Emergency by Daisy Hildyard
Review by Rachel Farmer
Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency, a novel about a childhood spent in rural Yorkshire told as a series of reminiscences by a woman stuck in lockdown in 2020, has been described as a pastoral novel for the modern age. Yet the setting is described as neither pastoral nor industrial, chafing at the confines of what rural life is imagined to be. The novel’s present-day narrator tells of her experiences with a clear-eyed, unsentimental lucidity, resisting the pull of nostalgia.
In her childhood village, three worlds jostle shoulder to shoulder, each infinitely rich and nuanced, yet also mercenary and unforgiving in their own way. First, the intense, insular world of childhood with its playground posturing and intricate hierarchies, each child hyper-aware of their position in the social order and the requirements of their station. Second, the world of the adults in the village, fraught with job insecurity and unspoken tensions and truces that bewilder the young narrator. And third, the natural world that surrounds them, teeming with life from the kestrel in the skies to the moth pupae buried in the earth.
As Hildyard lays bare this triptych of worlds through thoughtful description and anecdote, the three realms seem to shrink and swell, each one bleeding into the others. The children’s schoolyard ecosystem is epitomised by the animalistic posturing of pre-adolescent girls with vanilla-scented body sprays (the must-have item that term), which recalls the pompous strutting of the animal kingdom in mating season. The leader of the playground exudes an air of natural dominance, much like the bull on the neighbouring farm exerting an irresistible draw on the cows all around him. Emergency expertly conjures the all-consuming nature of childhood friendships, which take on an unspoken quality, almost driven by instinct. Hildyard describes a charged relationship between the narrator and her childhood friend Clare, who at one point sums up their turbulent dynamic with the memorable line: ‘“You’re full of shit [...] Remember that we’re best friends.”’
The adult world is one that the narrator understands upon reflection, hindsight granting her an insight she lacked at the time. As a child, the adults’ behaviour often bemused her—the prickly teacher with bruises on her face, the shy local farmer and his ‘ghost car’, the village shopkeeper and his imperious wife. Their local community is brimming with things unsaid, things she looks back on with dawning comprehension.
At the same time, there exists an uneasy tussle between humans and the nature that surrounds them. The narrator vividly describes the experience of finding a lapwing nest in the tyre track of a farm vehicle, and her dismay when she sees the eggs have been crushed by that same farm vehicle. Yet the lapwing builds another nest and lays another clutch, over and over again as each is destroyed, lapwing and tractor bound together in an endless loop. At every step, Emergency blurs the line between human society and the natural world: the vast web of mushrooms all invisibly linked underground mirrors the intricately connected supply chains all around the globe, which cause the narrator to come across the same brand of bananas in Panama as in her local village shop.
The narrator in particular has a special way of interacting with the landscape and wildlife around her, and her enthusiasm for the natural world explodes off the page—whether she is describing watching fox cubs playing, a vole and a kestrel in the abandoned quarry, or the slow exodus of a thousand baby toads.
Emergency is a book to be relished, its precise, subtle prose devoid of romanticism yet passionate in its own way. Hildyard’s writing is a feast for the senses: vivid and beguiling, pragmatic and unflinching, and deeply thoughtful.
Emergency is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 20th April 2022