafted on, inserted to make a point rather than smoothly integrated into the wider narrative. The narrator’s comments on white culture, to take just one example, were surprisingly clumsy, a very basic attempt at exploring broader questions of white privilege. In addition, the juxtaposition of the child who’s fully immersed in her local networks and the isolated adult whose life's been upended by global events, didn’t quite come off for me; and sometimes threatened to resurrect the kind of Cider with Rosie, conservative fantasies of prelapsarian, rural childhood which Hildyard seemed otherwise intent on dispelling. But although I had mixed feelings about aspects of Emergency, I still found it fascinating. I liked Hildyard’s prose style and use of imagery; and I admired the ambitious combination of novel of ideas and conventional coming-of-age story. Ultimately, there was enough that was memorable, moving or thought-provoking to capture my attention, and it's a novel I could easily see myself re-reading.
Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Astra House for an ARC
Rating: 3.5
March 14, 2023
“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….”
Published by the Fitzcarraldo Press, whose blue covers I love (Yes, I’m fickle!). This book covers an interesting series of areas. It’s a pastoral novel (admittedly a bleak one), a coming of age set in the 1990s in a village in the north of England, a lockdown novel, a series of meditations on animals, plants, humans and the delicate ecosystem in which we live. There is no real plot and it seems to meander, which may annoy some, but I quite liked it. The quote above is a nod to Middlemarch.
The premise is that it is the first lockdown and the narrator (Serena) looks out of the window of her flat at her neighbours, also similarly confined. Her mind goes back to her village childhood in the 1990s and she describes in detail the landscape and people she encountered. There is a danger as Raymond Williams argues that the countryside/city divide leads, in literature, to a lifeless and idealised sort of pastoral novel. That trend is still there and often it’s stocked with what poet Kathleen Jamie describes as “the lone enraptured male”. Hildyard drives a coach and horses through this. There’s plenty of nature, but no tranquillity. As the narrator says:
“in spite of the meadows and the herds and the flocks. I did not know anyone who retailed local folklore or knew the weeds by nicknames, there was no village idiot, no incest, or if there was, I did not know about it because the village was not a close-knit community.”
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.
Hildyard always has in mind the climate crisis and the plundering and destruction of the ecosystem. Indeed she has written an accompanying essay called Shades of Emergency for Extinction Rebellion. There is an acknowledgement of the complicated boundaries in rural areas between what is man-made and nature. Illustrative of this is the quarry. There are descriptions of sand martins and falcons along with the knowledge that the stone quarried is going to Norway and China to build motorways. The complex and often tragic juxtapositions continue with the story of the lapwing who Serena observes on her nest. She has built it in tyre tracks because there is a little shelter and the eggs are repeatedly destroyed by the tractor.
Hildyard looks at things that are sometimes just beyond the range of perception. I loved he meditative quality of this novel. It does have a message about the climate crisis, but it is also a reflection of the messiness of our relationship with nature and on the fact that we are intricately a part of our environment.
Published by the Fitzcarraldo Press, whose blue covers I love (Yes, I’m fickle!). This book covers an interesting series of areas. It’s a pastoral novel (admittedly a bleak one), a coming of age set in the 1990s in a village in the north of England, a lockdown novel, a series of meditations on animals, plants, humans and the delicate ecosystem in which we live. There is no real plot and it seems to meander, which may annoy some, but I quite liked it. The quote above is a nod to Middlemarch.
The premise is that it is the first lockdown and the narrator (Serena) looks out of the window of her flat at her neighbours, also similarly confined. Her mind goes back to her village childhood in the 1990s and she describes in detail the landscape and people she encountered. There is a danger as Raymond Williams argues that the countryside/city divide leads, in literature, to a lifeless and idealised sort of pastoral novel. That trend is still there and often it’s stocked with what poet Kathleen Jamie describes as “the lone enraptured male”. Hildyard drives a coach and horses through this. There’s plenty of nature, but no tranquillity. As the narrator says:
“in spite of the meadows and the herds and the flocks. I did not know anyone who retailed local folklore or knew the weeds by nicknames, there was no village idiot, no incest, or if there was, I did not know about it because the village was not a close-knit community.”
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.
Hildyard always has in mind the climate crisis and the plundering and destruction of the ecosystem. Indeed she has written an accompanying essay called Shades of Emergency for Extinction Rebellion. There is an acknowledgement of the complicated boundaries in rural areas between what is man-made and nature. Illustrative of this is the quarry. There are descriptions of sand martins and falcons along with the knowledge that the stone quarried is going to Norway and China to build motorways. The complex and often tragic juxtapositions continue with the story of the lapwing who Serena observes on her nest. She has built it in tyre tracks because there is a little shelter and the eggs are repeatedly destroyed by the tractor.
Hildyard looks at things that are sometimes just beyond the range of perception. I loved he meditative quality of this novel. It does have a message about the climate crisis, but it is also a reflection of the messiness of our relationship with nature and on the fact that we are intricately a part of our environment.
June 15, 2023
Winner of the 2023 RSL Encore Prize for second novels
Also shortlisted for the 2023 Folio Prize
This is the second novel by Daisy Hildyard. However this novel has far more overlap with - and the author is I think better known for – her previous non-fictional book of essays “Second Body”, a book which has had rather mixed reviews here and whose blurs starts with the idea that to “To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated within a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away”.
(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”)
This novel is mainly set in the author’s own childhood home area of North Yorkshire – in a kind of neither/nor place – not incredibly prosperous or downtrodden, not beautiful countryside, coast or big town, not entirely rural or urban. The protagonist for much of the book is a child roaming her home village (as per the opening quote) and observing, slightly passively the life of its inhabitants (both the other children at school, their parents and the wider village) and with an equal, if not possibly greater, weight of observation, the fauna, flora and fungi that surrounds and inhabits it – particularly a quarry and wood near the village.
The framing device is of the narrator some twenty or so years later in lockdown in a City flat – no longer really part of active society and reduced to the status of observer, which therefore triggers memories of her childhood observations.
Much of the nature writing in the main childhood part is both precise in its detail and at times beautiful in its prose; but this is no Monbiot or City living Green voting style account of the countryside but one steeped in reality and with a narrator (from something or a middle class family in the village) only too aware of the time of her privilege and even more so, two decades later, aware of what actually underlies much environmental writing. In a passage which I may just use for review of that writing she observes:
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.
One of the narrator’s early related childhood memories is of a bus driver who repeatedly and deliberately fluffed his gear choice when climbing a hill – and unfortunately for me this served as a metaphor for some not always brilliantly executed gear changes.
One key theme to the book is connectedness, not just the local connectedness of villagers or of underground fungal networks, but particularly a global connectedness which echoes the Second Body idea – as the narrator as an adult but looking back on her childhood muses on for example the interaction of global economic forces with the activity (or lack of activity) at the local quarry, or on the provenance of foodstuffs or destination of consumable materials. At times this can seem artificial and with an awareness of say plastic decay which seems age and era inappropriate and rather clumsily added via the latter awareness of the narrator in the present day framing.
And the present day scenes and lockdown scenes themselves – while I believe crucial as a breakthrough to the author finding a way to cast her ideas as a novel are often very jarring when they arise – while a closing scene of a fire seemed a very clumsy way to crowbar in a theme of global warming which has been latent yet inevitable for much of the book.
The book also explores class and race prejudices in the childhood era – not ones exhibited by particular offenders but ones gently endemic and implicit to the assumptions of the village. Again this can seem rather forced.
I would say though that I really enjoyed an extended scene where two incidents are juxtasposed. The first is the schoolchildren’s delighted reaction to Jarvis Cocker (a fellow Yorkshireman)’s take down of Michael Jackson’s Earth Song (itself of course thoroughly related to the book’s ideas) – and the cautionary reaction of a teacher which looking back the narrator realises is a criticism of the racist undertones to the protest and the reaction to it. The second is a lapwing’s insistence on laying its eggs in the nestling hollows created by a tractor tire – with the inevitable result that the eggs are shortly after crushed. In both cases the link is an assumption of right to space, one that means no harm but is blind to privilege.
So overall this is not a completely successful novel – but it is an ambitious, thoughtful and intelligent one and to be commended for it.
Also shortlisted for the 2023 Folio Prize
If the invisible air was loaded with invisible poisons, if my own bloodstream could be modelled by its tiniest contaminant component, then it was only logical to understand that the infinitely detailed world, within and beyond the things that I could make sense of, was dangerous. This was not what I felt as I moved freely around the village and the wood. I had a sense of total safety and this was a function of my background - my white body and my parents' confidence gave me a relationship with that environment that ran somewhere between feeling that I belonged to it, and feeling that it belonged to me, though I did not know of any child in our community, along any of the axes that were used to identify us - rich or poor; black or white; girl or boy; beautiful or ugly; strong or weak; bright or thick - who was kept inside out of a concern for their bodily safety. I had access to the wood, the fields, and to other peoples' homes as though I was an element of infrastructure, piped water or electrical wiring, running under the ground, between the trees, through and within the houses with a supply of something that the inhabitants, whether through habit or deep dependence, had stopped noticing.
This is the second novel by Daisy Hildyard. However this novel has far more overlap with - and the author is I think better known for – her previous non-fictional book of essays “Second Body”, a book which has had rather mixed reviews here and whose blurs starts with the idea that to “To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated within a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away”.
(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”)
This novel is mainly set in the author’s own childhood home area of North Yorkshire – in a kind of neither/nor place – not incredibly prosperous or downtrodden, not beautiful countryside, coast or big town, not entirely rural or urban. The protagonist for much of the book is a child roaming her home village (as per the opening quote) and observing, slightly passively the life of its inhabitants (both the other children at school, their parents and the wider village) and with an equal, if not possibly greater, weight of observation, the fauna, flora and fungi that surrounds and inhabits it – particularly a quarry and wood near the village.
The framing device is of the narrator some twenty or so years later in lockdown in a City flat – no longer really part of active society and reduced to the status of observer, which therefore triggers memories of her childhood observations.
Much of the nature writing in the main childhood part is both precise in its detail and at times beautiful in its prose; but this is no Monbiot or City living Green voting style account of the countryside but one steeped in reality and with a narrator (from something or a middle class family in the village) only too aware of the time of her privilege and even more so, two decades later, aware of what actually underlies much environmental writing. In a passage which I may just use for review of that writing she observes:
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.
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.
One of the narrator’s early related childhood memories is of a bus driver who repeatedly and deliberately fluffed his gear choice when climbing a hill – and unfortunately for me this served as a metaphor for some not always brilliantly executed gear changes.
One key theme to the book is connectedness, not just the local connectedness of villagers or of underground fungal networks, but particularly a global connectedness which echoes the Second Body idea – as the narrator as an adult but looking back on her childhood muses on for example the interaction of global economic forces with the activity (or lack of activity) at the local quarry, or on the provenance of foodstuffs or destination of consumable materials. At times this can seem artificial and with an awareness of say plastic decay which seems age and era inappropriate and rather clumsily added via the latter awareness of the narrator in the present day framing.
And the present day scenes and lockdown scenes themselves – while I believe crucial as a breakthrough to the author finding a way to cast her ideas as a novel are often very jarring when they arise – while a closing scene of a fire seemed a very clumsy way to crowbar in a theme of global warming which has been latent yet inevitable for much of the book.
The book also explores class and race prejudices in the childhood era – not ones exhibited by particular offenders but ones gently endemic and implicit to the assumptions of the village. Again this can seem rather forced.
I would say though that I really enjoyed an extended scene where two incidents are juxtasposed. The first is the schoolchildren’s delighted reaction to Jarvis Cocker (a fellow Yorkshireman)’s take down of Michael Jackson’s Earth Song (itself of course thoroughly related to the book’s ideas) – and the cautionary reaction of a teacher which looking back the narrator realises is a criticism of the racist undertones to the protest and the reaction to it. The second is a lapwing’s insistence on laying its eggs in the nestling hollows created by a tractor tire – with the inevitable result that the eggs are shortly after crushed. In both cases the link is an assumption of right to space, one that means no harm but is blind to privilege.
So overall this is not a completely successful novel – but it is an ambitious, thoughtful and intelligent one and to be commended for it.
June 16, 2023
Winner of the Encore Award 2023 for second novels
It occurred to me then that the ash tree itself had made the cake, or consumed it. The tree, like all the things that rampaged on its dead body, like Soldier, like the rabbits like the moss on the side of Clare's house, like the kestrel and the vole — they were all part of my community, as I then thought of it, at least as much as myself or Nic or Alice. Though our village was inside this community, the community went beyond the village. As I saw it, the whole area for miles around was part of the wood: the village, the river, the farms, the wild animals, the quarry, the stately home, the housing estate, the bacon factory, the ruined abbey — they were all surrounded and overrun by woodland which was patchily logged by the Forestry Commission, so that it was hard to identify the place where it ended or began; it ran through all these things, and all these things moved through the wood in their different ways.
Emergency is Daisy Hildyard's second novel and in a sense a fictional counterpart to her book length essay, The Second Body. The blurb for that book began:
and this is a theme that is integral to Emergency, which also is a pastoral novel prompted by Covid and for the era of global warming.
The narrator of Emergency is writing during the first Covid lockdown, but largely looking back on her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. At face value this may seem a standard novel of that type, but the narrator, certainly in her recollection of her childhood, is as focused on each living, and in some cases non-living, thing as her classmates and friends, and looks at them both in intimate detail, but also conscious, particularly now in a world where we are aware of the lasting nature of plastics and of the interconnectedness of planetary forces such as climate change, of their place in a wider world both in space and time.
This a musing prompted by an abandoned pot noodle bowl where an itinerant visitor made his camp, and linking back to her current confinement to her flat:
The pot was still there, still in precisely the same position. The stock inside had been licked clean and the coloured. ink on the outside had faded away but the pot, solid ridged plastic like a small white skull, was still there, and in all likelihood is still there now, and will be there for ages after the man, and I, and all our contemporaries have gone. I find it difficult to believe that its every component was imagined into being: the noodle, the liquid plastic, the nest of dried corn threads that slotted into the circular shape, and the stratum of salted powder at the base, the plastic sachet ofsauce, the scalloping on the pot, the green and yellow ink, the tiny image of a white-feathered chicken, and the looping font used for the logo, which gives an impression that it was handwritten, rather than printed, by a human being who was experiencing joy. All of it was invented and chosen. It was easy to be blind to it - not the original act of bringing pot noodles into being but the actual pot, which is just something which exists among all the forms and movements that surround me within and beyond my own narrow horizons, which, in my ordinary life, I overlooked. These days, living in an indoor world, I spend so much time looking on the same things that all their small details have crept into focus, moment after moment, not only the trademarks on the backs of the tins and packets inside my cupboards, whose contents I know completely, but also the shapes ofthe stains on the corru-gated roof of the bin sheds outside the building opposite. Not only the shrubs whose names I don't know, but the individual buds on their right-hand branches, which opened a day or two earlier than the buds on the branches that reach out to the left, where they have to wait a few more minutes for the sun each morning. Not only each bud, but each of the tiny green tags inside it, developing as though grudgingly, at an incremental pace.
Fascinating.
It occurred to me then that the ash tree itself had made the cake, or consumed it. The tree, like all the things that rampaged on its dead body, like Soldier, like the rabbits like the moss on the side of Clare's house, like the kestrel and the vole — they were all part of my community, as I then thought of it, at least as much as myself or Nic or Alice. Though our village was inside this community, the community went beyond the village. As I saw it, the whole area for miles around was part of the wood: the village, the river, the farms, the wild animals, the quarry, the stately home, the housing estate, the bacon factory, the ruined abbey — they were all surrounded and overrun by woodland which was patchily logged by the Forestry Commission, so that it was hard to identify the place where it ended or began; it ran through all these things, and all these things moved through the wood in their different ways.
Emergency is Daisy Hildyard's second novel and in a sense a fictional counterpart to her book length essay, The Second Body. The blurb for that book began:
Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in the possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be integrated within a local ecosystem which overlaps with ecosystems which are larger and further away.
and this is a theme that is integral to Emergency, which also is a pastoral novel prompted by Covid and for the era of global warming.
The narrator of Emergency is writing during the first Covid lockdown, but largely looking back on her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. At face value this may seem a standard novel of that type, but the narrator, certainly in her recollection of her childhood, is as focused on each living, and in some cases non-living, thing as her classmates and friends, and looks at them both in intimate detail, but also conscious, particularly now in a world where we are aware of the lasting nature of plastics and of the interconnectedness of planetary forces such as climate change, of their place in a wider world both in space and time.
This a musing prompted by an abandoned pot noodle bowl where an itinerant visitor made his camp, and linking back to her current confinement to her flat:
The pot was still there, still in precisely the same position. The stock inside had been licked clean and the coloured. ink on the outside had faded away but the pot, solid ridged plastic like a small white skull, was still there, and in all likelihood is still there now, and will be there for ages after the man, and I, and all our contemporaries have gone. I find it difficult to believe that its every component was imagined into being: the noodle, the liquid plastic, the nest of dried corn threads that slotted into the circular shape, and the stratum of salted powder at the base, the plastic sachet ofsauce, the scalloping on the pot, the green and yellow ink, the tiny image of a white-feathered chicken, and the looping font used for the logo, which gives an impression that it was handwritten, rather than printed, by a human being who was experiencing joy. All of it was invented and chosen. It was easy to be blind to it - not the original act of bringing pot noodles into being but the actual pot, which is just something which exists among all the forms and movements that surround me within and beyond my own narrow horizons, which, in my ordinary life, I overlooked. These days, living in an indoor world, I spend so much time looking on the same things that all their small details have crept into focus, moment after moment, not only the trademarks on the backs of the tins and packets inside my cupboards, whose contents I know completely, but also the shapes ofthe stains on the corru-gated roof of the bin sheds outside the building opposite. Not only the shrubs whose names I don't know, but the individual buds on their right-hand branches, which opened a day or two earlier than the buds on the branches that reach out to the left, where they have to wait a few more minutes for the sun each morning. Not only each bud, but each of the tiny green tags inside it, developing as though grudgingly, at an incremental pace.
Fascinating.
April 5, 2022
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.
As I read this book, I kept thinking about two other books, one that I read very recently and one that was a firm favourite many, many years ago as I was growing up.
The older book is Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” which is a series of connected short stories following a young boy’s summer. I read it first at a very young age and was incredibly impressed by the evocative way in which it captured memories. Daisy Hildyard does something similar but in a more sophisticated way in Emergency. This novel effectively has two timelines as a woman confined to her home in the first COVID lockdown looks back and recounts her childhood memories.
The memories she tells us about are full of incredible detail. I was perhaps most captivated by the nature encounters she tells us about. Since I retired, I have run a small photography business that concentrates on nature images and this means that I am outside for a few hours every day with my camera taking a keen interest in the behaviours of animals, trees, insects etc.. However, in addition to that, my own childhood was similar to the one recalled here because I grew up in the English countryside exploring my rural surroundings, which meant large parts of this book felt familiar.
Most of the stars I have given this book come from this combination of “this is what I do now” and “this was how I grew up”.
But Hildyard is also fascinated by interconnectedness and this shines through in the narrative. This is a topic that occurs a lot in the writing of one of my favourite authors, Richard Powers. This is why I opened my review with a particular quote from the book which put me in mind of “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s book is a non-fiction exploration of the interconnected world of fungi.
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”).
Personally, I didn’t feel that the modern day lockdown passages worked as well as the memories. They felt almost added on, although I think they do what the back cover suggests the book does which is “reinvent the pastoral novel for the climate change era”. For this to work properly (purely from my perspective), I think I would have preferred these sections to be more prominent in the narrative which would have made them feel more of an integral part of the book.
Very enjoyable to read, though, and a book I would recommend to several friends.
As I read this book, I kept thinking about two other books, one that I read very recently and one that was a firm favourite many, many years ago as I was growing up.
The older book is Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine” which is a series of connected short stories following a young boy’s summer. I read it first at a very young age and was incredibly impressed by the evocative way in which it captured memories. Daisy Hildyard does something similar but in a more sophisticated way in Emergency. This novel effectively has two timelines as a woman confined to her home in the first COVID lockdown looks back and recounts her childhood memories.
The memories she tells us about are full of incredible detail. I was perhaps most captivated by the nature encounters she tells us about. Since I retired, I have run a small photography business that concentrates on nature images and this means that I am outside for a few hours every day with my camera taking a keen interest in the behaviours of animals, trees, insects etc.. However, in addition to that, my own childhood was similar to the one recalled here because I grew up in the English countryside exploring my rural surroundings, which meant large parts of this book felt familiar.
Most of the stars I have given this book come from this combination of “this is what I do now” and “this was how I grew up”.
But Hildyard is also fascinated by interconnectedness and this shines through in the narrative. This is a topic that occurs a lot in the writing of one of my favourite authors, Richard Powers. This is why I opened my review with a particular quote from the book which put me in mind of “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s book is a non-fiction exploration of the interconnected world of fungi.
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”).
Personally, I didn’t feel that the modern day lockdown passages worked as well as the memories. They felt almost added on, although I think they do what the back cover suggests the book does which is “reinvent the pastoral novel for the climate change era”. For this to work properly (purely from my perspective), I think I would have preferred these sections to be more prominent in the narrative which would have made them feel more of an integral part of the book.
Very enjoyable to read, though, and a book I would recommend to several friends.
March 29, 2023
“Issue novels” are a tough sell for me. Some social issues, like poverty, racism, sexism, etc. can be explored very effectively through the medium of a novel. Other political or economic issues, I find, are best explored through nonfiction. There are exceptions, of course: Gaddis took down capitalism in J R more effectively than anything else I’ve ever read. Knowing that Emergency by Daisy Hildyard was a novel focused on climate change and degradation already put a slightly sour taste in my mouth. I immediately thought that climate change is an issue best left to nonfiction. When it comes to climate change, I want to know facts and figures, I want to learn about why it’s happening, whom it is affecting, what the main drivers are, etc. And it seemed tough to present info like this in a narrative.
I’ve got to say that Daisy Hildyard succeeded in writing a lovely “pastoral” novel–even if she failed spectacularly at writing a climate change novel.
Hildyard’s novel is written from the perspective of an author in isolation during the COVID pandemic (wonder who that could be…) reminiscing about her English country childhood (wonder who that could be???). She remembers her friends, family, and most of all: nature. There are long walks, scenes of animals interacting in pleasant and unpleasant ways, farming, degradation, just all kinds of reflections on what it was like for her to grow up in the country. The descriptions were written quite beautifully, I liked Hildyard’s prose a lot. I also thought that she captured her childhood voice really well and it was clear she was not revising what her experience was as a kid through adult eyes. All the wonder, naivety, and selfishness–perhaps egocentrism would be a better word–are wonderfully present in her narration. If the book were only these reflections, I probably would have bumped up the book to four stars. However, Hildyard’s attempts to shoehorn in opinions on climate change, and the odd choice to use the pandemic as a framing device, sullied some of my enjoyment.
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:
”I wanted to be able to kick somebody and still to be liked by the person I had kicked. That was normal if not excusable, it was a fundamental principle of class and race relations in the whole country at the time.”
She’s talking about kicking a boy in the shins whom she likes and wanting him to continue liking her, a common occurrence among little kids as they start to have crushes and don’t quite know how to express them. But then she makes the puzzling comparison to…people in the wealthier classes “kicking” those in the working classes and wanting to be liked? Majority races “kicking” minority races and wanting to be liked? The comparison is absurd: these groups or entities don’t care about being liked. They do the “kicking” to maintain and build power and profit and domination–it could not be further from their minds whether they are liked by the groups they sublimate. It showed a lack of awareness of social issues and an inability to break out of one's own perspective. Or, it could be simply that she wanted this to be an "issues" novel and looked for the most fragile connections between her own seemingly privileged experience (I'm basing this assumption on her having attended Oxford and the lack of want of practically anything present in this book) and larger societal issues.
I could write about a few more illustrative examples of this solipsism, but I'll limit it to one. She writes about a quarry in her town that is continually being mined and renatured throughout her childhood. She also focuses on animals being impacted by people impinging on their habitats. Degradation of environment and greedily scooping up animal habitats and land for profit are real issues. It came across as a bit slight to be reflecting on how her beautiful, pastoral English childhood was marred by these issues. People are dying in floods, mudslides, people are burning alive in fires and losing everything they own, and you're going to reflect on how the quarry would be prettier if the Canadians would just stop mining it? It felt very liberal guilt in a way that was pretty gross throughout. I'm not arguing that we should raze the English countryside in order to build factories, but being able to enjoy the splendor of the pastoral life is also not high on my climate priorities list.
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.
From my review, it might seem I was more annoyed reading the book than I was. It really is a lovely book, and I enjoyed the majority of my time with it mainly because Hildyard spends most of the time recounting episodes from the country in vivid detail–the book's biggest strength. Foxes play with each other, a bull is saved from a marsh, people get sick or injured. It's these smaller, individual, human- or animal-scale stories that felt like the heart of the novel to me. I wish Hildyard would have just stuck to these instead of making me roll my eyes every 10 or so pages with trite observations about society or politics.
I’ve got to say that Daisy Hildyard succeeded in writing a lovely “pastoral” novel–even if she failed spectacularly at writing a climate change novel.
Hildyard’s novel is written from the perspective of an author in isolation during the COVID pandemic (wonder who that could be…) reminiscing about her English country childhood (wonder who that could be???). She remembers her friends, family, and most of all: nature. There are long walks, scenes of animals interacting in pleasant and unpleasant ways, farming, degradation, just all kinds of reflections on what it was like for her to grow up in the country. The descriptions were written quite beautifully, I liked Hildyard’s prose a lot. I also thought that she captured her childhood voice really well and it was clear she was not revising what her experience was as a kid through adult eyes. All the wonder, naivety, and selfishness–perhaps egocentrism would be a better word–are wonderfully present in her narration. If the book were only these reflections, I probably would have bumped up the book to four stars. However, Hildyard’s attempts to shoehorn in opinions on climate change, and the odd choice to use the pandemic as a framing device, sullied some of my enjoyment.
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:
”I wanted to be able to kick somebody and still to be liked by the person I had kicked. That was normal if not excusable, it was a fundamental principle of class and race relations in the whole country at the time.”
She’s talking about kicking a boy in the shins whom she likes and wanting him to continue liking her, a common occurrence among little kids as they start to have crushes and don’t quite know how to express them. But then she makes the puzzling comparison to…people in the wealthier classes “kicking” those in the working classes and wanting to be liked? Majority races “kicking” minority races and wanting to be liked? The comparison is absurd: these groups or entities don’t care about being liked. They do the “kicking” to maintain and build power and profit and domination–it could not be further from their minds whether they are liked by the groups they sublimate. It showed a lack of awareness of social issues and an inability to break out of one's own perspective. Or, it could be simply that she wanted this to be an "issues" novel and looked for the most fragile connections between her own seemingly privileged experience (I'm basing this assumption on her having attended Oxford and the lack of want of practically anything present in this book) and larger societal issues.
I could write about a few more illustrative examples of this solipsism, but I'll limit it to one. She writes about a quarry in her town that is continually being mined and renatured throughout her childhood. She also focuses on animals being impacted by people impinging on their habitats. Degradation of environment and greedily scooping up animal habitats and land for profit are real issues. It came across as a bit slight to be reflecting on how her beautiful, pastoral English childhood was marred by these issues. People are dying in floods, mudslides, people are burning alive in fires and losing everything they own, and you're going to reflect on how the quarry would be prettier if the Canadians would just stop mining it? It felt very liberal guilt in a way that was pretty gross throughout. I'm not arguing that we should raze the English countryside in order to build factories, but being able to enjoy the splendor of the pastoral life is also not high on my climate priorities list.
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.
From my review, it might seem I was more annoyed reading the book than I was. It really is a lovely book, and I enjoyed the majority of my time with it mainly because Hildyard spends most of the time recounting episodes from the country in vivid detail–the book's biggest strength. Foxes play with each other, a bull is saved from a marsh, people get sick or injured. It's these smaller, individual, human- or animal-scale stories that felt like the heart of the novel to me. I wish Hildyard would have just stuck to these instead of making me roll my eyes every 10 or so pages with trite observations about society or politics.
July 22, 2022
The writing at a technical level was great, I just couldn't find anything to care about at all at a quarter of the way into it. I am typically fine with no, or little to no, plot novels and generally love interiority being predominate in my fiction. This, though, with the interconnectivity between our child narrator from a future self, just really didn't do anything for me. The odd moments weren't enough to have me wonder what would happen next. There are no stakes and the life of a child encountering animals is apparently not compelling to me, personally.
January 31, 2023
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.
During lockdown the narrator decides to speak about her childhood memories of living in rural England. As I stated earlier, these memories consist of long passages about plants, animals and her neighbours and friends and their relation to fauna and flora.
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.
It’s a pity because I do like descriptions of wildlife in novels.
During lockdown the narrator decides to speak about her childhood memories of living in rural England. As I stated earlier, these memories consist of long passages about plants, animals and her neighbours and friends and their relation to fauna and flora.
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.
It’s a pity because I do like descriptions of wildlife in novels.
May 21, 2022
Slow and observant story told by a woman in lockdown in England. She is going back and forth from her life in her apartment where she lives alone to her childhood lived in a small village. It’s very descriptive with beautiful, objective, details of especially nature. A ‘quiet’ interesting read.
Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC.
June 14, 2023
luminous!!! Read this. It will change the way you think forever (coming from an urban city girlie). I loved this book so much I wrote 1000 more words than my essay required and then had to kill those darlings off. Made me think about lockdown and covid in original and surprising ways - which is a tough task given that we all lived it :/ Yes there’s no plot, and you’re just along for the ride, but that felt very common to me as a reader of contemporary fiction, and the ride is worth it! I’m excited to finish Hildyard’s earlier book/essay (which Emergency builds on) soon - The Second Body - another to add to your lists
Read
April 18, 2022The narrator's reflection on her childhood in rural England, being close to and experiencing both industrial and agricultural impacts on the natural environment, holds up better than the portions explicitly about the pandemic. The latter felt more like a framing device, that the lockdown and constant time indoors compelled the woman to reflect on her community's interaction with its environment and other rippling events, rather than anything of specific consequence within the entire novel. Maybe, as time goes on and there's more distance, writers will have better processed the last two years of lockdown to more seamlessly incorporate that moment in their work. There are some notable reflections about remote violence, as in how exploitation (of either the natural environment and/ or marginalized groups) occur out of sight of the eventual end-users. What kind of responsibility do end-users bear being at the tip of a global supply chain that exists on unsustainability and inequity? Still turning things over in my head.
January 3, 2024
I expect Emergency will be welcomed differently by readers of fiction and of nonfiction. It is, of course, a work of fiction, but nearly all of the book's blurbs characterize it as a meditation on the climate crisis. What? I wouldn't have read it as any sort of environmental essay otherwise, because I think fiction suffers when it tries too hard to be commentary. And Emergency is not trying too hard to be anything; the greatest strength of this novel, the source of its grace, is the patience with which it reconstructs a childhood. A childhood in Yorkshire, to be exact: our narrator, writing from her apartment in lockdown, remembers the fields and woods she used to wander through and the scales of life she saw there. Linearity is of her least concern as she takes flight with whatever comes to mind in the moment (a friend's cruelty toward a starling recalls "living beef" in Texas), a sensibility that more storytellers need. The animals here—the cows, the foxes, the toads—are seen as people, that is to say truly seen, and they are the reason you should buy a one-way ticket to Hildyard's world immediately. I find it only sensible to continue my review in her words, as this is the most beautifully observed book I've read in a long, long time.
44: "Perhaps there are people who enjoy being given information they have not requested. If so, I have not met these people. I was interested in the things that I could see, the things I already knew about."
83: "In Texas I enjoyed talking to people who were quite comfortable in understanding themselves as violent and self-seeking creatures. They pushed up the temperature and they owned it; they welcomed competition and loved their weapons; they believed in war as the route to peace; and this ability to live with themselves was, to me, undeniably wholesome."
93: It's rare to have a companion whose presence is enough, and anyway, there is no person who is so fascinatingly alive that they are never interested in what's on their plate."
98: "There were no computers in these houses and no adults did work other than housework. No person was gazing into a handheld device. They were the final days of home life as it was then, discreet and private, with no aperture through which the social of the working life could pour. We didn't know it was the end of anything, of course. I am middle-aged now and still waiting for things to stop beginning."
133: "One day I asked my mother why I didn't have an accent. The Queen has an accent, I explained, and Ms. Carr, like all Scottish people, has an accent. But my own voice does not have any accent. I am normal."
198: "Adam showed her the five-pound note and she took out her purse. It was large, warm, soft, and brown. It opened with a golden clip which made a satisfying noise. Nic folded the note carefully into the purse and she took out two coins. In exchange for the five-pound note, she gave one pound to both of us."
206: "No conservationist would be able to define this collection of tiny trees as a forest; it is easier to protect the past than the future."
Additional Notes: 18 (geological), 21 (hyperventilating), 22 (squash), 33 (inversion of intelligence), 37 (choice ironies), 39 (Serena on the grass), 41 (Klopp), 70 ("Whoa"), 82 (Texas), 88 ("Bit camp"), 92 (run out of conversation), 94 (disappeared), 98 (ocean), 104 (shitty place), 107 (grandmother's granddaughter), 110 (cry together), 122 (chimpanzee), 125 (concentric layers of grit; bananas), 126 (interesting; shoes), 130 (mimed), 152 (sensible), 153 (dinner monitor), 185 (dog), 194 (Lucy stretching), 197 (furry money), 201 (circulation), 202 (continuous neighborhood)
44: "Perhaps there are people who enjoy being given information they have not requested. If so, I have not met these people. I was interested in the things that I could see, the things I already knew about."
83: "In Texas I enjoyed talking to people who were quite comfortable in understanding themselves as violent and self-seeking creatures. They pushed up the temperature and they owned it; they welcomed competition and loved their weapons; they believed in war as the route to peace; and this ability to live with themselves was, to me, undeniably wholesome."
93: It's rare to have a companion whose presence is enough, and anyway, there is no person who is so fascinatingly alive that they are never interested in what's on their plate."
98: "There were no computers in these houses and no adults did work other than housework. No person was gazing into a handheld device. They were the final days of home life as it was then, discreet and private, with no aperture through which the social of the working life could pour. We didn't know it was the end of anything, of course. I am middle-aged now and still waiting for things to stop beginning."
133: "One day I asked my mother why I didn't have an accent. The Queen has an accent, I explained, and Ms. Carr, like all Scottish people, has an accent. But my own voice does not have any accent. I am normal."
198: "Adam showed her the five-pound note and she took out her purse. It was large, warm, soft, and brown. It opened with a golden clip which made a satisfying noise. Nic folded the note carefully into the purse and she took out two coins. In exchange for the five-pound note, she gave one pound to both of us."
206: "No conservationist would be able to define this collection of tiny trees as a forest; it is easier to protect the past than the future."
Additional Notes: 18 (geological), 21 (hyperventilating), 22 (squash), 33 (inversion of intelligence), 37 (choice ironies), 39 (Serena on the grass), 41 (Klopp), 70 ("Whoa"), 82 (Texas), 88 ("Bit camp"), 92 (run out of conversation), 94 (disappeared), 98 (ocean), 104 (shitty place), 107 (grandmother's granddaughter), 110 (cry together), 122 (chimpanzee), 125 (concentric layers of grit; bananas), 126 (interesting; shoes), 130 (mimed), 152 (sensible), 153 (dinner monitor), 185 (dog), 194 (Lucy stretching), 197 (furry money), 201 (circulation), 202 (continuous neighborhood)
August 6, 2022
ARC from NetGalley and Astra House
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!
Emergency is described as a pastoral novel, and yes, if I have to say what it’s about then it’s about the relationship between humans and nature. But that’s it. There’s really no through story here. A woman looks back on her childhood from lockdown. It’s told in scenes that are not always linear and that blend together – we move from past to present in just a sentence and it’s a little disorienting. There were parts I was really interested in and others that really added nothing for me.
The setting is well-created here, the descriptions of the natural world are very evocative and the obviously based on experience anecdotes had me nodding my head – they were so right! Getting the first computer in the classroom, wooden desks with lids, being rewarded with a pen for good handwriting, Segas and Gameboys and ‘Is Adam playing?’
However, as right as all that was, something really rubbed me the wrong way. In nineties Yorkshire we did not say ‘mom’ or ‘principal’; we did not use ‘Saran wrap’, nor drive on ‘freeways’, nor drink ‘Gatorade’ (it wasn’t essential to the story, so why not Lucozade?). Was this adapted for American readers? Why? For a setting that felt so authentic, these details (minor though they might seem) really took me out of it.
I think there are scenes I’ll remember – maybe because they felt like my memories – but this is not a book I’ll revisit, and I don’t know who I would recommend it to.
Thank you, NetGalley and Astra for this ARC.
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!
Emergency is described as a pastoral novel, and yes, if I have to say what it’s about then it’s about the relationship between humans and nature. But that’s it. There’s really no through story here. A woman looks back on her childhood from lockdown. It’s told in scenes that are not always linear and that blend together – we move from past to present in just a sentence and it’s a little disorienting. There were parts I was really interested in and others that really added nothing for me.
The setting is well-created here, the descriptions of the natural world are very evocative and the obviously based on experience anecdotes had me nodding my head – they were so right! Getting the first computer in the classroom, wooden desks with lids, being rewarded with a pen for good handwriting, Segas and Gameboys and ‘Is Adam playing?’
However, as right as all that was, something really rubbed me the wrong way. In nineties Yorkshire we did not say ‘mom’ or ‘principal’; we did not use ‘Saran wrap’, nor drive on ‘freeways’, nor drink ‘Gatorade’ (it wasn’t essential to the story, so why not Lucozade?). Was this adapted for American readers? Why? For a setting that felt so authentic, these details (minor though they might seem) really took me out of it.
I think there are scenes I’ll remember – maybe because they felt like my memories – but this is not a book I’ll revisit, and I don’t know who I would recommend it to.
Thank you, NetGalley and Astra for this ARC.
May 2, 2024
It doesn't seem fair to review this book as you would a "novel", when it's so clearly not a story. Daisy Hildyard's 'Emergency' reads like a diary, or an extract from a longer recollection, on the past; her upbringing in North Yorkshire, which, as someone who experienced a very similar childhood, felt incredibly comforting and familiar, in a way. The novel is successful in its depiction of the past, but much of the form, I feel, let it down.
I'm not of the persuasion that neglecting chapters, emotive speech, or regular scene breaks can be overly successful. I would have personally loved for the book to follow a clearer, more palatable structure; it jumped from topic to topic, past to present, often rather clunkily. I felt that because of this, certain plotlines weren't done justice. I was left wanting... more, more of the things that really mattered.
I find this style of writing almost... selfish. The idea that the reader must engage themself, must stay intrigued while the structure is actively working against our pleasure in the reading process. I loved the concept, and I only wish the novel's outward simplicity contributed somewhat more to the joy of the reading process. Instead of stripping away the unnecessary, leaving the bare bones of our emergency, the style seemed to strip away... the necessary.
I'm not of the persuasion that neglecting chapters, emotive speech, or regular scene breaks can be overly successful. I would have personally loved for the book to follow a clearer, more palatable structure; it jumped from topic to topic, past to present, often rather clunkily. I felt that because of this, certain plotlines weren't done justice. I was left wanting... more, more of the things that really mattered.
I find this style of writing almost... selfish. The idea that the reader must engage themself, must stay intrigued while the structure is actively working against our pleasure in the reading process. I loved the concept, and I only wish the novel's outward simplicity contributed somewhat more to the joy of the reading process. Instead of stripping away the unnecessary, leaving the bare bones of our emergency, the style seemed to strip away... the necessary.
Read
May 31, 2023going to do the eyerollingly predictable thing and say is it A NOvel ,,,,, I really like this. I think we expect good things from fitzcarraldo & this delivers as it should, but it got me going elsewhere too. Melodramatically billed as 'dark pastoral' (??? o come on now) ,, Emergency lives in other directions, a kind of prose Afterlife of the Naturalist. I think the 'twist' abt 50 pages in where we're flung into lockdown was effective!! I kind of wanted more from that, and that did weave its way back in, the big capital T Themes are emerging ,,, maybe my/our expectations for something like this are little heresies. I don't know.
also! Daisy married to caleb klaces ? serve
also! Daisy married to caleb klaces ? serve
September 15, 2024
45 - excellent writing.
November 2, 2022
The title - for a novel in which there's no easily coherent plot, only an abundance of minor incident - feels like a bluff. In fact, as Hildyard has made clearer in writings around the book, it's a pun: a play on the idea of emergence, where the interaction of smaller factors gives rise to vast, unpredictable effects. The climate emergency as we experience it is an emergent emergency, a mesh of local disruptions and shifts which creates an ongoing crisis, but which also overlaps with the business of everyday life, in the same way human activity intertwines with non-human at levels from insects picking clean a half-finished pot noodle to birds half a world away poisoned by microplastics.
"Everything's connected" is one of those banal insights that's so clearly true it's no longer really meaningful, and Hildyard's gift in Emergency is to make you feel it, by a constant shifting of scale. Her narrator, a tweenage girl in mid-90s Northern England, is a quiet, observant, only child whose presence within nature - the local farms, woods and quarry - is inobtrusive enough to let her pay real attention to its small dramas. A kestrel hunting a vole, a lapwing looking to nest, the interactions of cows in the local herd, the textures and smells of dead trees or sodden grass - she notices everything that happens at these small scales, and has a knack for stepping outside human time and motive to understand them.
But she's also of the right age to zoom out as well as in, dimly beginning to understand the global processes and networks of power and money that are shaping her village and its inhabitants as de-industrialisation begins to set in. If the child narrator is a keen student of micro-connectedness, the details of this wider macro-connectedness are often provided by her adult self, writing the book during the 2020 lockdown, uneventful until the very final pages.
On the whole, Emergency works because the "micro" stuff is so entrancingly done - on one level the novel is a skein of 50 or so bits of superb observational nature writing, studded with good (though more conventional) material on the banalities and cruelties of childhood. But you need the dizzying zooms out to the "macro" too: Hildyard suddenly pulling back from a single moment or object to the whole process and story it's a part of.
As the book continues, it's also apparent that there is an actual story being told - though concealed, like the trail of holly-bushes along one of the tracks the narrator explores. The commercial fate of the quarry, the offshore oil rig, the local families they employ, and the secrets some of those locals hold are all important to that story but never important enough (or transparent enough) to the young narrator to be her main focus. Some elements are never resolved; enough are to give an impression of a slow degradation of local life. The present day narrator recalls her past, but does not organise it or connect it to the present: after all, if it is a story, its ending is the one she and we live in.
"Everything's connected" is one of those banal insights that's so clearly true it's no longer really meaningful, and Hildyard's gift in Emergency is to make you feel it, by a constant shifting of scale. Her narrator, a tweenage girl in mid-90s Northern England, is a quiet, observant, only child whose presence within nature - the local farms, woods and quarry - is inobtrusive enough to let her pay real attention to its small dramas. A kestrel hunting a vole, a lapwing looking to nest, the interactions of cows in the local herd, the textures and smells of dead trees or sodden grass - she notices everything that happens at these small scales, and has a knack for stepping outside human time and motive to understand them.
But she's also of the right age to zoom out as well as in, dimly beginning to understand the global processes and networks of power and money that are shaping her village and its inhabitants as de-industrialisation begins to set in. If the child narrator is a keen student of micro-connectedness, the details of this wider macro-connectedness are often provided by her adult self, writing the book during the 2020 lockdown, uneventful until the very final pages.
On the whole, Emergency works because the "micro" stuff is so entrancingly done - on one level the novel is a skein of 50 or so bits of superb observational nature writing, studded with good (though more conventional) material on the banalities and cruelties of childhood. But you need the dizzying zooms out to the "macro" too: Hildyard suddenly pulling back from a single moment or object to the whole process and story it's a part of.
As the book continues, it's also apparent that there is an actual story being told - though concealed, like the trail of holly-bushes along one of the tracks the narrator explores. The commercial fate of the quarry, the offshore oil rig, the local families they employ, and the secrets some of those locals hold are all important to that story but never important enough (or transparent enough) to the young narrator to be her main focus. Some elements are never resolved; enough are to give an impression of a slow degradation of local life. The present day narrator recalls her past, but does not organise it or connect it to the present: after all, if it is a story, its ending is the one she and we live in.
August 27, 2022
Daisy Hildyard has earned comparisons to Rachel Cusk in her new book Emergency. A novel set of the narrator being home during lockdown is a believable and spot on story of life in a lockdown pandemic atmosphere. The book goes between past and present as the narrator recalls her life in the past and present. It made me really long for childhood and early adulthood before the internet. I really loved the premise of Emergency and it's an outstanding book ! I definitely want to read more of Daisy Hilyards work in future. Thank you to the publisher who gave me a gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.
August 31, 2024
I also just love mushrooms
November 25, 2022
Hildyard's lyrical narrative of a north of England village childhood is recollected not so much in tranquillity as in the unremitting bleakness of life under lockdown in London during the recent pandemic. The adult narrator's confinement in an urban apartment has induced some critics to compare the precision of her recall with Proust's similarly confined narrator's, but the capacity for minute observation and representation more aptly evokes the clarity and immediacy that Wordsworth intended to convey, a desire so often hindered by his adult sententiousness. It is, however, an unsentimental recollection of the cycle of life, labour, sickness and death in the fields, farmyards and factories that surrounded her. The kindnesses and cruelties are recalled mostly without judgment in her account of the way things were, even with her growing awareness that she enjoys privileges unavailable to most of her neighbours. Yet the narrator's reflections on her childhood are punctuated by prolepsis: she knows how this will develop. This is a novel without a plot but with a common thread of the growing perception of the uneasy relationship between local labour practices and their global consequences. Whether the titular emergency has already arrived is open to interpretation, but the narrative leaves the reader in no doubt that it is emerging. The power of this fiction resides not only in its eloquence but also in its admirable restraint: Hildyard desists from preaching.
July 13, 2022
YOU NEED IT MUCH DARKER THAN THIS
I was attracted to this book by reviews calling it a 'pastoral novel for the climate change era' and similar. Many reviewers have noted Hildyard's well sustained, spellbinding, lyrical writing and I can't really disagree with all of that, but this was still a disappointing read for me.
The combination of 'lockdown' setting and childhood memories is certainly well delivered, even if the meshing of the two time zones does somehow dilute the intensity of whatever narrative strand there is. There isn't any actual 'plot' here and the mosaic process never reaches any obvious point/conclusion/denouement, so that long before the end I found myself wondering, 'Why are you TELLING me all this?'
Parts of the book are sweet/poignant/funny, other parts are mildly subversive, and there are elements of violence and other so-called 'dark' material, but for me there is very little here that is truly dark and even then it is definitely not dark enough. When it comes to climate catastrophe literature, it needs to be a hell of a lot darker (and braver) than this.
I was also, yet again, left wondering whether such a thing as a publisher's editor actually exists any more, with this book half in love with the word 'along' (on one page there are two 'along's and a 'longer' in the space of three lines). Yes, it is written in character, but that doesn't excuse rogue apostrophes or the swapping of 'tale' for 'tail'. Such errors undermine the reader's confidence that the writer/publisher know what they're doing or have proper control of their material.
As for the actual 'dark' stuff relating to pollution, poisons and our eco-crisis in general, if that is what drew you to this book I would recommend the first eight or ten journals of the Dark Mountain project beginning with Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto and Dark Mountain: Issue 1, published before its founders Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine let go of it and it drifted into less disciplined territory.
I was attracted to this book by reviews calling it a 'pastoral novel for the climate change era' and similar. Many reviewers have noted Hildyard's well sustained, spellbinding, lyrical writing and I can't really disagree with all of that, but this was still a disappointing read for me.
The combination of 'lockdown' setting and childhood memories is certainly well delivered, even if the meshing of the two time zones does somehow dilute the intensity of whatever narrative strand there is. There isn't any actual 'plot' here and the mosaic process never reaches any obvious point/conclusion/denouement, so that long before the end I found myself wondering, 'Why are you TELLING me all this?'
Parts of the book are sweet/poignant/funny, other parts are mildly subversive, and there are elements of violence and other so-called 'dark' material, but for me there is very little here that is truly dark and even then it is definitely not dark enough. When it comes to climate catastrophe literature, it needs to be a hell of a lot darker (and braver) than this.
I was also, yet again, left wondering whether such a thing as a publisher's editor actually exists any more, with this book half in love with the word 'along' (on one page there are two 'along's and a 'longer' in the space of three lines). Yes, it is written in character, but that doesn't excuse rogue apostrophes or the swapping of 'tale' for 'tail'. Such errors undermine the reader's confidence that the writer/publisher know what they're doing or have proper control of their material.
As for the actual 'dark' stuff relating to pollution, poisons and our eco-crisis in general, if that is what drew you to this book I would recommend the first eight or ten journals of the Dark Mountain project beginning with Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto and Dark Mountain: Issue 1, published before its founders Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine let go of it and it drifted into less disciplined territory.
May 22, 2022
The third Fitzcarraldo book I have read. Each of them are very literary, unique and bold. Emergency feels like a work of memoir or nature writing, but it is a novel. The majority of the book is taken up with intense, sensual memories of growing up in a small village in rural Yorkshire, and with close observations of nature. There is very little 'narrative'. Close descriptions of animals, plants, landscape and matter are weaved seamlessly into the story. A young girl grows up in an isolated village. Her parents are a little more educated than most of the surrounding adults, who work in a local quarry, farms, slaughter houses and care homes, or leave to work on oil rigs, but they are as financially insecure as everyone else. Cruelty or tragic events are reported in the same matter of fact tone as anything else. We spend time with a herd of cows, and they are described and portrayed with more or less the same level of attentiveness as the humans. Occasionally the narrative flashes back to the present day, in which the narrator is living alone in a town near where she grew up in the middle of the covid pandemic and lockdown, but the bulk of the narrative is from her childhood. The novel goes into reflections on our connectedness to nature, including in the epidemidiological sense, and the vicissitudes of global capitalism, such as the takeover of the quarry that the village is economically dependent on by a Canadian multinational, and it's closure when demand for it's product in China ends. This is an experimental, ambient, poetic work of fiction. It's an exemplary modern pastoral.
March 12, 2025
I was pretty sure I’d like this when I read ‘Daisy Hilyards Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.’ I found it beautiful and original but I wish it had flipping chapters because it read kind of like a never ending essay.
“Then its front end disappeared inside and I realised that the caterpillar was feeding; death was only recycling. The creature who had made that fur and skin, already half digested in the owl’s stomach, had not ended so much as spread itself out as its vital energy transitioned away, atom by atom, each chunk the size of a baby caterpillar’s bite. I felt it in my own body - not the objects but the animating energy passing through. It made me feel a bit sick. Butterflies.”
“Then its front end disappeared inside and I realised that the caterpillar was feeding; death was only recycling. The creature who had made that fur and skin, already half digested in the owl’s stomach, had not ended so much as spread itself out as its vital energy transitioned away, atom by atom, each chunk the size of a baby caterpillar’s bite. I felt it in my own body - not the objects but the animating energy passing through. It made me feel a bit sick. Butterflies.”
December 29, 2022
It’s so close, maybe too close. Katie got the author to sign it in Glasgow; she crossed out her own printed name and wrote ‘for Jennifer’. I remember underlining more passages than I can currently find.
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April 27, 2023really beautiful nature descriptions but definitely a test of my patience and attention span. best read while listening to big thief and drinking iced tea!
November 18, 2023
best thing I've read in a while
June 26, 2025
The best book I’ve read this year. The way the narration was written felt exactly like my thoughts, but I didn’t only enjoy it for self indulgent reasons. The story was beautiful, the prose was beautiful, just read it :P
July 24, 2022
Video review https://youtu.be/x0xuKsZGHHc
May 27, 2024
I did not expect to like this book and I’m not sure why I bought it, but I’m very glad I did: it’s one of my two favourite books I’ve read this year.
The meticulous care and detail with which the author describes the natural world should by rights have left me cold (I don’t get much out of long descriptions - aphantasia), but instead it made subjects I might previously have considered mundane feel vital, startlingly new and alive. I’ve never read writing like it.
The meticulous care and detail with which the author describes the natural world should by rights have left me cold (I don’t get much out of long descriptions - aphantasia), but instead it made subjects I might previously have considered mundane feel vital, startlingly new and alive. I’ve never read writing like it.
August 23, 2022
2.5
while I can say that this is lyrical, beautiful prose in the end this book didn't work for me. I felt I had nothing to connect to, especially the very light lockdown framing used. This is partially my fault, I saw "a woman recounts her 1990s childhood" and I thought I was going to be filled with nostalgia. Instead I got endless stories about animals (and sometimes neighbors) in a not quite rural, not quite suburbs town. There were some interesting through lines about the world supply chain and sometimes it seemed like it wanted to say something about animal farming but it never quite got there. It felt longwinded which made me constantly ask why I was being told all of this! I never felt the "evocative and unsettling" points from the blurb.
while I can say that this is lyrical, beautiful prose in the end this book didn't work for me. I felt I had nothing to connect to, especially the very light lockdown framing used. This is partially my fault, I saw "a woman recounts her 1990s childhood" and I thought I was going to be filled with nostalgia. Instead I got endless stories about animals (and sometimes neighbors) in a not quite rural, not quite suburbs town. There were some interesting through lines about the world supply chain and sometimes it seemed like it wanted to say something about animal farming but it never quite got there. It felt longwinded which made me constantly ask why I was being told all of this! I never felt the "evocative and unsettling" points from the blurb.
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