Emergency by Daisy Hildyard: A portrait of our ‘weird and messy earth song’

Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency is a pastoral novel for the age of dissolving boundaries. During lockdown, a woman recounts her childhood growing up in rural Yorkshire, in a village in transition, at the centre of an exponentially interconnected world.

The nonhuman has agency – mosses advance over brick, and rabbits are of principle and will. Our protagonist is attentive to the minute details of her village, which are recounted with astonishing attentiveness, a salute to the unquestioning animacy of childhood.

“They were all part of my community”: this mutuality extends down to the inanimate – even the machinery of the local quarry is bestowed belonging to the world, the quarry stone and the hairs and skin moles of quarry workers travel the globe. Like the spider that arrives one day in a bag of bananas, life is a supply chain, and this comes across the page as both comforting and disconcerting.

Apparently disparate things accumulate and fuse together in moments of interconnectivity. A Gurkha man and his companion are with the child when the three are bonded in a moment, looking at a cow just as its calf’s hoof presses on her belly from the inside, and the three humans make an automatic noise in response. Quotidian moments such as this build to give an impression of the many interruptions that other living and nonliving things exert on us.

At the same time that there is an unstoppable empathy for everything, the world that is built is often dispassionate, inhabited by fungus that might attack a weakened immune system, killing a child remorselessly. Uninvited intimacies like this rupture any sense of an individual self, and at these times the narrator is swept up in a tide that feels oppressive for its inevitability.

Small rebellion

But this powerlessness is in tension with the effect of action. The child protagonist practises wielding her own capacity to change the events around her, in a small rebellion against the bonds that hold her in the world of the village. Some of her experiments are bleak, but ask us to consider our own ability to affect the world around us. She watches three fox cubs starve, withholding her power to intervene, to see how the consequences will unfold before her. And in another instance, she fakes an emergency in a prank call, watching from behind a window as an ambulance arrives to the scene.

The slowness and gentleness of the text, its pace and its language, make you consider its title. There are emergencies and ruptures, but less of the urgent kind. More at play is the slow, steady and inevitable unfolding – of emergence. In the way that bodies mimic other bodies they are around lots, in Emergency it feels as though each individual life is a palimpsest, one overlapping another, human and nonhuman.

In the present day, via the adult protagonist living under lockdown, the reader is brought more bodily into the text by a shared reality: in the way that our own interconnectivity has been asserted by Covid-19. We are implicated in the moral world of the novel – are, Hildyard invites us, all living inside one pangolin. Suddenly, questions asked by the text around responsibility towards that with which we are bound become very familiar – cows that are so many that, driving through them, our narrator “became unable to think of the bodies as living individuals”, bring up now familiar questions of scale and “remote violence”.

Limits of empathy

Hildyard suggests that what situates us in the natural world is our shared existence alongside the nonhuman, in a state of interplay between being reshaped around the consequence of others, and our ability to respond; flux between our own power and the heft the world exerts on us. There isn’t anything instructive to read from this – the world of Emergency is instead a portrait of our “weird and messy earth song”, problematised by the narrator’s own confessions of the limits of her empathy.

Described by her publisher as a novel, Emergency often feels autobiographical but must surely be fictionalised, the detail too acute to be taken from actual memory. The form too plays on the way behaviour is changed by our contact with others, suggesting the way memory itself passes through the machine of experience. Life is the boundlessness and porosity that Hildyard sets out; flux between a state of slow emergence and sudden emergency, always and unstoppably unfolding.